In an interview with Chuck Klosterman on the subject of crime, baseball analyst Bill James talks about how a person becomes a murderer:
It is not as if we walk through one doorway and decide that murder is acceptable. You have to walk through many doorways. The first doorway leads to a party, where people are doing drugs and having fun. The second doorway leads to more partying. It’s a long, long series of doorways, until you end up in a room where a terrible thing happens. So the question is, “How many doorways away are you?” It’s not a question about a person’s capacity to commit a murder. It’s a question of how many doorways we keep between ourselves and that situation.
The whole interview is really interesting.
The currency of the Internet
Christian Rudder describes the OkCupid user base at OkTrends.