The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

by Malcolm Gladwell

The children of smokers are more than twice as likely to smoke as the children of nonsmokers. That’s a well-known fact. But—to follow Harris’s logic—that does not mean that parents who smoke around their children set an example that their kids follow. It simply means that smokers’ children have inherited genes from their parents that predispose them toward nicotine addiction.

In a perfect world we would give heavy smokers a pill that lowered their tolerance to the level of, say, a chipper.

I think there are two possibilities. The first can be found in the correlation between smoking and depression, a

30 cigarettes a day—could not get anything more than five milligrams of nicotine within a 24-hour period.

and those are the links to depression and the nicotine threshold.

What we should be doing instead of fighting experimentation is making sure that experimentation doesn’t have serious consequences.

Move the campaign from black churches to beauty salons.

The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount

of effort and time and cost.

a convenient shortcut, a way to make a lot out of a little, and that is what Tipping Points, in the end, are all about.

It was a kind of mass hysteria, a phenomenon that is not at all uncommon among schoolchildren.

We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves — and less time in the company of adults. We have given them e-mail and beepers and, most of all, cellular phones, so that they can fill in all the dead spots in their day — dead spots that might once have been filled with the voices of adults — with the voices of their peers.

Surely, after all, e-mail seems to make the role of the Connector obsolete, or