Overview
"Sure to be a deserved hit among the ever-growing Freakonomics crowd."--Booklist
"Kluger makes the modern world comprehensible."
--Publishers Weekly
"A fascinating journey."
--Library Journal
Sometimes a complex problem has an easy solution. And sometimes there's more to a simple thing than first appears.
In Simplexity, Time senior writer Jeffrey Kluger shows how a drinking straw can save thousands of lives, how a million cars can be on the streets but just a few hundred of them can lead to gridlock, how investors behave like atoms; how arithmetic governs abstract art and physics drives jazz, and why swatting a TV indeed makes it work better.
Kluger adeptly translates newly evolving science into a delightful theory of everything that will have you rethinking the rules of business, family, art--your world.
Editorials
Library Journal
Time magazine writer Kluger (Splendid Solution) here introduces us to the concept of simplexity-the notion that seemingly complex things can be more simple than they appear and that, alternately, seemingly simple things can be more complex than they appear. Like Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, he uses a single idea to offer readers a peek inside a wide variety of familiar occurrences, taking us on a fascinating journey. Kluger introduces readers to the relatively new field of complexity science, drawing examples from current projects of the Santa Fe Institute, the interdisciplinary scientific research center founded by Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann. Following the work of this and other scientists, he explains the complexity and simplicity of phenomena such as why it takes so long for a group of people to leave a burning building, why we're more likely to worry about things that probably won't kill us than about the things that probably will, and why the operating systems in our cell phones are so difficult to master. Though the chapters are only loosely held together, this book is sure to appeal to a broad audience. Recommended for public libraries.
—Elizabeth L. Winter