What makes something “go big”? From Mickey Mouse to the Beatles, Precious Moments to Pokemon, modern history is filled with stories of unexpected cultural phenomena and surprise smash hits. In his book The Tipping Point—itself a bit of a “smash hit”—Malcolm Gladwell theorizes that most cultural phenomena spread not unlike epidemic diseases—from person to person, through social contact. He compares Baltimore’s syphilis epidemic in the 1980s to the surprise resurgence of Hush Puppy shoes among New York’s fashionistas a decade later. He believes that in both cases the rapid expansion of these
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