In the 25 years since the release of his breakthrough book, “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell has become somewhat of a household name. Readers wonder what issue he’ll tackle next in his lively, heavily researched, journalistic style. For Gladwell fans, “Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering” is more of what they’ve enjoyed.
The book has stories that on the surface may not get our attention, but in taking a step back, we can see their implications: The events provoked trends and epidemics our world has endured. Gladwell enables our seeing these implications by offering a lesson in critical thinking, which Merriam-Webster defines as “applying reason and questioning assumptions in order to solve problems, evaluate information, discern biases.”
Harvard’s Women’s Rugby Team
Take the story about the Harvard women’s rugby team. What? You didn’t know that Harvard had one? Gladwell describes one ordinary game which was livestreamed on YouTube. There were six viewers, and only a small group of spectators visible. During the game, the skies opened, and it began to pour heavily. The game continued, with Harvard winning the day. Gladwell puts this question to the readers: “Why does Harvard have a varsity women’s rugby team, anyway?”As Gladwell reaches deeper into the question, plenty of details come to light. What seems at first an innocent and typical game played on an American field belies a system that doesn’t always play fair. Ivy League schools created sport programs, like rugby, to bring in students who may not have otherwise qualified academically. It was their way of controlling who got in and keeping up the status quo of students.
The three words Gladwell uses in the subtitle are terms he uses to name the culprits who begin an “epidemic,” whether it’s a virus spread from one person to another, or a rapid increase or decrease in what has been a stable social pattern. In the first chapter, Gladwell shares the story about an epidemic of bank robberies, something going out of style since the 1960s. Across the United States in 1965, there were a total of 847 bank robberies. That’s “a modest number,” he wrote, “given the size of the country.” There was a sense that the crime was “headed towards extinction.” That was until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when bank robberies nearly doubled.
Fascinating Lessons in Human Behavior
Watching Gladwell is like following a sleuth picking apart one clue after another, turning it over, and finding an insight from the research and expert opinions he collects. For those unfamiliar with his work, don’t be alarmed by the graphs, stat charts, and tiny asterisks that reference his resources. It’s easy to take in, provided in plain language, and allows readers to come away with more knowledge of human behavior than what they might receive in a college sociology course.
Nine trends and epidemics are covered in depth. One addresses how the word “holocaust” went from being a rarely used term to suddenly on everyone’s radar after a four-part miniseries aired in the late 1970s. Because of this mini-series, Nazi atrocities now had a name recognized by the whole world. Gladwell writes, “Today, we speak of the genocide that happened in Europe during the Second World War as the ‘Holocaust’- capital H. The atrocity has a name.”
He also examines how a community endured a series of tragic events. On the surface, these appeared to come out nowhere, but in studying the framework of the community’s system—where students were pressured to excel in all areas—these events built on one another, and unfortunately, manifested in horrible ways.
The history behind the COVID-19 pandemic and opioid crisis are included too. Gladwell’s riveting explanation should be required reading for those who create public health policy. The opioid crisis is explained in the final chapter as another example of Gladwell’s “law of the very few.” When Purdue Pharma was looking to push their pain product, they had to woo the physicians into prescribing it. However, at the time, only certain states followed the policy of requiring physicians to write their pain prescriptions in triplicate so that one copy was filed with the federal narcotic bureau.
The Takeaway
In “The Tipping Point,” Gladwell “introduced a series of principles to help us make sense of the kinds of sudden shifts in behavior and belief that make up our world.” That first book went on to become an international bestseller, and it changed the way business and science books were written for mass audiences.Since then, he’s written six other books, five of which were New York Times bestsellers. Gladwell felt it might be interesting to revisit his debut blockbuster and the tipping point idea, which he says was like “looking at a picture of yourself from long ago.”
“If the world can be moved by just the slightest push,” he wrote in “Revenge,” “then the person who knows where and when to push has real power. ‘Revenge of the Tipping Point’ is an attempt to do a forensic investigation of social epidemics.”
“Revenge of the Tipping Point” is hard to put down. Once pulled into the cultural quandaries Gladwell presents—issues today—readers will be compelled to keep reading to see where the author takes them.
