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.
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