So I assumed this was going to be a “How to Win Friends and Influence People” kind of book from the title but it was completely not. Gladwell jumps around a bunch of different stories - Amanda Knox, police shootings in America, Brock Turner, Cuban spies in the CIA. Ultimately his message boils down to:
1: People are really bad at determining whether someone is telling the truth or not, especially if they don’t behave how you would expect a guilty person to behave. And vice versa - some people just have a natural tendency to act shifty even if they are not guilty at all, but they get mistaken for a guilty person.
2: Random police stops work effectively in areas of high crime (or at least the downsides of it are outweighed by the amount of crime stopped) but the problem with American policing is that they do random police stops everywhere, leading to all the unfortunate death-by-cop incidents we see on the news.
The two points are linked by the fact that police officers don’t know how to talk to strangers and determine whether they are guilty or not I suppose? It felt a bit random - I would have preferred Gladwell do a deep dive on American policing, or on not being able to judge a person’s truthfulness - but seemed more like he was trying to figure out the best way to bring these stories together and didn’t quite succeed. Easy to read and interesting, though.