“Revenge of the Tipping Point” was my first Malcolm Gladwell book. Given that it’s an extension of his first book, “The Tipping Point,” I found myself with an especially fresh perspective on his ideas and writing style. As a nonfiction lover, I was curious — I’d heard about Gladwell in relation to the social-political-opinion-TED talk scene, and I wanted to give his work a try.
I absolutely devoured the first half of the book. And by “devoured,” I mean the flashlight-in-bed kind of devoured. Gladwell is a great writer — he introduces and transitions between ideas with ease. He strikes a perfect balance between captivating anecdotes and discoveries in social science, connecting it all with his own catchy phrases and ideas.
I found myself putting my book down to look up images of Philip Esformes and buildings in Miami constructed specifically for fraud and famous bank robbers. I tried to figure out the location of “Poplar Grove,” an anonymized homogenous town he describes. Gladwell had me hooked. I liked his stories. They are interesting and topical, and he approaches them in a unique way, despite many of them having already received extensive media coverage.
However, my reading experience shifted about halfway through the novel, around when Gladwell began his discussion about his established “rule of thirds” and Harvard’s esoteric country club sports. The “rule of thirds,” which Gladwell calls “universal law,” asserts that when a minority group reaches roughly one third of a population, it gains the power to significantly change group dynamics and to participate free from tokenism and model minority pressure. He argues that Harvard recruits so many wealthy, country-club-sport-playing students (he focuses particularly on women’s rugby, a sport in which coaches travel notable distances to find recruitable athletes) in order to prevent minority students from reaching that seemingly “magical” third, as these athletes are overwhelmingly white.
While I found his discussion of country club sports at Harvard and other Ivy League schools interesting and illuminating, I felt that Gladwell left important gaps in the story in order to favor his argument. First, I think it takes more than observations about country club sport demographics and Harvard’s racial distribution to make the claim that Harvard, while publicly pursuing diversity — even publishing its diversity programs and releasing its race data — was actually secretly and strategically introducing new sports for the sole purpose of getting more white students. This is not to say that it couldn’t be true — just that pointing out that country club sports are overwhelmingly white and wealthy and that Harvard’s minority populations fall below 30% is not enough to substantiate this kind of claim.
Moreover, he suggests using the rule of thirds in all kinds of places. Though he acknowledges some of its drawbacks, as in the case of Lawrence Tract — a neighborhood in California that had to turn away a minority family in need to maintain its balance of one third of each ethnic group in the neighborhood, hurting those it was meant to help with finding fair-priced housing — he doesn’t acknowledge the places it might not apply. He doesn’t mention, for instance, that a truly unbiased college admissions system should have a student population that is roughly representative of the U.S. population. This is a fact that can’t be reconciled with his rule of thirds, because there isn’t a third of each minority and there are far more than three racial groups in the United States.
I mention this specific case because it was the first place I really noticed two of Gladwell’s flaws: overgeneralizing his catchphrases in pursuit of “universal law” and cherry picking data to strengthen his arguments. His use of “universal law” and terms like “overstories” are great for readability but lead to stories and theories that are attached at times by only tenuous connections. His choice not to explore many objections or contrasting studies is also great for readability but makes his story less nuanced and certainly less rigorously proven. At this point, I began to see where some of Gladwell’s critics were coming from. He’s a great writer, but maybe not such a compelling social scientist.
While they might have slowed me down, though, these issues didn’t make reading “The Revenge of the Tipping Point” any less entertaining for me. Even though I sometimes knew what was coming next, I enjoyed reading about the cheetah’s population bottleneck and how old TV shows like “Holocaust” and “Will & Grace” changed social dynamics.
Gladwell particularly shines when he pinpoints a small, tangible change that lines up with one of his theories and links it directly to results, with evidence from more than one place. For instance, he explains the variation in opioid overdoses between similar states by a public policy which required doctors to write an extra script to notify the state of any opioid prescriptions. He uses multiple sources, including state overdose rates and Purdue Pharma’s targeted marketing plan, to prove that the policy made doctors less willing to prescribe opioids, an effect that is still seen today in lower overdose rates in states that undertook the policy. This story, which Gladwell chooses to wrap up the novel, does a great job of tying together a few of his catchy ideas with more concrete causes and effects.
After reading “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” I’ve come to the conclusion that Malcolm Gladwell is the Colleen Hoover of nonfiction — his work is tailored to a wide audience, fast-paced, engaging and maybe isn’t the most serious work in its genre, but it might be one of the more entertaining ones. If you’re looking for an interesting read, “Revenge of the Tipping Point” is for you. If you’re looking for scientific answers, though, you might want to look elsewhere.
Daily Arts Writer Claire Rock can be reached at [email protected].
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