Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point in which he explained how little things could suddenly add up to cause huge change, in phenomena as diverse as the popularity of Hush Puppies and the reduction of crime in New York City. The book achieved its own tipping point and became a bestseller. It was followed by Outliers, which proposed among other things that in order to be really good at something you had to have practised at it for 10,000 hours. This is my first shot at reviewing a book by Gladwell, so I am several thousand hours short of practice.
The phrase ‘tipping point’ was first coined to describe the proportion of black families it took to drive white families from a neighbourhood, so its roots are somewhat ugly. Gladwell revisits it here, and again applies it to certain phenomena – for example, a sudden suicide epidemic among students of a seemingly perfect high school in suburban America; the exploding number of bank robberies in Los Angeles; and Miami becoming a centre of cocaine dealing and money laundering. He supplies plenty of charts and graphs, which may seem intimidating at first, but he walks us through them. (He doesn’t mention the films Point Break and Scarface, but they deal with precisely these matters at around the same time he is talking about.)
Gladwell illustrates how wildly differing phenomena – for instance, the worldwide awareness of the Holocaust and the general acceptance of gay marriage – may have similar origins. In the case of those two, it’s TV: a four-part series called Holocaust aired over consecutive nights by NBC; and the delightful sitcom Will & Grace introduced a mainstream audience to the notion of a gay man who doesn’t try to kill himself by wrapping his car around a tree – to pluck an example from another earlier TV show. Gladwell does not, I am pleased to say, make glib use of either the Shoah or homophobia. You might at first be startled by the jump-cut between the two subjects, but such is his way (and I bet he really has put in his 10,000 hours of practice) that you don’t feel he’s forcing things or making inappropriate comparisons.
A problem with the book might be that non-American readers will find themselves shaking their heads at the kind of trends he describes. One – which he closes the book with – is the huge surge in deaths caused by opioids in the US – a crisis hard to grasp for anyone unfamiliar with America’s dystopian healthcare system, let alone the legal details. Another strange phenomenon is the existence of a Harvard women’s rugby team, even though interest in the sport is practically nil. Shockingly, the reason for it seems to be an attempt to keep Jews, Asians and blacks out of the university. But I presume fixing both America’s further education system and its healthcare is beyond Gladwell’s remit.
The portrait that emerges is of a deeply flawed society – or at least one that is extremely susceptible to epidemics of all kinds. Gladwell frequently uses the word ‘over-story’ to describe the kind of narrative medium in which we operate. I imagine it like the culture of a petri dish. ‘Epidemics have rules,’ he writes. ‘They have boundaries. They are subject to overstories – and we are the ones who create overstories.’ Such as: black people shouldn’t live in white neighbourhoods; gay marriage will never work and never should; and no one wants to talk about the Holocaust. Or indeed that having a women’s (or men’s, I suppose) rugby team at Harvard helps bring a vibrant ‘sense of community’ to the university.
Whether this book will actually help matters, or whether it isn’t much more than mildly nutritious chewing gum for the brain, only time will tell. But if the lessons from The Tipping Point had been learned, then Gladwell wouldn’t have felt the need to write a sequel.
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