NOTIONS: New Year’s resolution: It’s time for status quo to go
In the Jan. 3 issue of The New Yorker, writer Malcolm Gladwell reviews Pulitzer Prize-winner Jared Diamond’s new book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” Diamond’s premise, says Gladwell, “stands in sharp contrast to the conventional explanations for a society’s collapse.” While conventional wisdom has it that “civilizations are destroyed by forces outside their control, by acts of God,” Gladwell writes, “the lesson of ‘Collapse’ is that societies, as often as not, aren’t murdered. They commit suicide: they…