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 r… - Malcolm Gladwell

Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

When Larry Sherman designed the Kansas City gun experiment, he was well aware of this problem. “You wouldn’t tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they’ve got bad gallbladders,” Sherman says. “You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility to the police.” To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath — “First, do no harm” — applies equally to law enforcement. “I’ve just bought myself a marble bust of Hippocrates to try to emphasize every day when I look at it that we’ve got to minimize the harm of policing,” he went on. “We have to appreciate that everything police do, in some ways, intrudes on somebody’s liberty. And so it’s not just about putting the police in the hot spots. It’s also about having a sweet spot of just enough intrusion on liberty and not an inch — not an iota — more.