Made to Stick

“Comprehensive community building”: Tony Proscio, “In Other Words: A
Plea for Plain Speaking in Foundations,” Edna McConnell Clark Founda-
tion, 2000.
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The Truth About Movie Popcorn: A good account of the popcorn story is in
Howard Kurtz, “The Great Exploding Popcorn Exposé,” Washington Post,
May 12, 1994, C1.
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Who Spoiled Halloween?: The story of the contaminated Halloween candy
legend is told in Joel Best and Gerald T. Horiuchi, “The Razor Blade and the
Apple: The Social Construction of Urban Legends,” Social Forces 32 (1985):
488–99. Joel Best is one of a group of sociologists who study the “construc-
tion” of social problems. Social concerns about various problems such as
drunk driving, drug abuse, or poisoned Halloween candy do not always
match the underlying incidence of problems, and sociologists have tried to
understand how social problems become defined as “problems.” For another
interesting read on this topic, see Joel Best, Random Violence: How We Talk
About New Crimes and New Victims (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999).
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