Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell [8/10]

Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering was meant to be prolific author/podcaster Malcolm Gladwell’s twenty-fifth-anniversary reprise of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, but turned out to be a fundamentally new look at how thinking and ideas and phenomena spread. Gladwell writes as smoothly as river water, his ideas evocatively and precisely laid out. Framing the book with particularities of the crazed opioid crisis of America, he lays out a few key ideas: any two areas of humans can have materially different thinking patterns; often the “law of thirds” seems to apply, whereby a maverick idea or trend takes off when it gains acceptance by around a third of all people; humans can game how trends apply (cue Gladwell’s look at how the big American universities resist diversity); and how sometimes we resist the best ways to tackle our ills because we would need to focus on a few individuals (the superspreaders). And there is more, including the genetic poverty of leopards and our Covid-19 experience. Revenge of the Tipping Point is a ruminative, intoxicating bouquet of ideas, well worth a read.