Book Review: ‘Revenge of the Tipping Point,’ by Malcolm Gladwell

The problem is that he has chosen to be a farm stand that serves salty, fatty, sugary pseudo-thinking. His signature methodology is to convey relatively boilerplate, already well-known ideas, by rebranding the ideas and wrapping them in stories. And the lubricant of this engine is turning everything into little mysteries — why bank robberies spread in Los Angeles in the 1990s, but not in New York in the 1950s — that he, having created them, can now solve for you.

Some may find the faux-thriller construction annoying, but I believe it is necessary as a subsidy to, and concealer of, weak-sauce ideas. In his earlier books, Gladwell at least coined catchy rules of thumb (the mastery of a skill takes 10,000 hours, for instance), even if their validity was questionable. But in “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” even the rules have the consistency of a slushy.

One is that, in epidemics — of illness, addiction or mass shootings — a few people account for most of the spreading. Readers will recall the idea of superspreaders from 2020. Another is that “overstories,” the stories a place tells about itself, shape what happens there. This is a rebranding of the idea of cultural narratives; I don’t know whom it will surprise. A third is (as Gladwell already told us 24 years ago) that if you can get something to infect a critical mass, it will cross, well, a tipping point and spread from there.

For the best writers, writing is about questions, propelled by doubt and self-correction and the endless revision of one’s mind. But in Gladwell’s books, especially this one, a kind of Framework Supremacy is the driving force, forming and deforming the reality he describes. He becomes committed, for example, to what he calls the Magic Third: the notion that one-third of a group is a critical mass. Writing about women on corporate boards, he cites a study that things get more hospitable to women when three of them are serving together. Then he notes, in spite of considerable evidence that boards come in a range of sizes, that boards are “a group of (typically) around nine experienced businesspeople.” This use of “typically” and “around” is a small sleight of hand, and it serves him well.