Ideas Gurus

I've always been a nonfiction geek, and the type of research-based commercial nonfiction that took off in the early 2000s with books like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things can Make a Big Difference has always been like catnip to me. Right at the turn of the century, it seemed like there was a hunger for "ideas" and accessible writing about the latest developments in science, psychology, economics, and other traditionally "dry" reading. Writers like Gladwell, Michael Lewis, Daniel Pink, and more began churning out book length explorations of the kind of stories that used to make great airplane reading in magazines like Wired, Fast Company, Forbes, The Atlantic and countless which took off during the 90s, a true heyday of magazine writing.

I always called the writers of these books the "Ideas Gurus," and their schtick was finding obscure information in research studies and distilling it down into accessible chunks of narrative-based nonfiction writing. And at that time, as the industry grew and publishers where looking for the next big nonfiction bestseller, scholars and academics and researchers who would have never considered themselves best-selling others, much less media personalities, began to crank out some seriously cool books. Stephen Dunbar and Steven Levitt's Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything immediately springs to mind.

Op-ed commentary writers like David Books also got into the game, making a nice living with books like Friedman's must-read blockbuster The World is Flat and Brooks' more niche but quirky cool Bobos in Paradise. And the one writer, other than Gladwell, who has ridden the commercial nonfiction wave to its greatest heights is Michael Lewis, the Princeton-educated English major who became a bond trader and then transitioned to a writing career with the Wall Street tell-all Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street. Several of Lewis' books have gone on to Hollywood stardom as well -- notably, The Blind Side, Moneyball, and The Big Short.