Dear Thematiks readers:

If you enjoyed reading my 2021 Thematiks newsletter, I invite you to check out my 2022 project, Persuasion Rules. The newsletter is the companion to my new book, The Rules of Persuasion, which will appear in print in the second half of 2022.

In this new newsletter, I look at persuasion through what is at the same time a very old and a very new perspective. The basic rules I will explain were first articulated by the philosopher Aristotle over two-thousand years ago in a work called, the Rhetoric. This book by the foremost thinker the Western world has ever known is a guide to how language and persuasion work. Contained within it is a simple claim with profound implications.

In each post, I look at one thing — an advertisement, a news story, a poem, or a painting — and explain how it demonstrates the rules of persuasion at work. In my latest post, I examine the use of persuasion to sell the original Theranos story and how that strategy backfired in her trial.

Persuasion Rules

Reader request: Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos

A reader contacted me after my last post about Putin and asked me if the rules of persuasion apply to the Theranos saga. Though I had followed the case closely, I have not used it as a case study before and had no plans to write about it in my book. However, the more I recalled the Holmes story, the more I saw it as yet another example of Aristotle’s in…

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3 months ago · Carlos Alvarenga

All the best,

Carlos