Talking to Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell Page 0,117
p. 40.
Plath poems: “The woman is perfected…it is over” from “Edge,” in The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), p. 272; “And like the cat…Number Three,” from “Lady Lazarus,” pp. 244–45; and “If you only knew…my veins with invisibles…” from “A Birthday Present,” p. 207.
poets have far and away the highest suicide rates: Mark Runco, “Suicide and Creativity,” Death Studies 22 (1998): 637–54.
“A poet has to adapt himself” (in footnote): Stephen Spender, The Making of a Poem (New York: Norton Library, 1961), p. 45.
“She could never again…ultimately her undoing” (in footnote): Ernest Shulman, “Vulnerability Factors in Sylvia Plath’s Suicide,” Death Studies 22, no. 7 (1988): 598–613. (“When she killed herself…a broken home” [in footnote] is from this source too.)
“Had she supposed…laid her cheek on it”: Jillian Becker, Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), pp. 80, 291.
“The victims…the top of the cozy”: Douglas J. A. Kerr, “Carbon Monoxide Poisoning: Its Increasing Medico-Legal Importance,” British Medical Journal 1, no. 3452 (March 5, 1927): 416.
United Kingdom suicide rate in 1962: Ronald V. Clarke and Pat Mayhew, “The British Gas Suicide Story and Its Criminological Implications,” Crime and Justice 10 (1988): p. 88, doi:10.1086/449144; graph “Relation between gas suicides in England and Wales and CO content of domestic gas, 1960–77,” p. 89; graph “Crude suicide rates (per 1 million population) for England and Wales and the United States, 1900–84,” p. 84; “[Town] gas had unique advantages…in front of trains or buses,” p. 99; graph of “Suicides in England and Wales by domestic gas and other methods for females twenty-five to forty-four years old,” p. 91.
“the greatest peacetime operation in this nation’s history”: Malcolm E. Falkus, Always under Pressure: A History of North Thames Gas Since 1949 (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 107.
Town gas to natural gas conversion, 1965–1977: Trevor Williams, A History of the British Gas Industry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 190.
our inability to understand suicide costs lives (in footnote): See, for example, Kim Soffen, “To Reduce Suicides, Look at Gun Violence,” Washington Post, July 13, 2016, washingtonpost/graphics/business/wonkblog/suicide-rates/.
the inexplicable saga of the Golden Gate Bridge: John Bateson, The Final Leap: Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 8; history of suicide barrier (or lack of it) on bridge, pp. 33, 189, 196.
wound up filming twenty-two suicides (in footnote): Director Eric Steel’s documentary is starkly titled The Bridge (More4, 2006).
Seiden followed up on 515 people: Richard H. Seiden, “Where are they now? A follow-up study of suicide attempters from the Golden Gate Bridge,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 8, no. 4 (1978): 203–16.
“If a physical barrier…replaced by another”: These five quotes are from a set of public comments on the Transportation District’s proposal to erect a suicide net: goldengatebridge/projects/documents/sds_letters-emails-individuals.pdf.
In one national survey…would simply take their life some other way: Matthew Miller et al., “Belief in the Inevitability of Suicide: Results from a National Survey,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 36, no. 1 (2006).
Weisburd spent a year walking: David Weisburd et al., “Challenges to Supervision in Community Policing: Observations on a Pilot Project,” American Journal of Police 7 (1988): 29–50.
Sherman had been thinking along these lines as well: Larry Sherman et al., Evidence-Based Crime Prevention (London: Routledge, 2002). (Both Sherman and Weisburd are enormously prolific. I’ve included a small sample of their work here; if it interests you, there’s much more to read!)
“We chose Minneapolis”: L. W. Sherman et al., “Hot spots of predatory crime: Routine activities and the criminology of place,” Criminology (1989): 27–56.
Half the crime in the city [of Boston]: Glenn Pierce et al., “The character of police work: strategic and tactical implications,” Center for Applied Social Research Northeastern University, November 1988. Although the study authors weren’t aware that their data supported the Law of Crime Concentration, Weisburd put the pieces together when he looked at their conclusions.
Weisburd map of Seattle crime patterns:
See Figure 2 in David Weisburd et al., “Understanding and Controlling Hot Spots of Crime: The Importance of Formal and Informal Social Controls,” Prevention Science 15, no. 1 (2014): 31–43, doi:10.1007/s11121-012-0351-9. The map shows crime over the period from 1989 to 2004. For more on Weisburd’s research on crime and place, see David Weisburd et al., The Criminology of Place: Street Segments and Our Understanding of the Crime Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and David Weisburd et al., Place Matters: Criminology for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).