Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell (Little, Brown and Co., 368 pages)
Malcolm Gladwell had never written a book when he began, with a mix of “self-doubt and euphoria,” the manuscript that would become The Tipping Point, published in 2000. That book explored the ways in which an idea or a product will languish, until suddenly it doesn’t — ultimately becoming a “social contagion” that spreads rapidly, like contagions of disease.
The Tipping Point itself was something like that. At Gladwell’s first book event, two people showed up, a stranger and the mother of a friend. But after a while, the book “tipped” and went on to spend years on the New York Times bestseller list. At one point Bill Clinton called it “that book everyone has been talking about.”
Six other books and a podcast later, Gladwell is back to revisit the tipping point from a darker place. While The Tipping Point talks about how we can leverage the principles of social contagions to achieve a social good, Revenge of the Tipping Point posits that in this pursuit, there can be unintended negative consequences. We can tip over into something worse. Gladwell’s latest book is a cautionary tale that will appeal mainly to fans of The Tipping Point. As an author,he is something of an acquired taste. People seem to either love him or to doze off before the end of the last chapter. Let’s just say his books require an attention span.
Gladwell began his career as a journalist: first for The Washington Post, then The New Yorker. He still writes as a journalist, weaving together his own interviews and news accounts to tell stories in his own conversational voice and then to link seemingly unrelated events in the service of his own ideas. Along the way, he offers “rules” he invents to describe his views of how the world works.
Revenge of the Tipping Point follows that formula, from the quirky Gladwellian rules to the whiplash-inducing pivots between seemingly unrelated stories.
Take, for example, Gladwell’s treatment of “Poplar Grove,” a pseudonym for an affluent, homogeneous community that experienced a cluster of teen suicides (a focus of the 2024 book Life Under Pressure by Anna Mueller and Seth Abrutyn). Gladwell took his own tour of the town, finding a real estate agent who took him around and explained the dynamics of the family-oriented community. Then he linked the town’s tragedies to … a fertility crisis among cheetahs.
In this bewildering journey, readers are suddenly thrust from the leafy suburbs of domesticity to a veterinary clinic where scientists are grafting skin samples from domestic cats onto captive cheetahs, trying to figure out why breeding programs fail so spectacularly.
And then, before we even have time to get attached to our new cheetah friends, boom — we’re back in Poplar Grove.
And so it goes, while Gladwell gradually reveals the point he is trying to make, which is that in a monoculture — “a world of uniformity” — there are “no internal defenses against an outside threat.” In the case of both a “perfect” homogeneous community and cheetahs with little genetic diversity, “The best solution to a monoculture epidemic is to break up the monoculture,” Gladwell writes.
Gladwell then takes us to a community in Palo Alto, where a planned development on what was called the Lawrence Tract was supposed to solve the problem of “white flight” from American cities.
That community was developed with the stipulation that one-third of the homes be owned by whites, one-third by Blacks and one-third by Asians, in order to prevent “tipping” in the neighborhood — one ethnic group taking over the neighborhood. The word “tipping” had begun to be used in this way as neighborhoods changed by ethnicity.
“For a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, if you used the phrase, people knew exactly what you meant,” Gladwell writes. Real estate agents would talk about “tipping a building” or “tipping a neighborhood.” They were demonstrating, as Gladwell maintains, that “tipping points can be deliberately engineered” — especially once you venture beyond “the magic third.” (Which is another Gladwellian rule.)
“People, it is clear, behave very differently in a group above some mysterious point of critical mass than they do in a group just a little below that point,” he writes. And people who know this sometimes act to manipulate the tipping in ways that aren’t in a community’s — or a country’s — best interests.
For the New England reader, there is plenty of regional interest in this book. For instance, in Gladwell’s discussion of what is known as “small-area variation” — bewildering differences in outcomes among otherwise similar areas — he examines research that took place in Middlebury, Vermont, and Randoph, New Hampshire.
Despite both towns having almost identical sociological profiles when it came to insurance, income and levels of chronic illness, there were notable differences in hospitalizations, surgery and Medicare spending, with much higher numbers in Randolph. Similarly, when looking at two Vermont towns — Waterbury and Stowe — the same pattern emerged. “The people were the same — except, that is, that the children of Waterbury tended to keep their tonsils and the children of Stowe did not.”
Gladwell also ventures into Massachusetts with his examination of why Harvard University has a rugby team — when hardly anyone goes to see the games, and the players have to be recruited outside of the U.S. — and, later, the infamous Biogen conference in Boston in February 2020 that turned into a superspreading Covid-19 event.
It is the opioid crisis, however, that Gladwell begins and ends with. He uses the saga of OxyContin and the Sackler family to argue that epidemics, both medical and social, have rules and boundaries but it is human beings who create the stories around them and it is human beings who are ultimately responsible for where epidemics go. “It’s time for a hard conversation about epidemics…. We need to be honest about all the subtle and sometimes hidden ways we try to manipulate them,” he writes.
Gladwell has said that for the 25th anniversary of The Tipping Point, he’d intended to simply update or “refresh” the original book, but decided to do the harder work of taking it into another place. That paid off for the established Gladwell fan, but it’s unclear whether he will win new ones with this complex and meandering collection of stories. B
