"What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn't a fundamental trait, or what they called a "unified" trait. A trait li… - Malcolm Gladwell

"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 quality of "stickiness.

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.

...legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice — that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can't treat one group differently from another.