What Am I Reading? And Then There's This

Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper's Magazine, is the guy who created flash mobs. You've probably heard of them, maybe you've seen them on YouTube (here's a good one by the brilliant Improv Everywhere group). Basically it's a public scene where a large group of people, often strangers to each other, have been contacted in advance to arrive at a specific location, at a specific time, to perform a specific act, and then disperse.
In his book And Then There's This, Wasik relates tales of the early flash mobs (and how they were eventually co-opted by corporations for marketing) to introduce readers to larger world of viral culture. He examines the phenomenon of nanostories -- those trivial events and people that take on an overblown importance because of the echo chamber behavior of the internet. He gives a glimpse behind the curtain of hype as it relates to rock bands, guerilla marketers, and politicians, and shows how easily it can be manipulated.
This is a fascinating book, and fits nicely alongside the Gladwell volumes (The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers) as well as Steven Levitt's Freakonomics.