After the late Tim Russert brought us the "red states – blue states" meme during the 2000 election I started to investigate patterns of political books. I tried various data collection techniques and found an interesting outcome –- no matter how I collected the data I ended up with highly similar patterns. I use snowball sampling — start at a known point and follow the data out 1 or 2 steps. Once the snowball sample is complete, I start to eliminate the noise in the network -– I want to find the strong patterns that multiple overlapping networks provide. When the patterns emerge I usually see two strong clusters, with a minor cluster or scattering of books between the two large components. I only color the components after my network analysis software finds the emergent groups in the data –- then it is obvious which cluster is blue and which is red.

Gladwell is BACK! I love this guy..

“It is not from the sons of the millionaire or the noble that the world receives its teachers, its martyrs, its inventors, its statesmen, its poets, or even its men of affairs. It is from the cottage of the poor that all these spring.”

"…there are times when being an outsider is precisely what makes you a good insider. It’s not difficult to imagine, for example, that the head of Continental Can liked the fact that Weinberg was from nothing, in the same way that New York City employers preferred country boys to city boys. That C.E.O. dwelled in a world with lots of people who went to Yale and then to Wall Street; he knew that some of them were good at what they did and some of them were just well connected, and separating the able from the incompetent wasn’t always easy. Weinberg made it out of Brooklyn; how could he not be good?