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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Today, two things about that chart have changed. First, the heavy drinkers of today drink far more than the heavy drinkers of fifty years ago. “When you talk to students [today] about four drinks or five drinks, they just sort of go, ‘Pft, that’s just getting started,’” reports alcohol researcher Kim Fromme. She says the heavy binge-drinking category now routinely includes people who have had twenty drinks in a sitting. Blackouts, once rare, have become common. Aaron White recently surveyed more than 700 students at Duke University.15 Of the drinkers in the group, over half had suffered a blackout at some point in their lives, 40 percent had had a blackout in the previous year, and almost one in ten had had a blackout in the previous two weeks.fn5, 16 Second, the consumption gap between men and women, so pronounced a generation ago, has narrowed considerably—particularly among white women.17 (The same trends aren’t nearly as marked among Asians, Hispanics, or African Americans.) “I think it’s an empowerment issue,” Fromme argues: I do a lot of consulting work in the military, and it’s easier for me to see it there because in the military the women are really put to the same standards as men in terms of their physical boot camps and training and all of that. They have worked very hard to try to say, “We’re like the men and therefore we can drink like the men.” For physiological reasons, this trend has put women at greatly increased risk for blackouts. If an American male of...