Page 127 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Middlebrook writes:
She stripped her fingers of rings, dropping them into her big purse, and from the coat closet she
took her mother’s old fur coat. Though it was a sunny afternoon, a chill was in the air. The worn
satin lining must have warmed quickly against her flesh; death was going to feel something like
an embrace, like falling asleep in familiar arms.
She poured herself a vodka and took her own life. Like her friend Sylvia Plath, Sexton will
forever be in the category of doomed genius. “No one who knew Anne Sexton well was surprised
by her suicide,” Middlebrook writes.
I hope by now, however, that you aren’t satisfied with this account of Sexton’s death. If suicide is
a coupled act, then Sexton’s character and pathology should be only part of the explanation for what
happened to her. The same is true for Plath. Her friend Alfred Alvarez believed that too many
people have painted her as “the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her
art,” and he’s absolutely right. That distorts who she is: it says her identity was tied up entirely in
her self-destructiveness. Coupling forces us to see the stranger in her full ambiguity and complexity.

Weisburd has a map that, I think, makes this point even more powerfully. It’s from Jersey City,
just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

The dark area in the middle—bounded by Cornelison Avenue, Grand Street, and Fairmount Avenue
—is a prostitution hot spot and has been for some time. A few years ago, Weisburd conducted an
experiment in which he assigned ten extra police officers—an extraordinarily high number—to
patrol those few blocks. Not surprisingly, the amount of prostitution in the area fell by two-thirds.
Weisburd was most interested, though, in what happened in the lighter part of the map, just
outside the triangle. When the police cracked down, did the sex workers simply move one or two
streets over? Weisburd had trained observers stationed in the area, talking to the sex workers. Was
there displacement? There was not. It turns out that most would rather try something else—leave the
field entirely, change their behavior—than shift their location. They weren’t just coupled to place.
They were anchored to place.

We found people would say to us, “I’m in this area. I don’t want to move because it’ll make it
hard on my customers.” Or, “No, I have to build up a business again.” There are all these
objective reasons why they’re not moving. Another reason would be, “If I go someplace else, it’s
good for drugs, to sell drugs. There’s already people there, they’ll kill me.”
The easiest way to make sense of a sex worker is to say that she is someone compelled to turn
tricks—a prisoner of her economic and social circumstances. She’s someone different from the rest
of us. But what is the first thing the sex workers said, when asked to explain their behavior? That