To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice. - Malcolm Gladwell

The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds. Wegner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies — that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.

Suicide is coupled. The first set of mistakes we make with strangers — the default to truth and the illusion of transparency — has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.

And Leites and Wolf were wrong. “It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,