CONTENTS

Welcome

Dedication

Introduction

Deciding Without Thinking

The Very Strange Case of Kobe Bryant

THE FORCES AND THEIR SOURCES

1. Our Childhoods

I. Our Love of Play

All Play, Some Work

eBay and Our Other Toys

Fridays at Maine South: Forever Young

II. Our Love of Surprise

“Chasing Pavements” Up “Solsbury Hill”: How Music Gets Us

Riddles & Rhymes & Theming Lines

Issaquah’s Wizards of Surprise

III. Our First Love: Stories

The Story Behind 60 Minutes

The Great Communicator’s Secret

George Eliot’s Grandfather’s Wild Ride

J. Peterman’s Fantasies

The Storytellers of Stumptown

The Moral of Two Stories: Nike and Scion

IV. Little Versus Big

The Moral of a Hundred Childhood Stories

Underdogs in the Mist

2. Our Culture

I. Me: The Great Individualists

What Howard Hughes and 50 Cent Showed Us

Getting Bonnies and Clydes to Buckle Up

The Solved Mystery of the $70 Watch

Our Wish to Stand Apart

Tattoos, Nightsters, and Design-Us-Ourselves

The Rise and Fall of Krispy Kreme

The Age of Me: Talking to Us

II. We: The Great Togetherists

American Gothic, Chris Isaak, and Cast Away

We Are the World

Tall, Dark, and Handsome? The Lesson of American Actors

The American Way: Trust None of Us But All of Us

Following the Crowds over the Cliffs to the Malls: 2008–2010

The Hog’s Wonderful Tale: CAAS

Panera’s Invisible Secret

III. Lovers of the Familiar

What Was in the Marshall Field’s Name?

The Fall, Rise, and Fall of The Mary Tyler Moore Show

How the Mop Tops Cleaned Up

A Sunday with Christina Applegate

How the New Gets Old: The Ocean That Stopped Roaring

GM and Ford: Did Their Familiarity Breed Our Contempt?

IV. Eternal Optimists

Hello, Norma Jeane

Is Irrational Exuberance in Americans’ DNA?

Three Masters at Tapping Our Optimism

3. Our Eyes

I. Our Need for Beauty

Lessons from Our Keyboard

Staring at a Hand Ax: Our 400,000-Year-Old Urge

What Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast Taught Us

II. What Is Beautiful to Us?

The Circle and the Cube: The Shape of Beauty

The New Beautiful

Going with the Cognitive Flow

The Masters of the New Beautiful

III. Our Eyes’ Sheer Force: Five Studies

The Curious Case of Kensington High Street

Golfers in Red and Goalies in Black: How Color Changes the Game

The Mustang That Was Really a Bird

Vitaminwater’s Sleight of Hand

The Man Who Crushed the Box

Unthinking: The Road Ahead

I. Looking Back to Our Future

II. The Eulogy and the Six-Inch Nail: The Startling Power of Expectations

III. Why Wealthy Runners Limp: The New Frugalistas

IV. The Cycling Clown and Wandering Gorilla: Our National Attention Deficit

Summing Up

The Unthinking Marketer’s Checklist

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Acclaim for Unthinking

Newsletters

Bibliography