Drinking Games by Malcolm Gladwell
“So we go in,” Dwight went on, “and there was a couple of little white-haired guys there. And they said, ‘You’re tanned. Where have you been?’ And I said Bolivia. And one of them said, ‘Well, can you tell me how they drink?’ ” The building was Yale’s Center of Alcohol Studies. One of the white-haired men was E. M. Jellinek, perhaps the world’s leading expert on alcoholism at the time; the other was Mark Keller, the editor of the well-regarded Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol. Keller stood up and grabbed Heath by the lapels: “I don’t know anyone who has ever been to Bolivia. Tell me about it!” He invited Heath to write up his alcohol-related observations for his journal.
After the Heaths went home that day, Anna said to Dwight, “Do you realize that every weekend we were in Bolivia we went out drinking?”
Malcolm Gladwell may not apply the same academic rigor as an actual scientist. Some would say that many of his theories have all the tenacity of a bar-fact or just plain obvious. One thing he does well, though, is write the story of how an idea came to be. In Drinking Games he tells the story of Dwight Heath, a graduate student in anthropology who accidentally wrote a groundbreaking paper that showed that the abuse of alcohol is as tightly coupled to culture as it is biology—an idea that wasn’t always so obvious.
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