The Accident and the System
Four books about how systems produce the catastrophes we call 'accidents' — and why we keep blaming individuals instead.
These books share a thesis: the catastrophes we call accidents, epidemics, or crimes are produced by systems, not individuals. Singer traces it through traffic deaths and factory fires. Preston through viral outbreaks. Quinones through addiction. Greenberg through cybercrime. In every case, the “bad actor” is the final garnish on a lethal brew that was long in the cooking.
There Are No Accidents
Jessie Singer
The book that dismantles the word 'accident' itself. Every death classified as accidental is actually a systems failure that someone chose not to prevent.
317 highlightsCrisis in the Red Zone
Richard Preston
The 2014 Ebola outbreak as a study in how public health systems fail — and what it takes to improvise new ones under extreme pressure.
319 highlightsDreamland
Sam Quinones
The opioid epidemic as a systems story: pharmaceutical marketing, small-town economics, Mexican drug networks, and the failures of American medicine.
287 highlightsTracers in the Dark
Andy Greenberg
How blockchain analysis caught the world's worst criminals — and revealed that 'anonymous' cryptocurrency was never anonymous at all.
268 highlights