Page 153 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Notes

Talking to Strangers was written over a span of three years. In the course of my research, I
conducted countless interviews and read many hundreds of books and articles. Unless otherwise
attributed, quotations in the text are from my interviews.

What follows is not meant to be a definitive account of everything that influenced my thinking. It
is simply a list of what I consider the most important of those sources. It is almost certainly the case
that I have left some things out. Should you see anything that falls into that category or instances
where I am plainly in error, please contact me at lbpublicity.generic@hbgusa.com and I will be
happy to correct the record.

Introduction: “Step out of the car!”

The Sandra Bland case was the subject of a 2018 HBO documentary, Say Her Name: The Life and
Death of Sandra Bland, directed and produced by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner. Say Her Name
was created with the full cooperation of Bland’s family, and it does a very good job of describing
her life and capturing her spirit. However, it feeds into the speculation—common in various corners
of the internet—that there was something suspicious about Bland’s death. I do not find those
suspicions persuasive, and Say Her Name presents no real evidence to support them. The heartbreak
of Sandra Bland is, as you have just read, more complicated—and, tragically, more systemic—than
that.
“I am up today just praising God…”: “Sandy Speaks on her birthday! February 7th, 2015,”
YouTube, February 7, 2015, accessed January 10, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=KfrZM2Qjvtc.
has been viewed in one form or another several million times: See Texas Department of Public
Safety video (963K views), WSJ video (42K views), second WSJ video (37k views), plus sites
without video-view counts such as nytimes.com and nbc.com.
Transcript up to “for a failure to signal?”: “Sandra Bland Traffic Stop,” Texas Department of
Public Safety, YouTube, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaW09Ymr2BA.
Michael Brown was shot to death: Rachel Clarke and Christopher Lett, “What happened when
Michael Brown met Officer Darren Wilson,” CNN, November 11, 2014,
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2014/08/us/ferguson-brown-timeline/.
In Baltimore, a young black man named Freddie Gray…Scott was killed on April 4, 2015:
Peter Herman and John Woodrow Cox, “A Freddie Gray primer: Who was he, how did he die, why
is there so much anger?” Washington Post, April 28,
2015,https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/04/28/a-freddie-gray-primer-who-was-
he-how-did-he-why-is-there-so-much-anger. For Philando Castile, see Mark Berman, “Minnesota
officer charged with manslaughter for shooting Philando Castile during incident on Facebook,”
Washington Post, November 16, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-
nation/wp/2016/11/16/prosecutors-to-announce-update-on-investigation-into-shooting-of-philando-
castile/?utm_term=.1e7914da2c3b. For Eric Garner, see Deborah Bloom and Jareen Imam, “New
York man dies after chokehold by police,” CNN, December 8, 2014,
https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/20/justice/ny-chokehold-death/index.html. For Walter Scott, see
Michael Miller, Lindsey Bever, and Sarah Kaplan, “How a cellphone video led to murder charges
against a cop in North Charleston, S.C.,” Washington Post, April 8, 2015,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/08/how-a-cell-phone-video-led-
to-murder-charges-against-a-cop-in-north-charleston-s-c/?utm_term=.476f73934c34.