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.

The Bright Side by Sumit Paul-Choudhury

It has been a week for news, right? Feels as though we would all welcome the more positive perspective that is explored in a couple of new non-fiction texts.

THE BRIGHT SIDE by Sumit Paul-Choudhury is subtitled “How Optimists Change the World, and How You Can Be One.” Paul-Choudhury is a former Editor-in-Chief of New Scientist, with training as an astrophysicist and work experience as a financial journalist. The Guardian described this book as “An engaging, if slightly disjointed romp through the science and psychology of optimism.” As I read, I found myself thinking of Ted Lasso and his BELIEVE sign. Paul-Choudhury breaks the book into three sections, plus a somewhat theoretical Epilogue, a Bibliography, and an Index. He begins with talking about his wife’s untimely death and emphasizes that “Optimism, far from leading us to passively await our fates, can help us to actively explore our limitations -- and transcend them.” Indeed, there is a definite bias towards action; The Wall Street Journal review features this quote: “If we want the world to be better tomorrow than it is today,” Mr. Paul-Choudhury writes, “we first have to expect that it will be. Then we have to imagine the ways in which it could be. And then we have to ensure that it will be.”

Readers might try pairing this book with Hope for Cynics; by Jamil Zaki who argues that hopeful skepticism is a valuable and precise way of understanding others and that it can rebalance our view of human nature, thereby helping us build the world we truly want. An interview with the author, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, is available here on PBS NewsHour: