Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

by Malcolm Gladwell

California had two measles outbreaks in the mid-2010s—including one that started at Disneyland. The outbreaks led many to say that California was suffering from a problem with vaccine skepticism. But that’s wrong. Look again at those elementary schools with 100 percent vaccination rates. It’s actually small pockets of people within the state—such as the parents who sent their children to a very specific brand of elementary school—who have a vaccine problem. John Wennberg would recognize the pattern in an instant. Vaccine skepticism is small-area variation.

there is an easy way to protect your child from shingles—which, on a pain scale of 1 to 10, usually registers a 9 or 10—and that’s to have them vaccinated against chicken pox.

If epidemics are influenced by the overstories created by the inhabitants of a community, then in what sense are communities responsible for the fevers and contagions that plague them?

The best solution to a monoculture epidemic is to break up the monoculture.

Nigerian immigrants currently have more graduate degrees per capita than any other group in America.)

The game that Harvard is playing with rugby and that Georgetown is playing with tennis is, of course, also affirmative action. Except that instead of admitting underprivileged students with lower academic credentials, athletic affirmative action admits privileged students with lower academic credentials.

we were a very unique little group of people from the age of fifteen to the age of forty, maybe, that we had no children and no elders.