Malcolm Gladwell, the acclaimed popular science writer, returns with a follow-up to his highly influential study of social contagion, The Tipping Point. Published over two decades ago, that book explored topics from crime rates in New York to shoe sales through the lens of epidemiology, becoming an international bestseller and a viral work about viral phenomena.
In his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell revisits many of the same themes but with a darker, more grounded perspective. The joyous levity of Hush Puppies and Airwalk shoes is replaced by stories touching on modern America's faultlines: opioid addiction, racial quotas, and the transmissibility of Covid. The book is fascinating and provocative, more willing to take risks and conscious of its intellectual antecedents.
One chapter delves into diversity in Ivy League admissions, revealing how Harvard's admissions policy for athletes invites predominantly rich, white applicants in. Gladwell delights in puncturing the evasiveness and hypocrisy of academics and university lawyers. Another excellent chapter on Covid draws on a 2006 New Yorker piece about car emissions, unpicking how a single individual at a biotech company's leadership retreat in Boston may have led to over 300,000 infections.
Gladwell's technique of shifting perspective and scale—combining broad epidemiological sweeps with granular detail—is thrilling but carries risks. His topics, highly charged at an individual level, can be shorn of empathy as he zooms out to talk about the collective with authority. This is clearest in his chapter on an elite high school that suffered an 'epidemic' of suicides, drawing on research by sociologists Anna Mueller and Seth Abrutyn.
