Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

by Malcolm Gladwell

You may or may not agree with that final ruling. But it is hard to disagree with the judge’s fundamental complaint—that adding alcohol to the process of understanding another’s intentions makes a hard problem downright impossible. Alcohol is a drug that reshapes the drinker according to the contours of his immediate environment. In the case of the Camba, that reshaping of personality and behavior was benign. Their immediate environment was carefully and deliberately constructed: they wanted to use alcohol to create a temporary—and, in their minds, better—version of themselves. But when young people today drink to excess, they aren’t doing so in a ritualized, predictable environment carefully constructed to create a better version of themselves. They’re doing so in the hypersexualized chaos of fraternity parties and bars.