The real me isn't the person I describe, no the real me is the me revealed by my actions.
The most intriguing candidate for that something else is called the Broken Windows theory. Broken Windows was the brainchild of the criminologist James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. Wilson and Kelling...
The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.
The Power of Context is an environmental argument. It says that behavior is a function of social context.
The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from...
Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.
Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, 2005 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family...
People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the benef...
Not long after I learned about Frozen, I went to see a friend of mine who works in the music industry. We sat in his living room on the Upper East Side, facing each other in easy chairs, as he worked...
Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime.
Israeli minister of defense Moshe Dayan—the architect of Israel’s astonishing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War—also wrote an essay on the story of David and Goliath. According to Dayan, David fought Go...
In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the qualit...
I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind...
I think overall it’s a disadvantage, Jeb Bush once said of what it meant for his business career that he was the son of an American president and the brother of an American president and the grandson...
I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups--and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want...
How you feel about your abilities—your academic self-concept—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your mo...
Having a parent incarcerated increases a child’s chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.
Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contemp...
Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the work will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of...
Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation...