gave his brother something far more valuable than money: encouragement without condescension, taste without haughtiness.

Roughly 45 percent of new pairs met through mutual friends, and another 41 percent of new pairs met through mutual friends and shared contexts (like classes). The formation of new ties varied with network distance, meaning that individuals who were separated by two intermediaries (that is, they shared neither friends nor classes) were thirty times

Yet, just as legacy cultures can grow stodgy, a culture of newbies can innovate itself right into ridiculousness. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s was a classic example.

Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From advances what we could call a network theory of human achievement, one that has its best metaphor in ecology, the constant interdependence of many unseen forces that “compulsively connect and remix that most valuable of resources: information.”

I don’t mean dreamer to be pejorative. Many dreamer-type creators have enormous strength of character. They generate ideas, start new projects, inspire others to join them. They may also start things they can’t finish and break promises.

His charisma came, as charisma usually does, from a bottomless need to be loved.

finite game is played for the purpose of winning,” Carse wrote, “an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

Over time, the two members of a pair not only develop a private vocabulary but start to match each other in the basic rhythms and syntactical structures of their speech. This is due in part to the astonishing power of mimicry, which psychologists call “social contagion.” Just by being near each other, the psychologist Elaine Hatfield has shown, peo

We need similarities to give us ballast, and differences to make us move.