I recently read this book and recommend it highly. It’s about a woman who studies fads and how they start and her involvement with a colleague who studies chaos theory.
Each chapter begins with a blurb about a particular fad ranging from modern to historical times. The usual suspects like the tulip craze in the Netherlands (1600s?) to the hula hoop are subjects as well as some more obscure ones. Quite provocatively, she calls the American civil rights movement a fad.
She also discusses what she calls the difficulty threshold, which for us, bears on the question of unicycling as a possible fad, i.e. the more difficult an activity the less likely it is to become one.
I’m not really doing it justice, but is amusing, very cleverly written and engaging. It’s not very long and well worth the time.
Cheers,
Raphael Lasar
Matawan, NJ