FISHBOWL EXCLUSIVE: Don’t think about reading this book
Congratulations, Malcolm Gladwell! Your book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, spent months on the New York Times bestseller list and is ranked #32 on Amazon.com. You recently sold the movie rights for $1 million, starring Leo DiCaprio. Never mind that your hair is abundant and joyous. But what really matters at the end of the day is whether people care about you enough to make fun of you.
Fortunately for Gladwell, they do — enough to publish a full-length, hilarious parody of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking called Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking At All, coming out in a few weeks from HarperCollins. No doubt it will delight Blink‘s million-plus readers as well those who have been waiting impatiently for the Gladwell backlash to begin.
Blank spoofs Blink in minute detail, starting with the cover (which, let’s face it, is all that matters) and through Blink‘s now-infamous theories, like “thin-slice thinking” (the natural forerunner to the vastly superior “extra-lean deli-slicing”). Author Noah Tall, who is as real a person as JT LeRoy and no less employable, explains the wisdom behind Blank*:
The third and most important task of this book is to convince you that the power of knowing without thinking is not some wild, untamable force of nature like the sex drive of Colin Farrell but a talent that can be nurtured, managed, and utilized in normal, everyday situations that will enable you to destroy your enemies, shove the slow and witless out of the way, and dominate your spouse. It is an ability that we all must cultivate if we are to achieve the important goal of making me America’s all-time best-selling author.
We got a little distracted when he shoved us out of the way, but mmmm, Colin Farrell’s dreamy.
Blank also includes the “non-cognitive thinking” of such diverse sources as General Custer, Roy Rogers and the New York City Police Department, plus a stirring reference to a priapic pony (not to be confused with Custer’s “Little Big Horn”).
Read the book or just make a snap judgment about it based on the cover, but either way: cheap folks, it’s as close as you’re gonna get to Blink in paperback in the forseeable future.
The upshot? When HarperCollins decides to tell a joke, it really, really commits. Blank is all Blink is and less — plus so much less.
NB: In case you’re wondering, yes, we really do know who Noah Tall is, though we’re not sure that knowledge is worth going to jail for 85 days, even to get really skinny.
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