Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Leonardo da Vinci barely needs introductions. He is one of the poster children for genius alongside Einstein and Newton and his Mona Lisa is the best known work of art in the world. You would think that his story has been repeated ad infinitum in previous biographies. Isaacson, however, justifies this book's existence well. He is best known for his era-defining look into the life of Steve Jobs and, given his generalist background, he has the right background to deliver a balanced recounting of the polymath's story. After all, Leonardo's life is a combination of flamboyant brilliance, as seen in his best known paintings, grinding procrastination and an overall search for truth in a country on the cusp of a scientific revolution.

There are surprisingly few contemporary accounts of Leonardo and even those greatly embellish his life. Isaacson relies on Leonardo's notebooks for context, and with good reason, as those provide the best view into the mind of the artist. Leonardo was an obsessive note taker and his notebooks, the majority of which have survived for posterity, are filled with amazing sketches and thoughts written in his peculiar mirror-script. Paper was precious at the time, so he would revisit old drawings and continue a different topic on a used page. Or he would combine two drawings in unexpected ways: curly hair evolving into a water eddy or a tree evolving into a human circulatory system. Isaacson gracefully includes pictures of the relevant notebook pages, which is one reason to buy the book in hardcover and not Kindle format.

Isaacson proclaims that the notebooks are the primary inspiration for his interpretation of Leonardo. It's a good starting point, but it also underlines his weakness in interpreting Leonardo's art. At least for a layman, Isaacson's description of Leonardo's main oeuvre is too flowery and comes too close to some of the cliches that circulate about art criticism. He takes his interpretations one step too far and often repeats himself unnecessarily. His description of Leonardo's and Michelangelo's rivalry is much more interesting than the description of The Battle of Anghiari, a lost Leonardo that was commissioned to sit across the room with a Michelangelo. Leonardo's work and personality are best viewed in the context of another genius of the era, and it's a shame that Isaacson spends so little time on Leonardo's contemporaries. Leonardo is dandy and outgoing, but so fixated on perfecting ephemeral elements in his art that he often forfeits his commissions and leaves work unfinished. He would spend as much time perfecting a piece's perspective as he would on painting some of the figures. Michelangelo, on the other hand, slept in his clothes and, occasionally, in his boots. He would complete the largest and arguably most famous religious painting in the world: the ceiling of The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

I have a fundamental disagreement with Isaacson's description of Leonardo. He views the artist's inability to finish some of his main works - namely, The Battle of Anghiari and The Adoration of the Magi - as another display of his brilliance. According to his interpretation, the works were dropped because Leonardo could not find the perfect way to work out a particular detail in the painting; an artificial perspective or the right painting material. Leaving imperfect paintings unfinished means, in this oblique logic, that all finished paintings must be perfect, thus proving his genius. The same reasoning is applied to his inventions, like helicopters, crossbows and other apparatus, which were mostly untested in the field. For me, Leonardo was seminal in spite of this trait, not because of it. By being a fraction less demanding on himself, he would have produced even more great pieces of art without much reducing its quality. Art criticism often focuses on minutiae - which perhaps explains its love of Leonardo - but the world in general would have benefited if this particular genius had a slightly less perfectionist approach to life.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

The Tipping Point may have been one of the first non-fiction books I read. I borrowed it from a friend in high school as he described it as a "modern classic", whatever that means in the context of modern non-fiction. In a way, I've been on that path ever since. I've never been a disciple of Malcolm Gladwell in the way that some people seem to be, but I do follow his writing and, more recently, his podcast Revisionist History. I recommended The Tipping Point to my wife - it's succinct, entertaining and touches on some of the cornerstones of sociology - but ended up reading it myself once it landed on my bedside table.

It hasn't aged well, but it still has surprisingly much to offer. The Tipping Point describes a theory about social epidemics that Gladwell has amalgamated from academic studies and his own thinking. A social epidemic is how fidget spinners, high (or low) waisted jeans and Instagram suddenly became central fixtures of western societies without any seemingly deliberate plan behind them. Gladwell lays out the three key components in compellingly simple terms: it's about the people, the context and the content. Certain types of people are vastly more powerful in spreading a social epidemic. Mavens learn every minute detail of a new product and act as data banks. Connectors spread the message by, well, being connected. Salesmen convince others to act on the information curated by mavens and distributed by connectors.

It may not be worth it to explore the contents of The Tipping Point in more detail. The theory itself has held up well over time, but the anecdotes and other trivia are hilariously out of date. The dramatic drop in crime in the United States was a recent phenomenon at the time of release, but today it is being studied as if it were ancient history (and the reasons behind the decline are perhaps better explored in Freakonomics). Hush Puppies and Airwalk have not been in the public mind since more or less since the release of this book. The Tipping Point was released in 2000 at the height of the dot-com bubble. Social networks wouldn't properly exist for another decade. Their existence would increase the speed of social epidemics by an order of magnitude: today, tweets travel faster than seismic waves (https://xkcd.com/723/).

Gladwell's framework for understanding social epidemics seems to do well in today's world of Facebook, Brexit and Trump. What it lacks, though, is a compelling exploration of a single phenomenon that would showcase the theory in action, starting from the first person who reacts to a coming social epidemic. The author doesn't show us who were the first people to adopt Hush Puppies. He only speculates about their existence. This increased focus on the people in social epidemics would be a great way to study contemporary phenomena. For example, why is Naziism resurging on the political right? Why do some environmental initiatives surge (reducing plastic or carbon compensation), while others never find traction (emissions trading or reduction of meat production subsidies)? The Tipping Point could benefit from a complete rewrite, not because it describes the world poorly, but because it was ten years ahead of its time.