Certain creative works possess such powerful self-referentiality, an endless ability to ricochet, that they become embedded in the culture. One such book is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Published more than two decades ago, it explored a dazzling range of topics, from crime rates in New York to shoe sales, all through the lens of epidemiology. “[T]he best way to understand […] any number of mysterious changes that mark everyday life,” he wrote, “is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do.” An international bestseller, it became a kind of testament to its own thesis, a viral work about viral phenomena.
I can still recall reading The Tipping Point as a teenager and being bowled over by its seductive marriage of social science and psychology to New Yorker-style portraits and anecdotes. Like an indiscreet magician, Gladwell presented his readers with a series of stories, mysteries and puzzles, and then proceeded to decode them, revealing his workings in an upbeat and confident narrative voice. Listen to me, he seemed to whisper to his readers, and I will show you the hidden workings of society, and how you, as an individual, can influence or “tip” the trends that shape it. The book turned its 36-year-old author into a household name, a kind of secular seer at the turn of the new millennium.
Almost 25 years and six books later, Gladwell has written a follow-up to his first work that revisits many of its themes. In its self-confidence, addictiveness and lucidity the new book resembles its predecessor, but bears the mark of an older, wizened author, and one who lives in a country very different to the Clinton-era United States. Gone is much of the joyous levity, the case studies about Hush Puppies or Airwalk shoes, replaced by stories that touch on the faultlines and anxieties of modern America: opioid addiction rates, racial quotas and the transmissibility of Covid. It is fascinating and provocative; more grounded in history, conscious of its intellectual antecedents, and more willing to take risks.
Many of Gladwell’s subjects are familiar and yet he injects them with a new energy. In chapter five, he delves into the thorny question of diversity in admissions to the Ivy League, hardly an underreported issue, and yet he somehow turns the subject on its head. Instead of examining the means by which elite institutions keep minorities out, he reveals the subtle and insidious ways in which Harvard, through its admissions policy for athletes, invites predominantly rich, white applicants in. Much of the chapter is based on court transcripts, and Gladwell delights in puncturing the evasiveness and hypocrisy of academics and university lawyers as they squirm to avoid acknowledging the principles that underlie university admissions.
Less irony is on display in Gladwell’s excellent chapter about Covid, which draws in part on a piece he wrote on car emissions for the New Yorker back in 2006. The central story is the 2020 outbreak of disease at a biotech company’s annual leadership retreat in Boston, which is estimated to have led to more than 300,000 infections. Using the science of car emissions and aerosols, he slowly unpicks what might have happened on that day, and concludes that a single individual may have been responsible for the outbreak. It leads him to reflect on the scientific evidence that relatively few individuals, so-called super-spreaders, are responsible for most Covid transmission, an unsettling conclusion that poses particular moral and policy dilemmas.
Part of Gladwell’s allure is his uncanny ability to shift perspective and scale – to combine the broad sweep of an epidemiological viewpoint with the granular detail of a court transcript, direct quotation or description; to shuffle between different worlds, from viruses to aerosol science and conservation, drawing parallels and contrasts. It is a thrilling technique, but it comes with narrative risks. His topics, so highly charged at an individual level, are sometimes shorn of empathy as he zooms out and talks about the collective with a voice of authority and reason. Nowhere is this clearer than in his chapter on the story of an elite high school that suffered an “epidemic” of suicides. (Gladwell draws on the research of two sociologists, Anna Mueller and Seth Abrutyn.) Shifting between stories of inbred cheetahs and the troubled high school, he unpicks the relationship between monocultures and suicide, but loses sight of the complexities and emotional resonance of his subject.
In 1978, Susan Sontag published Illness As Metaphor, an all-out assault on the ways in which metaphors and imagery distort our understanding of sickness, isolating the ill and deepening human suffering. “Metaphor is a code word for misrepresentations, stupidities, false ideas,” she said. “I’d say people would be better off without them.” I don’t believe this is true (and perhaps neither did Sontag); we all need metaphors to make sense of the world around us, though perhaps their power lies precisely in their inadequacy, the ways they highlight the gaps between things, rather than their convergence: cheetahs and children, polluting cars and human “super-spreaders”, viruses and crime rates.
I sometimes wished that Gladwell would dwell longer on these gaps, unpicking some of the messiness of human experience, a messiness that reassuringly explodes the scientism and positivism of our culture. Gladwell includes a quote by the Scottish writer Andrew Fletcher: “Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.” For all Gladwell’s academic citations, his objective tone and his repeated references to lessons or laws, this is a book of songs, a skilfully woven fabric made of stories, images and metaphors. I devoured it, just as I did his first, though with more circumspection than my younger self, dwelling on its silences and omissions as much as its artistry.
• Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is published by Little, Brown (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
