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

by Malcolm Gladwell

When the US Supreme Court issued its opinion, Harvard University released an angry statement. “We affirm that,” the school said: To prepare leaders for a complex world, Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience. No part of what makes us who we are could ever be irrelevant. Harvard must always be a place of opportunity, a place whose doors remain open to those to whom they had long been closed, a place where many will have the chance to live dreams their parents or grandparents could not have dreamed. It would take a Jesuit to make sense of the many layers in that statement. But let us try. When the university says that “no part of what makes us who we are could ever be irrelevant,” we can assume it is referring to its determination that Harvard should always be a place where only one group gets to be above the Magic Third. When it calls Harvard an institution where “many will have the chance to live dreams their parents or grandparents could not have dreamed,” we can assume it is making a small, inside joke about the special deal it grants to the children of alumni. (What they really mean is the opposite: Harvard is a place where many have the chance to relive the dreams their parents and grandparents already dreamed.) And when Harvard says it wants a student body that represents “multiple facets of human experience,” we can assume it is referring to the extraordinary lengths the school goes to,...