The Tipping Point

If you go through that history and keep count, the number of worlds that Lois has belonged to comes to eight: the actors, the writers, the doctors, the lawyers, the park-lovers, the politicians, the railroad buffs, and the flea market aficionados. When I asked Weinberg to make her own list, she came up with ten, because she added the architects and the hospitality industry people she works with in her current job. But she was probably being modest, because if you looked harder at Weisberg's life you could probably subdivide her experiences into fifteen or twenty worlds. They aren't separate worlds, though. The point about Co

Once — and this would have been in the mid-1950s — Weisberg took the train to New York to attend, on a whim, the Science Fiction Writers Convention, where she met a young writer by the name of Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke took a shine to Weisberg, and next time he was in Chicago he called her up. "He was at a pay phone," Weisberg recalls. "He said is there anyone in Chicago I should meet. I told him to come over to my house." Weisberg has a low, raspy voice, baked hard by half a century of nicotine, and she pauses between sentences to give herself the opportunity for a quick puff. Even when she's not smoking, she pauses anyway, as if to keep in practice for those moments when she is. "I called Bob Hughes. Bob Hughes was one of the people who wrote for my paper." Pause. "I said do you know anyone in Chicago interested in talking to Arthur Clarke. He said, yeah, Isaac Asimov is in town. And this guy Robert, Robert — Robert Heinlein. So they all came over and sat in my study." Pause. "Then they called over to me and they said, Lois… I can't remember the word they used. They had some word for me. It was something about how I was the kind of person who brings people together."

This is in some ways the archetypal Lois Weisberg story. First she reaches out to somebody, to someone outside her world. She was in drama at the time. Arthur Clarke wrote science fiction. Then, equally important, that person responds to her. Lots of us reach out to those different from ourselves, or to those more famous or successful than we are, but that gesture isn't always reciprocated. Then there's the fact that when Arthur Clarke comes to Chicago and wants to be co

One of the things that people remember about Weisberg's Friday night salons back in the 1950s was that they were always, effortlessly, racially integrated. The point is not that without that salon blacks wouldn't have socialized with whites on the North Side. It was rare back then, but it happened. The point is that when blacks socialized with whites in the 1950s in Chicago, it didn't happen by accident; it happened because a certain kind of person made it happen. That's what Asimov and Clarke meant when they said that Weisberg has this thing — whatever it is — that brings people together.

"She doesn't have any kind of snobbery," says Wendy Willrich, who used to work for Weisberg. "I once went with her on a trip to someone's professional photography studio. People write her letters and she looks at all of her mail, and the guy who owned the studio invited her out and she said yes. He was basically a wedding photographer. She decided to check it out. I was thinking, ohmigod, do we have to hike out forty-five minutes to this studio? It was out by the airport. This is the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of Chicago we're talking about. But she thought he was incredibly interesting." Was he actually interesting? Who knows? The point is that Lois found him interesting, because, in some way, she finds everyone interesting. Weisberg, one of her friends told me, "always says — 'Oh, I've met the most wonderful person. You are going to love her,' and she is as enthused about this person as she was about the first person she has met and you know what, she's usually right." Helen Doria, another of her friends, told me that "Lois sees things in you that you don't even see in yourself," which is another way of saying the same thing, that by some marvelous quirk of nature, Lois and the other people like her have some instinct that helps them relate to the people they meet. When Weisberg looks out at the world or when Roger Horchow sits next to you on an airplane, they don't see the same world that the rest of us see. They see possibility, and while most of us are busily choosing whom we would like to know, and rejecting the people who don't look right or who live out near the airport, or whom we haven't seen in sixty-five years, Lois and Roger like them all.

There is a very good example of the way Co

Why is this? Granovetter argues that it is because when it comes to finding out about new jobs — or, for that matter, new information, or new ideas — "weak ties" are always more important than strong ties. Your friends, after all, occupy the same world that you do. They might work with you, or live near you, and go to the same churches, schools, or parties. How much, then, would they know that you wouldn't know? Your acquaintances, on the other hand, by definition occupy a very different world than you. They are much more likely to know something that you don't. To capture this apparent paradox, Granovetter coined a marvelous phrase: the strength of weak ties. Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are. Co

This principle holds for more than just jobs, of course. It also holds for restaurants, movies, fashion trends, or anything else that moves by word of mouth. It isn't just the case that the closer someone is to a Co