NEW YORK, NY.- Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author, has an office on a quiet street in Hudson, New York, where he sits at a desk under a poster of Mao Zedong, the former communist leader of China. Why? Maybe to signal how ideas can be dangerous? Nope, no particular reason. There are two other Chinese communist posters on the wall, too. “I found them online for like $10,” said Gladwell, 61. “I just think it’s funny.”
Gladwell, who has spent his career steeped in ideas and translating social science research into everyday usefulness, says he doesn’t take his own ideas too seriously. But others do. His first book, “The Tipping Point,” became a sensation when it was released in 2000. The book explained how something ordinary — whether a shoe (Hush Puppies loafers), a behavior (theft) or an idea (“the British are coming”) — spreads so wide that it becomes an epidemic. Business mavens, political leaders and ordinary strivers in both those fields treated it like a Bible, mining it for insights on how to make their own products and pitches spread. Today, business schools have named leadership programs after Gladwell’s work, and many entrepreneurs cite his famous rule that true achievement has a cost: 10,000 hours of practice.
In October, he is releasing a new book, “Revenge of The Tipping Point.” Gladwell feels that “The Tipping Point” became wildly popular because it matched the optimism of the late 1990s; it mapped how to create positive change at a moment of positive potential, with the Cold War over and crime declining. (The book promoted the “broken windows” theory of policing, which suggested that the way to prevent major crimes was to strictly police petty ones, a notion that gave rise to policing practices now viewed by many as discriminatory.)
“Revenge of The Tipping Point” turns the first book’s conceit on its head, examining the forces that drive negative epidemics, which to him felt more attuned to our present moment.
Gladwell explores the role of “superspreaders,” people best positioned to ignite a behavior or an idea. And he examines how communities are shaped by their population proportions; group dynamics tend to stay stable when minority perspectives make up roughly one-third of the overall size, what he calls “the law of the magic third.”
I spoke with Gladwell about his career and new book, in which splashy theories abound, as they do on his podcast, “Revisionist History.” This interview has been edited and condensed.
Q: You wrote in “David and Goliath,” your 2013 book, about the benefits of being an underdog. Starting out, you were more of an underdog, and now you’re a rock-star journalist. How does that alter the experience of undertaking a new project?
A: It means less than I would have thought. The way I do my job has not changed. I still do all of my own reporting and research. That’s the same way I worked when I was in my 20s. It does mean it’s easier to get people to return my calls.
Q: Is there an underdog quality built into taking a creative risk?
A: It’s difficult for me to imagine myself as an underdog at the moment. I don’t know whether the idea of David and Goliath maps onto the world of journalism. I don’t think of us as having power in the way that armies have power. Our power is so amorphous and vague and flimsy and contingent.
Q: Isn’t audience power?
A: I guess, in a certain way. But I’ve never been under the illusion that I own the audience, nor do I think that they are following me in the sense that I’m converting them to my ideas. The fun of reading one of my books is not to be converted to a way of thinking. The fun is to meet a new idea and play with it and decide whether you like it, right?
We have a table read Thursday for a podcast episode that is a critique of “The Tipping Point,” of the crime chapter.
Q: The “broken windows” chapter?
A: Yeah, it’s just like: “I was wrong. Here’s how badly I was wrong. Here’s why I was wrong.”
The idea that crime was an epidemic and that criminal behavior was contagious is correct. But the idea that broken windows and stop-and-frisk were the correct response to a contagion is completely false.
Q: What is it like looking back at work that you published, which certainly had an effect on policymakers, and thinking, “I completely disagree with my past self”?
A: I don’t have any great hesitation about saying I was wrong. If you’re reading a book that is 25 years old, stuff should be wrong. If you don’t recognize that the world has changed in 25 years, there’s something wrong with you.
Q: If you were rewriting the “broken windows” chapter now, what would be the takeaway?
A: I just went to Philadelphia to hang out with these people who are doing real broken windows, like actual literal broken windows. The thing about broken windows is it’s not a metaphor. I was treating it like a metaphor. No, no, no. It’s literally about fixing broken windows.
This is a group that cleans up vacant lots. They’ve cleaned up thousands of vacant lots in Philadelphia. And they have measured declines in crime, improvements in mental health.
Q: How do you balance your roles as a storyteller and as someone who is translating social science findings to powerful people who want to act on those findings?
A: It’s tricky. I think the biggest problem — and it’s something that I am a lot better at now than I was when I was starting out — is to understand that you do need to communicate the uncertainty. It’s fine to have a beautiful idea that you’re presenting to people and helping them make sense of the way the world operates. But I do think that you have to communicate the understanding that this could be wrong. We’re not presenting a fact here. We’re playing with an idea.
I hold ideas very loosely, and I think it’s important for people who write about ideas to remind their readers to hold their ideas loosely.
Q: You have written about the ways that social context influences behavior. What in our current context is shaping your desire, in “Revenge of The Tipping Point,” to look at what propels negative social change?
A: The book is framed by the opioid crisis. We’re talking about over 100,000 deaths a year at this point from overdoses, which is just an astonishing, mind-blowing number.
You’d think it would be all we were talking about.
Q: You present interesting theories about what accelerated the opioid crisis. You describe “superspreader” doctors who were wooed by pharmaceutical companies and wrote vast numbers of opioid prescriptions; you examine the variation in drug overdose levels between states that required doctors to make extra copies of their prescriptions and states that didn’t.
But what about factors like corporate greed, lack of federal regulation, communities being susceptible to addiction because of economic devastation and feelings of neglect? How are you understanding the role that all those other variables played?
A: I was conscious of the fact that I was writing a chapter and not a book. I was also conscious of the fact that I’m not the first in line writing about this. There have been some really amazing books about opioids that have come before me. So I wanted to add to our understanding.
In these kinds of books, you can’t ever tell the whole story. You have to pick where you think the opportunities for advancing people’s understanding are the greatest. For example, the insight that the opioid crisis was not national, that there was significant “small area variation,” I think is really interesting. The insight that the overwhelming majority of physicians who prescribed painkillers did so in an ethical manner. So this is not an indictment of the medical profession. The medical profession did its job. A tiny group of people on the fringes got identified and targeted by a rapacious drug company.
Q: One thing that’s changed since “The Tipping Point” is that now you have kids. Do you take your research insights into account in your own parenting? For example, you’ve written that when teenagers are deciding where to go to college, they should choose being a big fish in a small pond instead of a small fish in a big elite school.
A: I have told all my friends that I’m fully prepared to be a hypocrite on all of these matters. I opined on parenting before I was a parent. Now that I am a parent, I don’t think I’ll ever opine on parenting again.
Q: You started your career in a very different media world. You had this storytelling style of presenting big ideas and tying them to stories, to evidence. Media consumption has changed a lot. We’re seeing this rise of anti-expertise: People love Joe Rogan, getting their news from TikTok. How is the embrace of anti-expertise affecting the way audiences receive your work?
A: I have difficulty with the notion that we’re in a moment of anti-expertise. I don’t buy it. I’m not a regular Joe Rogan listener. I actually committed to listening to an episode with Andrew Huberman. (Huberman is a neuroscientist at Stanford who hosts a popular podcast.) I guess he’s controversial, I have no idea.
I thought it was a great episode. Rogan let someone who knows about the brain and human development come on his show and talk for two hours. That is the opposite of anti-expertise. And Rogan does this week in and week out — he invites people who know something on his show and lets them talk. Sometimes I don’t agree with the person he has on his show, but other times I learn a lot. It’s a different consumption model for encountering expertise, but it’s not anti-expertise.
Q: But he’ll also have on people whose ideas completely fly in the face of medical consensus, right?
A: He brings in people who have something to say and lets them talk at length. Whereas in the media world I grew up with, we wanted someone who was a gatekeeper to curate. He won’t do that.
People increasingly want uncurated expertise. Now does that sometimes create problems? Yeah, a lot of people didn’t take the COVID vaccine that should have and died as a result. That’s really unfortunate. I am fully aware of what happens when you let a thousand flowers bloom. (There’s Mao, or at least an echo of him, again.) But I’m also aware that there is at times something beautiful about the fact that we are opening up access to people in a way we never did before.
Q: In Steven Pinker’s review of one of your books, he wrote that “when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he’s apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.” You had a compelling response on your blog. It seems like his critique was about the tension between the work of a writer and the work of a social scientist.
A: I always hear from people who have read books of mine and have taken ideas and made them their own in a certain way. Going back to the original “Tipping Point” — tons of people who were thinking about the problem of how to get their word out about something or change people’s minds looked to that book. They didn’t treat it like a how-to book. But they saw in that book ideas that helped them shape their own strategies. And that to me is beautiful.
Q: You write that groups function well when “a once-insignificant set of outsiders” reach one-quarter or one-third of the overall group size. You call that “the law of the magic third.” Why call it a law? Given that you hold ideas loosely.
A: It’s for fun. I mean, I don’t call it a capital-L law.
There’s two things here. You’re confusing the application and the principle. It does seem like in a variety of contexts, group dynamics shift when a dissenting voice reaches 30%. I’m comfortable with saying there is something really interesting about “one-third.” That does not mean you can apply it in every case, right? The hard work is saying, “OK, well, when is this principle in operation?” What I would love to see is more experimentation. Let’s do a randomized study on what happens if you cluster minority groups in classrooms at about 30%.
That’s the goal of the book, to give people the sense that the world that you’re given is not the world you have to settle for.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
