Page 38 - Sharp November 2024

MAN WORTH LISTENING TO
A CURIOUS CASE
NEARLY 25 YEARS AFTER THE TIPPING POINT, MALCOLM GLADWELL EXPLAINS WHY HE’S CHALLENGING HIS MOST FORMATIVE WORK
By David Stol
C ANADIAN AUTHOR MALCOLM GLADWELL HAS BUILT A REPUTATION UPON
his ability to find the extraordinary where others find banality. After penning seven New York Times Best Sellers, publishing countless articles across The New Yorker and The Washington Post, and founding the production company Pushkin Industries — which hosts his enormously popular podcast, Revisionist History — Gladwell hasn’t just tapped into the cultural zeitgeist. Rather, his work has helped define it.
It’s been nearly 25 years since his first book, The Tipping Point, theorized how an idea, trend, or social behaviour could cross a threshold, tip, and spread like wildfire. But in typical Gladwellian fashion, his curiosity has brought him back to challenge the very theories that first ignited his career.
This fall, Gladwell is introducing his latest work, Revenge of the Tipping Point, where he traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. A lot has changed since his first book; he’s started a family, mourned the loss of his father, and witnessed society change in ways he never could have foreseen 25 years ago. Ahead of what he calls “his most personal book yet,” Gladwell reveals why he felt the need to revisit his previous theories, how he develops his relentless curiosity, and his keys to becoming an expert interviewer.
By now, The Tipping Point has transcended the book itself and made its way into mainstream vernacular. Have you grown more comfortable with the fact that your theories will spread outside the context of your work?
When I did that audiobook [Miracle and Wonder] with Paul Simon, I asked for his thoughts on people’s interpre- tations of his songs. His philosophy was that you have to give people the freedom to listen to the music as they wish to listen to it and draw the conclusions they wish to draw. That’s really good advice. You know, people might take the “10,000-hour” rule out of context, or, like you said, The Tipping Point becomes as much a phrase as it is a book to some people. Sure, it changes the work to some degree. But at the same time, they’re trying to bring their own experiences to it. I try to introduce new ways of looking at the world and our social behaviour. But I can’t control, nor would I want to control, the meaning people extract from my work.
That’s very reminiscent of how your Pushkin Indus- tries colleague, Rick Rubin, approaches creativity; let the audience alchemize it into something new. Yes, exactly. It’s a very “Rick” idea. Rick has a very Zen- like approach to his work. For me, it’s quite admirable. That’s how I like to think of sharing ideas.
After nearly 25 years, why revisit The Tipping Point? Was there a particular moment that made reframing your previous ideas so necessary?
I think it was the story that begins and ends the book surrounding the opioid crisis. It seemed like everything about that crisis embodied both the deliberate and inadvertent use of the “tipping point” principles to create and perpetuate an epidemic. Of course, the crisis began 25 years ago, but we would have never analyzed or critiqued a drug company’s behaviour back then in the way we do today. It highlights our skepticism and our ability to be more critical of higher institutions. I think that was an important societal shift to address.
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