Revenge of the Tipping Point
Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering
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4.4 • 155 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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Twenty-five years after the publication of his groundbreaking first book, Malcolm Gladwell returns with a brand-new volume that reframes the lessons of The Tipping Point in a startling and revealing light.
Why is Miami…Miami? What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does it mean for racial harmony? In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena.
Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world’s most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis. Revenge of the Tipping Point is Gladwell’s most personal book yet. With his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science, he offers a guide to making sense of the contagions of modern world. It’s time we took tipping points seriously.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Revisiting his best-known work, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell brings fresh perspective to his own theories about social epidemics in this fascinating read. His focus in the book is what happens when society makes a well-timed push in the wrong direction. The ongoing opioid crisis, a wave of Los Angeles bank robberies, and widespread Medicare fraud in Miami all provide examples of what happens when conditions are optimized for poor choices and bad behavior. Comparing society to a dense forest where the canopy above determines what happens below, he looks for trends and stories that shape communities large and small. It’s not all negative, though. He also explores the surprising effect a 1978 television miniseries had on how we view the Holocaust and the impact the sitcom Will & Grace had on perceptions of gay marriage. Like its predecessor, Revenge of the Tipping Point isn’t simply food for thought, it’s a full buffet of intriguing ideas.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Gladwell befuddles with this convoluted revisiting of his bestseller The Tipping Point. Aiming to reveal abuses of the tipping point phenomenon by the powerful, Gladwell's primary example is Purdue Pharma's peddling of opioids. To build his case he grafts two new metaphors onto the tipping point concept. One is "overstories"—overarching social ideas which, like the top layer of canopy in a forest, affect the behavior of everything below. The other is a suite of epidemiology metaphors drawn from the Covid pandemic, most notably the concept of superspreaders, which, to be fair, is a great example of "The Law of the Few," an idea Gladwell wrote about in The Tipping Point that states that a big demographic problem is often actually caused by only a few people. In the end, while he connects Purdue's misdeeds to both "overstories" (Purdue targeted states without strong preexisting narcotics regulations) and superspreaders (Purdue focused its efforts on prescription-happy doctors), Gladwell never really lands the tipping point angle. He writes that Purdue's switch to a less easily snortable version of the drug "tipped" OxyContin users into heroin users, which seems, like so much else in the book, to bring the definition of a tipping point right up to its own tipping point into oblivion. As he climbs the rungs of his argument, Gladwell entertains with his deep cache of anecdotes. But it's a ladder to nowhere.
Customer Reviews
Eroding uniqueness
The weakest of his works. The 2 stars might be a function of comparative expectations as his prior works were exceptional. He far too often lets his personal views encroach upon the data and findings. I was particularly struck by the juxtaposition of an incredibly cool analysis of the problems of monoculture in cheetahs (awesome chapter) and then the immediate lack of seeing the effects of a monoculture in an Ivy League class and advocating for a CalTech like monoculture. All in all he skimmed interesting topics but didn’t dig to the profound as he had some previously