Follow-up to pop-sociology hit The Tipping Point is easily readable but it feels like the author hasn’t moved with the times 'But they were wrong': Malcolm Gladwell. Photo: Randy Holmes via Getty Images Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell Back in the 2000, Malcolm Gladwell’s debut, The Tipping Point , became a self-fulfilling literary event: a book about how trends and ideas catch on, which itself became a phenomenon. It sold in its millions, appeared on ‘best of decade’ lists, earned praise from Bill Clinton and launched its author on to the lucrative lecture circuit.
In the decades since, it has come to define a certain kind of pop-sociology title, aimed at readers who want to explain it all in several hundred pages, with a hypnotically simple theory of how society works. The Tipping Point was this very thing, the book that launched a thousand TED talks. Now Gladwell returns with Revenge of the Tipping Point , an updated look at epidemics and the thresholds that, he argues, they must cross in order to endure.
He has an eye for an interesting case study; chapters on a spate of bank robberies in Los Angeles and on how a businessman’s move to Miami triggered his turn to Medicare fraud are engaging and snappy. He makes a convincing case that a 1978 drama starring Meryl Streep changed how we talk about the Holocaust, and there’s a fascinating section on the Lawrence Tract, a cul-de-sac in 19.