Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

by Malcolm Gladwell

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

One of the great minds of our time – Malcolm Gladwell – follows up his sensational book The Tipping Point by revisiting the subject matter with a modern lens, dissecting what it is that pushes society over the edge, and what role we play in it.

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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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316575805
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	10/01/2024
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	967
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, and The Bomber Mafia. He is also the cofounder of Pushkin Industries, an audio-content company that produces Revisionist History, among other podcasts and audiobooks. He was born in England, raised in Canada, and lives outside New York with his family and a cat named Biggie Smalls.

Hometown:

New York, NY

Date of Birth:

September 3, 1963

Place of Birth:

England, U.K.

Education:

University of Toronto, History degree, 1984

Read an Excerpt

Revenge of the Tipping Point excerpt © 2024 Malcolm Gladwell

Twenty‑five years ago, in The Tipping Point, I was fascinated by the idea that in social epidemics little things could make a big difference. I came up with rules to describe the internal workings of social contagions: the Law of the Few, the Power of Context, the Stickiness Factor. The laws of epidemics, I argued, could be used to promote positive change: lower crime rates, teach kids how to read, curb cigarette smoking.

“Look at the world around you,” I wrote. “It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push — in just the right place — it can be tipped.”

In Revenge of the Tipping Point, I want to look at the underside of the possibilities I explored so long ago. If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the per‑ son who knows where and when to push has real power. So who are those people? What are their intentions? What techniques are they using? In the world of law enforcement, the word forensic refers to an investigation of the origins and scope of a criminal act: “reasons, culprits, and consequences.” Revenge of the Tipping Point is an attempt to do a forensic investigation of social epidemics.

In the pages that follow, I’m going to take you to a mysterious office building in Miami with a very strange group of tenants, to a Marriott Hotel in Boston for an executive retreat that went badly awry, to a seemingly perfect town called Poplar Grove, to a cul‑de‑sac in Palo Alto, and on from there to places you’ve heard of and places you haven’t. We’re going to investigate what’s weird about Waldorf schools, meet a long‑overlooked drug warrior named Paul E. Madden, learn about a 1970s television miniseries that changed the world, and raise an eyebrow at Harvard University’s women’s rugby team. All of these are cases where people — either deliberately or inadvertently, virtuously or maliciously — made choices that altered the course and shape of a contagious phenomenon. And in every case those interventions raised questions we have to answer and problems we have to solve. That’s the revenge of the Tipping Point: The very same tools we use to build a better world can also be used against us.

Editorial Reviews

10/21/2024

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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

In Revenge of the Tipping Point, splashy theories abound, as they do in Gladwell’s podcast, Revisionist History… He turns the conceit [of The Tipping Point]on its head, examining the forces that drive negative epidemics, which to him felt more attuned to our present moment.”—Emma Goldberg, New York Times

“Rigorously researched—but always with a witty flair—it’s a must-read for longtime Gladwell fans or readers simply curious about the quiet, surprising origin stories of the crises and questions that define contemporary life.”
 —Francesca Billington, Oprah Daily

“Brimming with fun and insightful anecdotes…Revenge of the Tipping Point will leave you pondering Gladwell’s theories and asking more questions…The book explores how individuals can use power and influence to shape…the collective narratives we tell ourselves as groups or as a society — and in so doing steward policies and perspectives.”—Alex Tapscott, New York Post

"To his adept synthesis of academic research he adds journalistic curiosity, a crisp prose style and a mastery of counter-intuitive juxtapositions. Often beginning with a conundrum, he seeks out case studies and concepts that illuminate it, altering (slightly or radically) our understanding of the world."
 —Julia M. Klein, Los Angeles Times

“Gladwell gives us a sort of interactive nonfiction, not unlike a detective story…Revenge of the Tipping Point essentially asks why we were all so ready to think anything that spreads like a virus could be good for us. In the first book we had connectors, mavens and salesmen. Now we have overstories, superspreaders and social engineering…The match that so elegantly graced the cover of The Tipping Point is now on fire.”—Frank Rose, Wall Street Journal

“The long-awaited follow-up to The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s groundbreaking 2000 debut, explores the watershed moments that define this new age of societal upheaval…with curiosity and humor.”—Shannon Carlin, TIME Magazine

“Gladwell is a great storyteller and writes with a contagious sense of curiosity, with each revelation seeming as exciting to him as it is to readers…Revenge of the Tipping Point provides an opportunity to assess his success and his critics’ arguments.”—Economist

“An astute and bracing appraisal of how cultures succeed or fail...Gladwell deftly demonstrates how attention to statistics and data points can shape a business, school, or community."—Booklist

“Thoughtful, carefully written...Refining and deepening his and our understanding of the spread of customs, mores, and practices, Gladwell emphasizes those overstories, illustrating them with twisting and turning tales.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

From the Publisher

Malcolm Gladwell once again shows that audio is the ideal medium for someone who excels at both long-form journalism and podcasting. In this follow-up to his iconic debut, THE TIPPING POINT, Gladwell explores the bleaker side of how things go viral. His unmistakable delivery has become more animated after years at the mic, and as he's done in previous audiobooks, he uses snippets of recorded interviews to give authentic voices to many of his subjects. Less successfully, voice actors present the rest of the quotes. Some of Gladwell's arguments about contagion are more persuasive than others, but the overall presentation is so compelling that listeners will binge this work and wonder where the time went. D.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2024 - AudioFile

★ 2024-07-24
A quarter-century on, Gladwell revisits his best-known book and examines some of its assumptions and conclusions.

RereadingThe Tipping Point, Gladwell writes, made him realize “that I still do not understand many things about social epidemics.” Thetip point of real estate parlance—it refers to things such as the ethnic composition of a neighborhood when, once a percentage in the growth of racex is reached, members of racey will move up, on, or otherwise out—explains only so much. Often, he writes, “social contagions,” a metaphor used to describe how ideas spread like viruses, can be traced back to just a handful of innovators (or viral superspreaders, for that matter): What matters thereafter is how the ideas (or viral loads) are received and dealt with. For example, why does Illinois have a low rate of opioid abuse relative to Indiana? Because Indiana, like many states, doesn’t require monitoring, which explains why swarms of Big Pharma salespeople descended on those states to push OxyContin and other drugs to epidemic levels. Illinois, by contrast, is one of the states that require triplicate prescriptions: one copy goes to the pharmacist, one to the patient’s records, one to a regulatory agency. That three-tiered pharmaceutical pad, Gladwell writes, “evolves into an overstory,” or governing idea, “a narrative that says opioids are different, spurring the physician to pause and think before prescribing them.” Refining and deepening his and our understanding of the spread of customs, mores, and practices, Gladwell emphasizes those overstories, illustrating them with twisting and turning tales of, for example, how the wordholocaust came into general usage (surprisingly, via TV), how the idea of gay marriage gained acceptability, and how widespread social engineering "has quietly become one of the central activities of the American establishment.”

Fans of the original will learn much from Gladwell’s thoughtful, carefully written reconsideration.

Kirkus Reviews