Malcolm Gladwell on Tragic Dirt vs. Magic Dirt

The New Yorker pundit asks, in effect, why so many murderers seem so low IQ.

In The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews the book Unforgiving Places that I wrote about on Substack a few weeks ago. The review contains Malcolm’s usual blend of insight and inanity.

What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime

A Chicago criminologist challenges our assumptions about why most shootings happen—and what really makes a city safe.

By Malcolm Gladwell

June 2, 2025

Most violence isn’t instrumental and planned around some gain; it’s expressive, born of flaring tempers—and unaffected by the calibration of penalties.

Late on a Sunday night in June of 2023, a woman named Carlishia Hood and her fourteen-year-old son, an honor student, pulled into Maxwell Street Express, a fast-food joint in West Pullman, on the far South Side of Chicago. Her son stayed in the car. Hood went inside. Maxwell is a no-frills place—takeout-style, no indoor seating. It’s open twenty-four hours a day. Hood asked for a special order—without realizing that at Maxwell, a busy place, special orders are frowned upon. The man behind her in line got upset; she was slowing things down. His name was Jeremy Brown. On the street, they called him the Knock-Out King. Brown began to gesticulate, his arms rising and falling in exasperation. He argued with Hood, growing more agitated. Then he cocked his fist, leaned back to bring the full weight of his body into the motion, and punched her in the head.

When the argument had started, Hood texted her son, asking him to come inside. Now he was at the door, slight and tentative in a white hoodie. He saw Brown punch his mother a second time. The boy pulled out a revolver and shot Brown in the back. Brown ran from the restaurant. The boy pursued him, still firing. Brown died on the street—one of a dozen men killed by gunfire in Chicago that weekend.

More details: the gun belonged to Mom, who had a concealed carry permit for it. (Back in my day in Chicago, concealed carry permits were very hard to obtain.) A witness said that Mom told her boy to pursue the wounded Brown and finish him off. She also told he child to shoot a woman who had sided with Brown in their dispute, but the boy did not.

Mom and son were eventually charged with first degree murder but then the charge was dropped a few days later and they were let out of jail.

In the remarkable new book “Unforgiving Places” (Chicago), Jens Ludwig breaks down the Brown killing, moment by moment. Ludwig is the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and he uses as a heuristic the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s version of the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking.

As I pointed out in my 2017 review of Michael Lewis’s biography of Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the two academics started out as IQ scientists for the Israel Defense Force, and they basically remained IQ guys for their whole careers.

Somehow, they managed to avoid having anybody notice that they were IQ scientists asking trick questions from IQ tests from hell (e.g., “Linda is a bank teller”). For example, here’s one of Kahneman’s brain-twisters:

The mean I.Q. of the population of eighth-graders in a city is known to be 100. You have selected a random sample of 50 children for a study of educational achievement. The first child tested has an I.Q. of 150. What do you expect the mean I.Q. to be for the whole sample?

Personally, I’d suspend judgement until I had more evidence. An IQ of 150 is so rare (1 in 2,330) that I’d wonder if something is wrong with either the test or the randomness of the sample. But to Kahneman’s extremely literal brain, this is merely a simple algebra problem. The question stipulated that the mean IQ is “known to be 100” and that’s all you need to know.

After Tversky’s death, Kahneman became absurdly fashionable.

According to Kahneman, these are the two cognitive modes that all human beings toggle between. The first is fast, automatic, and intuitive. The second is slow, effortful, and analytical.

I.e., System 2 is basically what IQ tests measure.

Ludwig’s innovation is to apply the dichotomy to criminal acts. A System 2 crime might be a carefully planned robbery, in which the assailant stalks and assesses his victims before attacking them. This is what criminologists call instrumental violence: acts, Ludwig writes, “committed in order to achieve some tangible or ‘instrumental’ goal (getting someone’s cash or phone or watch or drug turf), where violence is a means to some other, larger end.” A System 1 crime, by contrast, is an act of what Ludwig calls “expressive violence”—aimed not at gaining something tangible but at hurting someone, often in a sudden burst of frustration or anger.

E.g., hothead Sonny Corleone engages in System 1 criminal violence, whereas Dartmouth scholar Michael Corleone specializes in planning System 2 criminal violence.

The central argument of “Unforgiving Places” is that Americans, in their attempts to curb crime, have made a fundamental conceptual error.

As Tonto said to the Lone Ranger, “Who is this ‘we’ you are talking about, paleface?”

I’ve been aware that most murderers are morons for many decades. For example, in 1987 I read Bonfire of the Vanities, in which Assistant D.A. Kramer muses:

But the poor bastards behind the wire mesh barely deserved the term criminal, if by criminal you had in mind the romantic notion of someone who has a goal and seeks to achieve it through some desperate way outside the law. No, they were simpleminded incompetents, most of them, and they did unbelievably stupid, vile things.

Jill Leovy’s 2015 book Ghettoside makes clear how stupid most South Central Los Angeles killers are as well.

Malcolm goes on:

We’ve assumed that the problem is instrumental violence—and have fashioned our criminal-justice system around that assumption. But the real problem is expressive violence. The ongoing bloodshed in America’s streets is just Maxwell Street Express, over and over again.

In other words, most homicides are just low IQ idiots doing low IQ idiot stuff.

This is the puzzle that Ludwig sets out to solve in “Unforgiving Places.” His answer is that these episodes confound us only because we haven’t appreciated how utterly different System 1 criminality is from that of System 2. System 1 thinking is egocentric: it involves, Ludwig writes, interpreting “everything through the lens of ‘What does this have to do with me?’ ” It depends on stark binaries—reducing a range of possibilities to a simple yes or no—and, as he notes, it “focuses more on negative over positive information.” In short, it’s wired for threats. System 1 catastrophizes. It imagines the worst.

In sum, System 1 thinkers tend to have low IQs and thus do low IQ things like punch women in chicken restaurants.

Paywall here. Over 2100 words after the paywall break.

Brown’s encounter with Carlishia Hood pushed him into System 1 mode. He made an immediate egocentric assumption: if he knew that special orders were a norm violation, then Hood must know, too. “Given that System 1 assumption,” Ludwig explains, “from there it is natural that Brown believed the person in front of him was deliberately holding things up.”

Hood, meanwhile, didn’t know about the special-order taboo, so she was operating under her own egocentric assumptions. She “knew she wasn’t being disrespectful and deliberately trying to hold up everyone else in line, so the curse of knowledge led her System 1 to assume that Brown surely also knew that,” Ludwig writes.

The term “curse of knowledge” is a striking way to point out that the Mom is yet another dope.

“So why was he getting so bent out of shape? She didn’t mean to be inconsiderate to the people behind her in line; she just wanted the Maxwell Street Express people to change whatever it was that she wanted changed on the burger.” Neither had the cognitive space to consider that they were caught in a misunderstanding.

If you can afford it, try to live around people who have enough “cognitive space” (i.e., IQ) so that you don’t get dragged into this kind of numbskull incidents.

They were in binary mode: I’m right, so you must be wrong. From there, things escalated:

Hood says to her son, who’s standing behind Brown, “Get in the car.”

Brown seems to think that comment is directed at him—another misreading of the situation.“WHO?!?” he says. “Get in the CAR?!?”

Hood says something that’s hard to make out from the video.

Brown says, “Hey lady, lady, lady, lady. GET YOUR FOOD. GET YOUR FOOD. If you say one more thing, I’m going to KNOCK YOU OUT.” You can see his right fist, clenching and unclenching, over and over.

She says something that is again hard to make out on the video.

He says, “Oh my God I SAID if you say one more thing, I’m going to knock you out.”

At which point he punches her—hard.

Hood’s son is standing in the doorway, watching the assault of his mother. Had he been in System 2 mode, he might have paused. He might have asked for help. He might have called 911. He could have weighed the trade-offs and thought, Yes, it’s unbearable to watch my mother being beaten. But, if I kill this man, I could spend years in prison. But he’s filled with adrenaline. He shifts into catastrophizing mode: There is nothing worse than seeing my mother get pummelled by a stranger. Brown punches her again—and again. The boy shoots him in the back. Brown runs. Hood tells her son to follow him. There is nothing worse than letting him get away. Still in System 1, the boy fires again. Brown collapses in the street.

Ludwig argues that this is what most homicide looks like. Much of what gets labelled gang violence, he says, is really just conflict between individuals who happen to be in gangs. We misread these events because we insist on naming the affiliations of the combatants. Imagine, he suggests, if we did this for everyone: “ ‘This morning by Buckingham Fountain, a financial analyst at Morningstar killed a mechanic for United Airlines.’

Uh … how often do financial analysts at Morningstar murder gainfully employed mechanics next to Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park between the Loop and the Lake?

When my wife was five, she was convinced that princesses lived in Buckingham Fountain.

On the extremely rare occasions when a Sherman McCoy is accused of homicide, the press is hardly reticent about reporting that he is a million dollar per year bond trader for venerable Pierce & Pierce.

Naturally you’d think the place of employment must be relevant to understanding the shooting, otherwise why mention it at all?”

The “super-predator”—the remorseless psychopath of television dramas—turns out to be rare. The mass shooter, meticulously assembling his arsenal, is a statistical anomaly. The professional hit man is mostly a literary invention. “A careful look at twenty years of U.S. murder data collected by the F.B.I.,” Ludwig writes, “concluded that only 23 percent of all murders were instrumental; 77 percent of murders—nearly four of every five—were some form of expressive violence.”

The Chicago Police Department estimates that arguments lie behind seventy to eighty per cent of homicides. …

Ludwig’s point is that the criminal-justice system, as we’ve built it, fails to reckon with this reality. We’ve focussed on the signalling function of punishment—on getting the deterrents right, offering the proper mixture of carrots and sticks to influence rational actors. Mass incarceration, which swept the country in the late twentieth century, rested on the assumption that a person spoiling for a fight with another person was weighing costs: that the difference between ten years and twenty-five would matter.

Uh, no. I can recall reading in 1976 James Q. Wilson’s Thinking About Crime, a mere 49 years ago, which emphasized that while prison terms may or may not either rehabilitate or deter offenders, it definitely incapacitated them from inflicting violence upon the general public.

But was Jeremy Brown calculating odds when he punched Carlishia Hood? Was her son performing a Bayesian analysis as he ran from the restaurant, gun in hand?

This misapprehension, he argues, is why the American experience of crime so often seems baffling. Murders are volatile—a city really can go from dangerous to safe overnight—because the behavior driving most homicides is volatile.

Individuals are volatile. Cities less so due to large sample sizes.

Why did crime in New York continue to fall after the N.Y.P.D. ended stop-and-frisk?

For one thing, Bloomberg’s 12 years were so successful that the NYPD changed NYC lowlife culture. Before, bad guys went out on the streets packing guns in case they ran into other bad guys packing guns. By 2013, however, frisks weren’t finding many weapons because lowlifes were now more scared of the NYPD finding a gun on them than they were scared of not having a gun of them. Bloomberg’s NYPD achieved mass mutual arms limitation on the streets.

For another, even leftist Bill DeBlasio didn’t want to waste the huge gains made in fighting crime, so he made his police commissioner for his first three years Giuliani’s famous first top cop Bill Bratton. Bratton thought he could keep crime down without mass stop and frisk. And he did.

Because what makes police officers effective isn’t how many people they stop or arrest—it’s how many arguments they interrupt or defuse, ideally without resorting to handcuffs or charges.

How long did this argument that led to a shooting take? How was the Chicago Police Department supposed to get there in time to defuse it?

Why does crime seem more related to places than to people?

Uh, Malcolm, you know, it doesn’t.

For example, in the Austin neighborhood on the Chicago’s West side, almost the entire population was replaced between 1967 and 1990 and the murder rate went up by about one order of magnitude. The place stayed the same, but the earlier inhabitants were replaced by a much shootier new set of inhabitants. Next door in Oak Park, however, the city imposed racial quotas to keep the population from being rapidly replaced … and the murder rate didn’t soar. Today, Austin is about 5% white and shooty, while Oak Park is 60% white, very gay, very liberal, and not very shooty.

Because some places are simply better at de-escalation than others. Imagine Maxwell Street Express in a more stable neighborhood, with a core of regulars—people connected to one another, who know something about Jeremy Brown and his temper. Another customer might have stepped in and said, “Hey, wait a minute, Jeremy. Cool it. I don’t think the lady knows how this restaurant works.”

Why assume that stability of residents is what black neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side lack? Airport restaurants have extremely non-stable clienteles, but I don’t see incidents like this in airports. (Granted, airport restaurant patrons seldom are packing heat.)

And why did Philadelphia’s vacant-lot program work so well? Because, when an empty lot becomes a well-kept lawn, people come outside. They have barbecues and picnics.

After all, what’s less conducive to black mass shootings than barbecues and picnics?

Blacks die by homicide 22% more in June thru August than in December thru February. I suspect that one reason is that what Jill Leovy calls “unwanted party guests” are easier to keep out from indoor parties than from outdoor parties.

Kids play. And suddenly, as Jane Jacobs famously put it, the block has “eyes on the street.”

“Jane Jacobs claimed that informal social control contributed vitally to public safety by interrupting criminal and violent acts in the moment,” Ludwig writes.

Okay, but Leovy’s book focuses on the problem of impunity in black neighborhoods: the lowest rate of homicide clearance are in black neighborhoods where nobody saw nuthin’ due to a reasonable fear among witnesses that they too will be murdered if they go to the cops with who dunnit.

It’s an idea that doesn’t make much sense if you assume that violence is instrumental.

A lot of black-on-black murders become rationally instrumental after the fact. D’Quasious wounded L’Quavious for dissing him and accidentally killed 82 year old Bessie who was eating ribs in the background. So, D’Quasious’s boss Darren puts out the word that nobody is to talk to the cops about what they saw.

The rational criminal, after all, will just move a block over—set up shop where the odds tilt in his favor. But that’s not how most offenders operate. They’ve lost their temper. For a few volatile minutes, they’re not thinking straight. And, in that state, violence interrupted is violence prevented.

One subject that Ludwig all but ignores in “Unforgiving Places” is guns. It’s a notable omission, since what turns the confrontation at Maxwell Street Express from a fight into a homicide is the peculiarly American fact that Carlishia Hood had a handgun in her car. In any other developed country, a fistfight between Jeremy Brown and Carlishia Hood would in all likelihood have remained a fistfight.

But so would this dispute if it had involved any other race/ethnicity in America besides blacks. For example, according to the CDC, non-Hispanic blacks died 13.3 times per often in 2018-2024 by firearm homicides as non-Hispanic whites, 26.5 times as often as Asians, and, most strikingly, 5.3 times as often as Hispanics.

African Americans have a gigantic gun violence problem, but New Yorker writers aren’t supposed to mention it.

But Ludwig is weary of gun-control arguments. He simply doesn’t believe that the United States is ever going to enact serious restrictions. “Over the last 243 years of U.S. history, the number of major, restrictive federal gun laws has been (depending on how you count) something like five or six.” That’s what economists call the base rate—and Ludwig’s position is that the energy devoted to that lost cause might be better directed elsewhere.

He wants us, instead, to take System 1 behavior seriously. First, stop talking about criminals as if they occupy some distinct moral category. Neither Jeremy Brown nor Hood’s son was evil.

That seems debatable. Besides, “evil” is the kind of concept that the low brow participants in this killing find more interesting than the concepts that New Yorker subscribers, who hardly ever shoot anybody, obsess over.

They were caught in an unforgiving moment. Second, stop locking up so many people for long prison terms. The best way to keep arguments among teen-agers from turning violent is for adults to step in and tell them to cool down—and mass incarceration drains adults from troubled neighborhoods. …

Adults like Jeremy Brown?

By the way, South Shore vs. Greater Grand Crossing.

It’s been pointed out to me that in recent statistics, South Shore, home of Jesse Jackson, where I used to drive down to play golf and sail, is now, despite all its superb amenities on the lakeshore, such as the South Shore Cultural Center and, just to the north, the upcoming Obama Library, just as poor as more inland Greater Grand Crossing.

That’s pretty depressing that 21st Century middle class blacks haven’t been able to preserve a lovely neighborhood with good architecture in which Enrico Fermi lived while he was inventing the first ever nuclear reactor, and in which many 20th Century black celebrities chose to live. According to Wikipedia, the last celebrity to live in South Shore was Kanye West.

Yet, as Ludwig emphasizes, South Shores still has only about half the homicide rate of its inland neighbor Greater Grand Crossing.

That’s good to know, but it’s interesting why that is. Here’s a possibility:

I looked up all 23 gay bars in Chicago on Yelp. The great majority were on the north lakefront, but the only two on the black South Side were in South Shore.