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

by Malcolm Gladwell

It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

I offered in my book a recipe for how to promote positive change—as the subtitle suggested, to find a way for little things to make a big difference.

And Revenge of the Tipping Point is the result: a new set of theories, stories, and arguments about the strange pathways that ideas and behavior follow through our world.

Revenge of the Tipping Point is an attempt to do a forensic investigation of social epidemics.

Varsity sports are a mechanism by which Harvard maintains its group proportions.