Revenge of the Tipping Point by Gladwell

REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT by Malcolm Gladwell discusses “Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering” twenty-five years after The Tipping Point was published. Gladwell writes that he re-immersed himself in “the world of social epidemics” and discovered a “new set of theories, stories, and arguments about the strange pathways that ideas and behavior follow through our world.” In terms of newer content, he focuses in part on "overstories" – the idea, like the upper portion or canopy in a forest, of a big picture perspective to better discern patterns and behavior changes. He also makes numerous references to the COVID pandemic and the notion of superspreaders. Throughout, he shares a variety of stories and circumstances from South Florida (where he says Miami is “ground zero for this extraordinary epidemic of [Medicare] criminality”) to the Harvard women’s rugby team (when he argues about how colleges use sports to manipulate group proportions) to frequent references to the opioid epidemic and the Sackler family. Gladwell incorporates charts, graphs and data as well as devoting more than ten percent of the book to endnotes and an index. REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT received a starred review from Kirkus. Interested readers may also want to turn to titles by the Heath brothers like Switch, Decisive, 2017’s The Power of Moments or 2022’s Making Numbers Count.