Malcolm Gladwell visited ‘The Tipping Point’ which sent him to literary stardom

It is fair to say that “Tipping Point” is the tipping point for Malcolm Gladwell’s career. In 2000, the book catapulted Gladwell, then a New York staff writer, to literary superstardom. It also started a new genre of explanatory social science books aimed at a mass audience.

The concept of a tipping point – a moment when everything suddenly changes, and a phenomenon becomes an epidemic – is not original to Gladwell. But they are embedded in the language of our culture. “When the paperback came out,” he wrote in the sequel, “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” “it was part of the zeitgeist.” Over the years, Gladwell, now also a podcast entrepreneur, has produced more bestsellers, among them “Blink” (2005),”The Outliers” (2008) and “Talk to Strangers” (2019). To his adept synthesis of academic research he adds journalistic curiosity, a sharp prose style and a mastery of counter-intuitive juxtapositions. Often starting with a puzzle, he looks for illuminating case studies and concepts, changing (slightly or radically) our understanding of the world.

“Revenge of the Tipping Point” follows a familiar formula. It remains tempting to dispute Gladwell’s repeated analogies between disease and social epidemics, and perhaps wonder whether he cherry-picked examples to serve his theory. Sometimes, too, the narrative seems slow and discursive, because he changes, sometimes suddenly, from topic to topic. Still, Gladwell’s update on the idea of ​​a tipping point will likely satisfy hard-core fans, and challenge and divert other readers.

Cover “Revenge of the Tipping Point”

(Small, Brown)

The original “Tipping Point” concentrated on three key concepts that Gladwell believed were essential to understanding social epidemics. It explained the Law of the Few, the indispensable role of messengers called Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen; Stickiness Factor, involving message durability; and Contextual Strengths, meaning the broader landscape of fighting the outbreak.

With “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” he offers “new theories, stories, and arguments about the strange paths that ideas and behaviors take in the world.” The title suggests that the tools used to harness social epidemics for good can also have disastrous effects.

The book begins with an anonymous case study that many readers will recognize: It involves a congressional hearing involving a company accused of causing an epidemic, and the company’s witnesses refuse to blame.

Gladwell then introduces a puzzle related to the case study. He begins with an epidemic of bank robberies sweeping Los Angeles but not the country, exemplifying “small regional variations.” That variation, he says, is a product of what he calls a community’s overstory, a set of cultural and social determinants. To a knowledgeable Gladwell reader, this seems like another about the power of context.

Drilling down, Gladwell visited a highly educated community obsessed with high achievement, known in the social science literature as Poplar Grove. In a classic Gladwell tic, he interweaves seemingly unrelated stories, about the genetic uniformity and vulnerability of cheetahs. He says that these two populations – the city and the cheetah – are both monocultures, so they have no resilience. That shortage, along with a high-pressure environment, helped fuel Poplar Grove’s suicide epidemic, he suggested.

The next part of the book deals with social engineering and the rule of “third magic,” which is illustrated by white flight from urban neighborhoods. The tipping point, Gladwell writes, is “it works intentionally engineered.“One example, in Palo Alto: Lawrence Tract, a planned community where whites, blacks and Asians are committed to living together in equal numbers in an effort to prevent a racial tipping point, whatever the individual costs.

Another case study, particularly relevant following last year’s US Supreme Court ruling that struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, involves the presence of the women’s rugby team at Harvard. Why does Harvard (accused in an affirmative action suit) need such a team, Gladwell asks, and, more to the point, why are so many mediocre athletes admitted to the university?

In skewering Harvard’s long-acclaimed dean, William Fitzsimmons, Gladwell is at his snarky best. One claim Fitzsimmons made was that “having a vibrant athletic tradition … makes a big difference in our ability to attract all kinds of students.” But Harvard currently admits only 3.4% of applicants, Gladwell notes, and “who is this delusional person … who would turn down an offer from Harvard because the sports scene isn’t ‘vibrant’ enough?”

In fact, Gladwell argued convincingly, Harvard used sports to keep an “overwhelmingly white” proportion of students “ready … on the playing field of the country clubs of the United States.” It’s not entirely clear from her analysis whether the student’s whiteness or wealth is a determining factor in Harvard’s calculations, or exactly how this predilection interacts with Harvard’s efforts to diversify its student population. But, according to Gladwell, “Affirmative action is wrongly brought to justice.”

Gladwell also discussed the notion of a super-spreader event, which is familiar with the COVID-19 pandemic and was illustrated at the February 2020 meeting of the biotech company Biogen in Boston. Here we get a long disquisition on aerosol transmission, saliva and dehydration – and, in the end, what seems like a variation on the old idea of ​​a lopsidedly powerful messenger.

Then we turn to what Gladwell calls zeitgeist overstories, a way of conceptualizing cultural change. He cites the role of the 1978 television miniseries “Holocaust” in changing the politics of memory, and the comedy “Will & Grace,” which first aired in 1998, for revolutionizing ideas about gay people and relationships. “Overstories,” Gladwell writes, “are more volatile than they appear.”

In the final installment, Gladwell cleverly applies these concepts to a hidden case study, which seems to straddle the divide between social and biological epidemics.

It is not necessary to buy everything Gladwell is selling to appreciate “Revenge of the Tipping Point.” It turns out that trying to put his objections at least half happy.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural journalist and critic in Philadelphia.