In his first book, the widely and deservedly praised Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis tweaked the noses of the powers-that-be at the investment banking firm Salomon Brothers and apparently provoked nary a ripple of recrimination. His sixth book, Next: The Future Just Happened, is not yet in bookstores and it has already infuriated former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt. And Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, is not going to be happy with it, either.

This is not because Michael Lewis has suddenly lost the sense of humor or flair for storytelling we experienced reading Liar’s Poker or The New New Thing, his book about Jim Clark and Silicon Valley. Rather, in Lewis’ eyes, Levitt and Joy have become so swollen with self-importance that they offer inviting illustrations of the status upheavals spawned by Internet technologies and radically democratized access to information. It will be no comfort to Levitt and Joy to learn that Next comes with its own megaphone — that old technology called television.

For, Next, the book, is the fraternal twin of Next, the BBC television documentary, which features Lewis as the on-camera guide to the New Internet Order. The documentary will premiere in the U.S. in two two-hour segments on A&E on August 5 and 6 at 9 p.m. ET.

According to Lewis he was "stewing" over the weird ways in which the "transformative technology of the Internet was touching people" and feeling frustrated because pursuing this idea required more work than he could possibly accomplish on his own, when the BBC came calling with promises of a research team and a travel budget.

"I don’t think I would have written the book if the BBC hadn’t come along," Lewis said during a recent call from Paris, where he and his family have lived during the two years he worked on the book and the documentary.

In Next, Lewis weaves a series of themes into the swift, sharp, often-funny narratives that comprise the bulk of the book. "The Internet creates chaos in any relationship that’s premised on an imbalance of access to information," Lewis says, describing one of his themes. "The legal profession, the medical profession and parents in relation to their children have enjoyed superior status because they have had better access to information. I found myself looking for the effects in the world of eliminating these imbalances."

A related idea, which Lewis attributes to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Andy Kessler, is that Internet technologies empower the fringe over the center. "For example, we spent a week in Finland asking the question how did a society that was basically a nonentity in Europe become a society that is now on the leading edge of technology and the communications revolution?"

Lewis’ final overarching theme is that "one day thousands of years from now, if people are still alive, they’ll look back on this period as the endgame of democracy. I don’t mean that democracy is coming to an end but that it’s becoming more and more extreme. The democratizing instinct wants to level everything."

Lewis says he struggled to embody these themes in the narrative. "What Next really wanted to be was a series of arguments about how the world is changing and how the Internet plays a part in that. But I’ve always felt the essay is a cheat. It’s harder, more challenging and more interesting if you can turn it into a narrative. So I go looking for scenes. I structure pieces of writing like a novel."

Lucky for us. Particularly in the first two-thirds of the book, where Lewis relates the stories of three teenage boys whose lives are profoundly changed by the Internet, the narratives are compelling. There is the moving story of Daniel Sheldon, a brilliant boy who is basically educating himself on the Internet, because the schools in his working class English town have failed him. There is the weirdly disturbing story of Marcus Arnold, who has become an extraordinarily popular dispenser of legal expertise via the Internet, even though he is only a teenager and has never opened a legal book. And there is the surly Jonathan Lebed, who made a killing in the stock market by trading online, often from the school library in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, and ran seriously afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the process.

It’s the story of Lebed that leads Lewis to interview Arthur Levitt in what is probably the highpoint — or lowpoint — of the book. With a sort of deadpan humor, Lewis exposes Levitt’s empty pomposity and self-satisfied platitudes in a scene that might have made Mark Twain proud.

"It was shocking," Lewis says, reflecting on his interview with Levitt. "He’d been all over television talking about this case . . . but while I’m talking to him it becomes clear to me that he doesn’t understand not only this case but also the way the markets actually work. The 16-year-old kid’s description of the world is much more persuasive than the head of the SEC’s. That was something that took me a minute to get my mind around. Here in a microcosm was what I’d been talking about. The head of the SEC’s authority was badly undermined because he didn’t know what he was supposed to know, and that information was widely available on the Internet."

Lewis delivers a similar comeuppance to Bill Joy near the end of the book. Joy, who was responsible for the technology behind Sun Microsystems, has recently become famous for an essay warning of the dangers of new technologies. This strikes Lewis as ludicrous. "I found his article completely unpersuasive. It read like the work of a charlatan to me. All of its clout as an argument came from the fact that it was written by someone everybody thinks is a genius. . . . The Internet has vaulted computer scientists to a new level, where they can now start meddling in the big questions of social philosophy. They want to be grand old men in a world that’s designed not to have grand old men. I thought it was important for that reason to hurl a stink bomb into their world."

Of course Lewis’ stink bombs usually come with a strong dose of common sense and a big whiff of laughter. "I’ve always been somebody who laughed at inappropriate moments," he says. "Humor is a natural predisposition for me. . . . Humor is my spitball."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

He was born Leonard Alfred Schneider in Mineola, New York, in 1925. By the time he died of a drug overdose in Los Angeles in 1966, the man who came to be known as Lenny Bruce had not only achieved legendary show-business status but had also become America's foremost First Amendment martyr. His mother, Sally Marr, was a comedian, and Bruce followed in her footsteps, playing strip joints and nightclubs nationwide beginning in his early 20s. He eventually made records and TV appearances, but it was Bruce's live gigs that gained him fame, in particular because while his act was occasionally humorous it was also laced with certain unmentionable 4- and 10- and 12-letter words. Bruce claimed he was more social critic than comic, and that his use of foul language was merely a rhetorical device a part of his act inseparable from its context with the ultimate goal of de-clawing notions of profanity and blasphemy. Local magistrates in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York disagreed, however, and Bruce spent the better part of the last years of his life in court, fighting obscenity charges.

With The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon, authors Ronald Collins and David Skover, both journalists with legal backgrounds, have put together an exhaustive study of the performer's important freedom of speech cases. They offer biographical highlights along the way, including Bruce's marriage to stripper Honey Harlowe, the club life he lived so intensely and his infamous run-ins with policemen eager to stifle his dirty" mouth. Bruce's financial struggles are also part of the picture, primarily because he had a penchant for living beyond his means (not to mention a nasty heroin addiction) and later spent so much time in court that he was almost perpetually in debt to his lawyers. Indeed, attorneys, prosecutors and judges are the real stars of this book, as Collins and Skover plow through court transcripts and offer blow-by-blow accounts of the progress of each case and its eventual impact, if any, on First Amendment freedoms and litigation. The text also focuses on the somewhat pathetic episodes in which, frustrated by the legal system, Bruce took it upon himself to play lawyer, to his predictable detriment.

Bruce had his high-profile defenders, to be sure among them, Village Voice journalist Nat Hentoff, record producer Phil Spector and television star Steve Allen. Yet it's hard not to wonder why, after a time, he didn't attempt cleverer means to avoid being hounded by his dogged detractors and nemeses. Bruce's self-destructive urge was apparently not only physical but psychological, and the laughing had stopped long before he accidentally OD'd on morphine.

Although a repetitive chord is struck with each subsequent trial sequence, this well-written volume will have special appeal for readers interested in free-speech issues. The authors' research here is unstinting, drawing upon the rich Bruce media record, published documents of all kinds (books, articles, court opinions) and interviews with contemporaries, from Hugh Hefner to Lawrence Ferlinghetti to George Carlin. The book also comes with an audio CD, which complements the book's text and features dozens of Bruce performances and interviews.

Let others probe the grand sweeps of human history—Malcolm Gladwell is resolved to study moments. At least the significant ones. In his 2000 bestseller, The Tipping Point, he examined conditions that sparked trends. In his new book, Blink, which he subtitles "The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking," the New Yorker staff writer focuses on the astounding reliability and occasional blind spots of snap judgments. It turns out that we know more than we think we know, even if we don't know why.

Blink has three aims, says Gladwell: "to demonstrate that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately; to help decide when we should and shouldn't trust our instincts; and to show that snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled."

It was his own unsettling encounters with snap judgments that led him to write Blink, Gladwell tells BookPage by phone from his office. "I had grown my hair longer," he begins, "and as soon as I [did that], my life began to change. I started getting speeding tickets and harassed at the airports. Then one day, I was walking down 14th Street, and these police in a big van cut me off and jumped out and surrounded me because they were convinced that I was this rapist who'd been in the area. It's an old story, of course. Many African-Americans have it much tougher than I do. It was just a sort of reminder that there was an awful lot going on in the first couple of seconds. People were seizing on things about me and drawing very, very substantial, non-trivial conclusions. That's what got me thinking that this was interesting."

Exactly how much is going on in that first little moment? This ability to make rapid and accurate assessment flourishes everywhere, as Gladwell's book illustrates. In one instance, art experts were able to instantly recognize a phony ancient statue even though scientists who had studied it for months were sure it was authentic. In another, a general acting on battlefield instincts during a war game ran circles around his opponents who had tons of pertinent data and fast computers to analyze it. Gladwell introduces a researcher who can predict the likelihood of a married couple divorcing by eavesdropping on a few seconds of their conversation and noting their facial expressions.

"The thing that really struck me the most from my book," Gladwell says, "was this idea that more information does not necessarily yield a better decision. I've come to take that very seriously. I now no longer feel the need to exhaustively mine every available source of information before making a decision. I now believe that I have to spend more time analyzing what I know rather than going out and adding to what I know."

A good deal of Blink is devoted to what can be gleaned from and induced by facial expressions. "This source often reveals much more than words," the author contends. "I watched one of the [Bush-Kerry presidential] debates with the sound off to try and get a sense of what they were communicating nonverbally. It was quite striking to watch those things because you realize there was so much going on, on that level. . . . They're telling you a lot. I think you learn something profound about people but you only really see it when you remove the distraction of their words. You learn about their self-confidence and level of conviction. I think you learn something about their honesty. All those things are apparent when you cleanse the moment."

Once he had the "blink" concept in mind, Gladwell says, he had no trouble finding examples to support it. "Books like this are kind of organic. You follow certain ideas and see what happens. I could write another book tomorrow on the same topic that would be completely different. There's a kind of freedom in writing this kind of conceptual book [even though] there's not a clear road map."

So how, then, are we to regard our instincts? Well, we ought to take them seriously, Gladwell says. "They can be really good, or they can be terrible and mislead us horribly. But in both cases, we have an obligation to take them seriously and to acknowledge they're playing a role. The mistake is to dismiss them."

Cultural historian Steven Johnson has had it with people who complain that videogames, TV shows, movies and the Internet are dehumanizing and intellectually barren pastimes. In fact, he argues, just the opposite is true. Johnson’s thesis is that each of these newer (and constantly evolving) forms of popular culture gives our brains the kind of workout we could never get, say, simply from reading.

It was his long-running interest in videogames that inspired his new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. "I’ve written about videogames in all four of my books," he tells BookPage from his home in Brooklyn, "[and even] when I was writing in an old web magazine called Feed," which he co-founded and edited. "We tried to do serious commentaries on games and not just treat them like child’s play. All through the late ’90s, I was following this road and watching really interesting games come out. At the same time, the mainstream media was talking mainly about these violent games and [the high school massacre at] Columbine: were the Columbine shooters influenced by playing these violent videogames like Quake and Doom and so on? I just thought there was this basic disconnect. It really seemed like the people who were doing most of the public pontificating about these games hadn’t spent any time with them."

The critics, Johnson says, seemed unaware that the best-selling videogames were generally nonviolent and quite complex to play. "I had thought for a long time," he says, "that there was some kind of argument to be made for appreciating the complexity and problem-solving and pattern-recognition involved in the gaming culture."

To link his ideas about the mental benefits arising from pop-culture activities, Johnson poses a concept he calls "the Sleeper Curve." He names it after a sequence in Woody Allen’s 1973 sci-fi comedy, Sleeper, in which a man awakens from a 200-year sleep to learn that such once-feared delicacies as cream pies and hot fudge were actually good for him—at least when viewed over the long run. It’s the same with current games and media, the author argues. While they may seem alarming up close or in individual instances, their long-range effect is beneficial because they gradually and inexorably teach our brains to adapt to the complexity of the lives we now live. In the process of engaging these and other technologies, he says, the average IQ of Americans has been going up steadily over the past 50 years.

A common denominator in pursuing these pastimes, according to Johnson, is that we have to learn the rules, conventions and situations as we go—in other words, adapt. "Adapting to an ever-accelerating sequence of new technologies also trains the mind to explore and master complex systems," he writes. "When we marvel at the technological savvy of your average 10-year-old, what we should be celebrating is not their mastery of a specific platform—Windows XP, say, or the GameBoy—but rather their seemingly effortless ability to pick up new platforms on the fly, without so much as a glimpse at a manual."

But why do emerging technologies and refinements always spark such virulent resistance? "There are a couple of things at work," Johnson muses. "The first is that we always translate these new forms, technologies and genres and evaluate them using the criteria developed to make sense of older [ones]. So the car is the ‘horseless carriage,’ and the [sound recording] is the ‘compact disc,’ even though the fact that it’s compact and a disc is not what’s interesting about it but the fact that it’s digital. We have this bias—we look at videogames and say, hey, this doesn’t have the psychological depth of a novel or even a movie. So this must be kind of a debased form that’s not worthy of any intellectual scrutiny. There’s also clearly a generational thing of people just not getting what the kids are into and assuming they must be up to no good. It’s an old story."

Johnson’s previous works include the bestseller Mind Wide Open, an examination of brain science that uses his own brain as a guidepost. He says his next project will be a book about the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, which he hopes to develop it into a "history of cities and how they heal themselves."

Bill Maher was a Cornell University grad in search of a career when he discovered stand-up in the ’80s. Searching for an outlet for his often-controversial viewpoints, Maher created Politically Incorrect, an Emmy-nominated round-table interview show that established itself on Comedy Central in 1993 before concluding its run in 2002 on ABC. Maher’s one-man Broadway show received a Tony nomination for 2003, the same year he re-entered the television sweepstakes with Real Time with Bill Maher, yet another interview program that currently airs on HBO.

Maher’s frankness has landed him in hot water. He drew fire in 2001 when he asserted that the 9/11 terrorists were anything but cowards. Just recently, an Alabama congressman accused Maher of treason for his remarks regarding army recruitment efforts. But like him or not, Maher, 49, resists clear-cut political categorization. His support for the privatization of Social Security, his 2000 endorsement of Ralph Nader for president, his disdain for some dearly held women’s issues and his pro-death penalty stance have helped to make him a shape-shifting media figure.

Maher’s latest book, New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer, is a collection of wry, often caustic observations about everyday American life, the world, politicians, celebrities in short, any topic within range of his opinionated mind. Maher took the time to answer a few questions for BookPage during a publicity tour. This book is a chance for me to rail and vent, he says, often with tongue planted firmly in cheek. The collection calls out people, traditions and institutions in no uncertain terms, as it addresses my personal pet peeves and frustrations in a raw and hopefully a humorous way. The idea of new rules might be at odds with a personality America knows as a stalwart freethinker. Could this be an older, mellower Bill Maher? I don’t start with a political agenda and then craft my opinion, explains Maher. I start with my opinion and let the chips fall where they may. I’ll leave it to others to . . . try to categorize my thinking. The idea of rules and structure, by the way, are not exclusive to conservatives. Liberals fight tirelessly for rules guaranteeing a woman’s right to choose, minority and gay rights, a living wage, etc. As far as getting older and mellower goes: guilty as charged. Where I used to reserve Tuesday nights exclusively for my poker buddies and Jack Daniel’s, I now have a standing date with ÔJudging Amy.’ New Rules is as likely to praise Hollywood and California as easily as it lambastes elements of culture that originate from those places. To hear Maher tell it, it’s okay if Billy Joel marries a woman 35 years his junior, but he’s firmly against older women posing in Playboy. But give the guy credit: his scattershot musings are consistently inconsistent. I’m not a black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinker, says Maher. I can defend Hollywood in general while decrying some of its individual practices, just like I can have a huge problem with Western medicine but still see a Van Nuys doctor about my ingrown toenail. As for defending Billy Joel, the logic is perfectly consistent: most heterosexual men are attracted to young, nubile women. I don’t state that to be popular or fair-minded, but simply as a fact. The book has plenty to say about the Bush administration, and Maher’s animosity is palpable. Still, he isn’t working for any political party. For some reason, Maher says, many regard an intellectual free agent as threatening. If you don’t declare allegiance to a team, they’ll pick one for you. People spend way too much time trying to categorize others, trying to place them in an easily definable, one-size-fits-all box. I guess because, once in a box, you’re more easily dismissed. [My] goal was never to forward an agenda. It was to entertain, to enlighten and to meet chicks. New Rules also takes potent aim at media and lifestyle icons such as Trekkies, movies, cell phones and more, in a way that seems to position the comedian somewhere between a tastemaker and a Miss Manners for the modern age. A Miss Manners for the modern age? I like it, Maher responds. But mostly these are funny jokes in rule form. The reason these rules are so popular, however, is that they strike a pretty universal chord. It’s amazing how so many of us are annoyed by so many of the same things. Political pundit, social critic, stand-up comedian. Maher is all three (and possibly a few other names that his detractors might call him). But first and foremost I’m a comedian, he says. After promoting his book, Maher will return to TV with all-new live installments of Real Time. He’s also got a new stand-up special entitled I’m Swiss airing on HBO. And, as always, he concludes, I will be touring my comedy act as a means of creative expression and to avoid my student loan officer. Martin Brady is a writer in Nashville.

There's a major shift in the way businesses offer their products to the public, according to Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. His new book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, explores the ways in which our culture and economy are moving away from hits (popular products and markets), which reside at the head of the demand curve, and toward a huge number of niches in the tail of that curve. This Long Tail is resulting in a massive increase in choices for consumers, who until now have, by and large, unwittingly had their tastes shaped by what is widely available or most popular. BookPage asked Anderson, who writes a popular blog on the subject, to explain it all; he responded from a plane high over Texas.

What do you mean by the Long Tail?
Last year, 65,000 music albums were released only 700 made it to the shelves of America's No. 1 CD retailer, Wal-Mart. If you're into anything that isn't in the top 700 (whether it's non-mainstream or simply not a new release), you understand the Long Tail. Likewise if you're into documentaries, foreign films, or any other kind of movie that isn't stocked at Blockbuster. Many interesting examples were put forward by readers of the [Long Tail] blog, too, such as microbrews as the Long Tail of beer and insurgency as the Long Tail of warfare.

You emphasize that, while choice is certainly preferable to scarcity, there remains a need for good filters to help people find their way through myriad options. What are the best filters?
Amazon continues to lead the way. It has good examples of the most important kinds of filters: search, personalized recommendations, reviews, rankings, even specialized filters such as statistically improbable phrases. Outside of books, Google is of course the ultimate filter and the innovation around helping you find music you'll like is just beginning.

You say the alternative to let people choose is choose for them. How do we know the limits of our filters?
I'm against choosing for people if that means guessing what they want and offering only that. I believe the best technique is to order choice in ways that reflect individuals' expressed and observed preferences, while still offering unbounded variety. The best filters will get this right and be rewarded with happy consumers; others will have to evolve until they get it right.

How should businesses alter their approaches as niches become more plentiful and influential?
Those who can see the world outside the hits will prosper most. That means understanding how to market to niches and make a profit from modest sales. A key tactic will be the ability to scale down achieve economic efficiencies so you don't have to just focus on hits. That can be as simple as digital distribution, which drops the marginal cost of goods close to zero, or as complicated as self-service, giving customers the tools to help themselves.

But hits are here to stay?
The curve that defines the Long Tail is ubiquitous in everything from markets to nature. It is, above all, one of inequality: a few things have high impact and a large number of things have low impact. This is as true of music albums as it is of earthquakes. Some things are always going to be more popular than others, and word-of-mouth will exaggerate those differences. But the difference between hits and niches seems to be shrinking: there's now room for both of them, so it's not hits or niches, but hits and niches.

The Long Tail blog's tagline is a public diary on the way to a book. How did the blog shape the book?
The blog was a fantastic aid. It had three advantages for me, in writing a nonfiction, research-heavy book based on a published article [Wired, Oct. 2004]: 1) It allowed me to keep the momentum going between the publication of the article and the book; 2) I gave away some of my research results and ideas, but got back many times that from my smart readers; 3) Those thousands of readers have great word-of-mouth influence, which I imagine will help market the book. I was so encouraged by my experience, I'm thinking of ways to introduce some of that technique to Wired.

Are there more books in your future?
Absolutely, but I've promised my wife I'd finish the book tour for this one before turning to the next!

Journalist Tom Vanderbilt has made a career out of writing about topics from the mundane to the obscure, including sneakers, Quonset huts and nuclear fallout shelters. His writing is distinguished by its attention to detail, with exhaustive research used to explore every nuance of a given subject.

Vanderbilt does just that in latest book, Traffic, an eye-opening and entertaining journey into the experiences of driving. The book examines virtually every aspect of driving, from why traffic jams form to why the other lane always seems to be moving faster. BookPage asked Vanderbilt (who drives a 2001 Volvo V40) to serve as a tour guide in negotiating the challenges we face on the road – and in the parking lot.

What motivated you to write Traffic?

I've always been an "early merger" at places like highway work zones where you're forced to merge from two lanes of traffic into one. On one occasion, I became frustrated in a long queue as vehicles kept passing me in the "closing" lane. I jumped to the head of the queue and "late merged." I felt guilty about it, but as I began to study the literature, I found that if the system were set up the right way, more traffic would flow through the bottleneck if everyone did not get over sooner. What I had thought my whole driving life was the right thing to do was in fact wrong. That made me wonder what else I had misunderstood about this curious everyday environment.

Why do drivers take on different personalities when they get behind the wheel?

In traffic, we are largely anonymous, secure in our own enclosures, and there is little actual human contact or immediate consequence for our actions – at least until that guy with the gun rack on the pickup truck you gave the finger to pulls up alongside you at the traffic light! All of these factors lead us to behave in ways we might not otherwise. An interesting comparison is the Internet, whether it's "cyber-bullying" or flaming someone in a chat room. It's been called the "online disinhibition effect." Whether we are corrupted by the medium or expressing our true selves is another question altogether.

Why is it that drivers should take the first spot they see in a parking lot instead of circling for the best spot?

A couple of interesting studies have found that people who search for the "best" spot, i.e., the closest to the entrance of the building, often end up spending more time searching for a spot than it would have cost them to simply grab the first one they saw and walk; or sometimes, what people thought was the best spot was actually further away than a spot a few rows away from the entrance (but closer to the beginning of the row). This is a great example of how "heuristics" – our little rules of thumb that guide our decision-making – often trick us into not making the best decision.

What is distinctive about the way Americans drive?

We certainly drive more than anyone else in the world. No other country has as many SUVs or light trucks in its vehicle fleet. I've also not seen another place so disposed to putting bumper stickers on cars. There's another thing I've noticed in driving culture here that perhaps seems American: We all feel as if we have rights, but we also don't want our rights to be violated. Sometimes these bump up against each other in traffic; for example, some people feel they have the right to speed, some people feel they have the right to go the speed limit, and not be tailgated by someone behind. We say the left lane is for "faster traffic," but faster than what? To quote the late George Carlin, "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"

How do you think rising gas prices will change American driving habits?

As we're already seeing, people will drive less – cutting out so-called "discretionary" driving, switching to cycling or public transport for more trips. We'll also drive smaller cars – and better smaller cars, mind you, than those econo-boxes from the early 1970s. It might also cause people to "drive smarter" – not accelerating as quickly from a stop, trying to avoid stopping and starting all the time by timing traffic flow better, and just driving slower in general. Fuel consumption is nonlinear: it costs more to go faster, even after accounting for time savings, and the percentage increase rises with speed.

Americans are in love with drive-through restaurants. Do you have a favorite drive-through order?

That's easy. The "Double Double" with fries and a Coke at In-and-Out Burger, which sadly doesn't exist in New York. But please, park before you eat – and shut off the engine!

John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

Think you know all there is to know about Chanel No. 5? Think again. The perfume that famously was the only thing Marilyn Monroe wore to bed has a fascinating history revealed by English professor Tilar J. Mazzeo in The Secret of Chanel No. 5. Read on for more.

Before The Secret of Chanel No. 5 you published The Widow Clicquot, a book about the woman behind Veuve Cliquot. How did one luxury item lead to another?
It was my interest in wine and scent that led me to perfume. If you think about it, there are very close connections there. Essentially, both are aromatic volatiles suspended in alcohol—just in wine it’s alcohol we can drink. I got the idea for the book one day at the kitchen counter of a good friend who is a perfume collector of sorts, when I had just come back from three months(!) of wine-tasting research for my book on The Back Lane Wineries of Napa. My nose was very acute after all that tasting, and I realized that perfume was a fascinating subject that I wanted to know more about.

"The idea that it’s an older woman’s perfume always makes me laugh a bit though. That’s like saying diamonds are for little old ladies just because your grandmother had the good sense to wear them."

When it came to writing The Secret of Chanel No. 5, were you initially motivated by the perfume, or were you more interested in the woman behind the bottle?
It was definitely the perfume. I wanted to know what made a great perfume. I mean, if we know how to talk about great wines, why not think about great perfumes? And of course that led me to Chanel No. 5 immediately, because it’s not just the world’s most famous perfume but also a scent that the experts still praise as one of the most beautiful scents from the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s.

So much has already been written about Coco Chanel—how did you manage to take someone who has spawned countless books and films and keep her fresh?
Yes, Coco Chanel certainly is experiencing a revival at the moment. She’s emblematic of style and savvy for a lot of women especially. What I wanted to understand was how Chanel No. 5 had its own unique destiny apart from her—because by the mid-1920s she wasn’t the entrepreneurial genius behind it already. At the same time, it’s really interesting: looking at Coco Chanel’s intimate relationship with her most famous “creation” reveals whole new aspects of her personality and art. There are sides of Coco Chanel we’ve never seen.

Can you tell us a little bit about what goes into researching something as iconic as Chanel No. 5?
This was some of the most fun research I’ve ever done—and for someone whose last book was on one of the great figures of French champagne, that’s saying something. Of course there was the library research. There was a lot of it. And that was fascinating if not fun exactly. But my writing is always personal too, so I visited with perfumers around the world, everywhere from Paris and Berlin to New York, the south of France, and Bermuda. I was lucky enough to work for a bit with the perfume professor at International Flavors and Fragrances in New York City and to learn some of the technical aspects of perfume appreciation there. I met with the odor artist Sissel Tolaas in Berlin, visited the rose harvest in Grasse, and talked with dozens and dozens of interesting people who have made perfume their passion. If I had life to do over again, I would be a perfumer. No question.

In your mind, is there a quintessential woman who wears Chanel No. 5?
Well, it’s an adaptable scent, but it’s a very distinctive perfume too. I think a woman has to have confidence to wear it. For me that’s the key thing about Chanel No. 5. It’s not your retiring wallflower fragrance, and I think of it as a scent for women in their 20s and 30s and 40s and not as a teenager’s first perfume. The idea that it’s an older woman’s perfume always makes me laugh a bit though. That’s like saying diamonds are for little old ladies just because your grandmother had the good sense to wear them.

So much about fashion and style is ephemeral—what is it about Chanel No. 5 that has made it timeless?
That’s really the question isn’t it? That was what I wanted to figure out in researching this cultural icon. Technically, it’s a wonderful fragrance, but of course there are other wonderful fragrances out there that haven’t become legends. And in the beginning, it wasn’t just Coco Chanel or marketing either that made it famous. So it was something of a riddle. But in the end, what makes it timeless is that way that it became a larger symbol of luxury during the Second World War, when it was one of the few beautiful things to cut across international borders. It captures so much of the complexity of the last century—and that’s what makes it so essentially relevant to the modern woman’s identity.

Tell the truth: do you wear Chanel No. 5?
Yes, I do wear Chanel No. 5 sometimes. I have a bottle on my bureau at home always. But it’s not my daily perfume. I actually prefer Chanel’sEau Première, which is a lighter and I think ultra-modern version of Chanel No. 5. It’s basically the same notes but more angular, and that’s my regular scent. I am also a huge fan of iris scents, but those can get fabulously expensive.

If someone were going to give you a gift, which would you prefer: a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, or a bottle of Chanel No. 5?
Unfair question! I hope the Widow will forgive me—because goodness knows there are few things in this world I love more than a bottle of Veuve—but I think I’d have to take the bottle of Chanel No. 5 just because a bottle of champagne lasts a night and a bottle of perfume lasts a year. That’s part of the reason during the Second World War perfume became the ultimate luxury. It was an indulgence that, in hard economic times, you could enjoy a little bit every day.

We don't want you to spill all your secrets, but what's one surprising thing readers will discover in The Secret of Chanel No. 5?
For me, one of the most surprising things was that Coco Chanel wasn’t the force behind Chanel No. 5. By the time she came to “invent” Chanel No. 5, this was already a scent with a fascinating history. And part of why she both loved and, at moments, hated her creation was because, quite early in its history, Chanel No. 5 slipped free of the woman whose name it carried. It was a perfume with a life of its own.