E-book Assessment
Revenge of the Tipping Level: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social
Engineering
By Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown & Co., 368 pages, $32
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It’s truthful to say that “The Tipping Level” was the tipping level for Malcolm Gladwell’s profession. In 2000, the e book catapulted Gladwell, then a New Yorker workers author, to literary superstardom. It additionally jump-started a brand new style of explanatory social science books geared toward mass audiences.
The idea of the tipping level — the second when every little thing immediately adjustments, and a phenomenon turns into an epidemic — was not unique to Gladwell. However he enshrined it in our cultural parlance. “By the point the paperback got here out,” he writes in his sequel, “Revenge of the Tipping Level,” “it was a part of the zeitgeist.” Over time, Gladwell, now additionally a podcast entrepreneur, has churned out extra bestsellers, amongst them “Blink” (2005), “The Outliers” (2008) and “Speaking to Strangers” (2019). To his adept synthesis of educational analysis he provides journalistic curiosity, a crisp prose fashion and a mastery of counter-intuitive juxtapositions. Usually starting with a conundrum, he seeks out case research and ideas that illuminate it, altering (barely or radically) our understanding of the world.
“Revenge of the Tipping Level” follows that acquainted method. It stays tempting to dispute Gladwell’s repeated analogies between illness epidemics and social ones, and doable to wonder if he’s cherry-picking examples to serve his theories. At occasions, too, the narrative appears unduly gradual and discursive, as he shifts, generally abruptly, from subject to subject. Nonetheless, Gladwell’s replace of his concepts about tipping factors will most likely fulfill hard-core followers, and problem and divert different readers.
Cowl “Revenge of the Tipping Level”
(Little, Brown)
The unique “Tipping Level” focused on three principal ideas that Gladwell argued have been important to understanding social epidemics. It described the Legislation of the Few, the indispensable function of messengers he referred to as Connectors, Professionals and Salesmen; the Stickiness Issue, involving the sturdiness of messages; and the Energy of Context, that means the broader panorama in opposition to which epidemics unfolded.
With “Revenge of the Tipping Level,” he affords “a brand new set of theories, tales, and arguments in regards to the unusual pathways that concepts and conduct comply with by means of our world.” The title refers back to the notion that the instruments used to harness social epidemics for good can also have deleterious results.
The e book kicks off with an anonymized case research that many readers will instantly acknowledge: It entails a congressional listening to involving an organization charged with fomenting an epidemic, and firm witnesses loath to just accept any blame.
Gladwell then introduces puzzles tied to case research. He begins with an epidemic of financial institution robberies that swept Los Angeles however not the nation, an instance of “small-area variation.” Such variation, he argues, is a product of what he calls a group’s overstory, a set of cultural and social determinants. To the knowledgeable Gladwell reader, this looks as if one other tackle the facility of context.
Drilling down, Gladwell visits a much-studied group obsessive about excessive achievement, identified within the social-science literature as Poplar Grove. In a basic Gladwell tic, he interweaves a seemingly unrelated story, in regards to the genetic uniformity and vulnerability of cheetahs. He argues that these two populations — the city and the cheetahs — are each monocultures, and due to this fact lack resilience. That lack, together with a high-pressure setting, helps account for Poplar Grove’s suicide epidemic, he suggests.
The e book’s subsequent part offers with social engineering and the rule of the “magic third,” epitomized by white flight from metropolis neighborhoods. Tipping factors, Gladwell writes, “could be intentionally engineered.” One instance, in Palo Alto: the Lawrence Tract, a deliberate group the place white, Black and Asian individuals dedicated to residing collectively in equal numbers in an try to keep away from a racial tipping level, no matter the person prices.
One other case research, extremely related after the U.S. Supreme Court docket resolution final yr placing down race-based affirmative motion in faculty admissions, entails the existence of a ladies’s rugby group at Harvard. Why does Harvard (a defendant within the affirmative motion swimsuit) want such a group, Gladwell asks, and, extra broadly, why are so many academically mediocre athletes accepted to the college?
In skewering Harvard’s longtime dean of admissions, William Fitzsimmons, Gladwell is at his snarky finest. One Fitzsimmons declare is that “having a vibrant athletic custom … makes a giant distinction in our means to draw all types of scholars.” However Harvard at the moment admits solely a tiny 3.4% of its candidates, Gladwell notes, and “who is that this imaginary individual … who would flip down a suggestion from Harvard as a result of the sports activities scene wasn’t sufficiently ‘vibrant’? ”
The truth is, Gladwell argues convincingly, Harvard makes use of sports activities to take care of its proportion of overwhelmingly white college students “ready … on the country-club taking part in fields of america.” It’s not solely clear from his evaluation whether or not the whiteness or the wealth of these college students is the figuring out consider Harvard’s calculations, nor precisely how this predilection interacts with Harvard’s efforts to diversify its scholar inhabitants. However, in Gladwell’s view, “The incorrect affirmative motion was introduced earlier than the courtroom.”
Gladwell additionally discusses at size the notion of the super-spreader occasion, acquainted from the COVID-19 pandemic and epitomized by the February 2020 assembly of the biotechnology agency Biogen in Boston. Right here we get an extended disquisition on aerosol transmission, saliva and dehydration — and, ultimately, what looks as if a variation on the outdated thought of the lopsidedly highly effective messenger.
Then we transfer to what Gladwell calls zeitgeist overstories, a means of conceptualizing cultural change. He cites the function of the 1978 tv miniseries “Holocaust” in reworking the politics of reminiscence, and of the comedy “Will & Grace,” which first aired in 1998, in revolutionizing concepts about homosexual individuals and relationships. “Overstories,” Gladwell writes, “are way more unstable than they could seem.”
Within the remaining payoff, Gladwell cleverly applies these ideas to his demystified case research, which appears to straddle the divide between social and organic epidemics.
It’s not mandatory to purchase every little thing Gladwell is promoting to understand “Revenge of the Tipping Level.” It seems that attempting to poke holes in his arguments is at the very least half the enjoyable.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.
