Malcolm Gladwell Speaks on Viral, Cultural Phenomena at the 2024 Boston Book Festival

It’s hard to believe that an author can include chapters on Miami Medicare fraud, Covid-19, Ivy League admissions, famous bank robbers, and cheetah captivity all within a single book. It takes a curious mind and a patient teacher to present a coherent theory that applies to countless, seemingly unrelated historical and present-day examples. Often, it takes Malcolm Gladwell.

To kick off the 2024 Boston Book Festival — a celebrated annual event that included over two hundred visiting authors this year — Gladwell presented his newest book, “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” at the Back Bay Events Center on Oct. 25. Speaking in conversation with Susan Goldberg, former editor in chief of National Geographic magazine, Gladwell shared that he created this newest work to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his first and wildly famous book, “The Tipping Point.”

In an interview with The Crimson, Gladwell reflected on his original book and his reasons for writing a sequel to “The Tipping Point.”

“I never reread [my work], it’s weird. It’s like looking at your high school yearbook. 25 years ago seems like a really long time — it’s pre-internet, it’s pre-Covid, it’s pre-9/11. It’s just a different world,” Gladwell said. “In reading it, I just had the sense that if I wanted to say more on this issue, I would have to start over again.”

The issue he mentions is the idea of tipping points: how one small action can incite a widespread, cultural change. In “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” however, Gladwell offers more on how human behavior can enforce or prevent tipping points. He specifically points to the idea of overstories: the ways in which a group’s unified identity can cause a trend to spread like wildfire, yet stop at the boundary of that localized identity.

“I got really interested in an idea that I only explored a little bit in the first book, which is this notion of overstories. [It] is just this idea that I think that communities have common narratives, shared narratives, that are really powerful, and we don’t appreciate how powerful they are,” Gladwell said. “And this observation comes from the world of medicine, where, for the last fifty years or so, they have been wrestling with what they call small area variation.”

In the book, Gladwell looks at medical treatment among different cities within the same state. He shares research that medical care is similar within the borders of a given city, but widely different between communities. He suggests that overstories within groups create these pockets of homogeneous operations.

At the event, when asked whether overstories were synonymous with cultural norms, Gladwell was quick to defend their differences.

“I think when we talk about cultural norms, we don’t always assume there is a kind of extreme regional or local specificity,” Gladwell said. “I’m talking about something slightly different from that, which is a set of narratives that are specific to place.”

Another concept Gladwell suggests is that a specific percentage of outsiders must be introduced to overcome current practices of a group. In other words, he addresses the elephant in the room: What exactly is the tipping point? Gladwell and other social scientists suggest the rule of the Magic Third: the idea that outsiders must make up about one-third of a group in order to enact meaningful change.

In true journalistic fashion, Gladwell cited his sources for this idea. At his talk, Gladwell shared his obsession with a 1977 paper by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “Some Effects of Proportions on Group Life: Skewed Sex Ratios and Responses to Token Women.” In this work, Kanter famously poses a theory that defines the critical mass of diverse individuals needed to enact change within a group, and how numbers below that essential value only contribute to token diversity. This theory came from an investigation into why a group of women were not performing well in a male-dominated company.

“[She said,] ‘Your problem with your female employees is that you didn’t hire enough of them.’ She’s the first person, in a very pointed way, to start thinking about numbers when it comes to diversity,” Gladwell said. “We almost deliberately turn a blind eye to the numbers question — we think it’s about symbolic change in the composition of a group. But her whole point is that it’s not about symbolic changes. You don’t change anything when you bring in one outsider.”

Gladwell went so far as to assign homework to the audience. “It is one of the single greatest social science papers I’ve ever read. If you do nothing else with your life, you should read this paper. It’s fantastic,” he said.

Despite the focus of his book being on the tipping points that lead to rapidly spreading trends and ideas, Gladwell was insistent on not including the obvious, tired example of social media.

“I do believe that writing a book is not like writing a term paper. When you write a term paper, and you’re writing the history of Napoleon and you leave out several key military campaigns, your professor marks you down for that,” Gladwell said. “But writing a book is not like that. You are under no obligation, nor do I think the reader wants you to touch every base. What they want is to have a light shined in places that it never occurred to them to shine a light. So I thought, rather than talk about the aspect of this phenomenon that we are familiar with, why not talk about the parts we’re not thinking about.”

Gladwell has a talent for uncovering unexpected and seemingly uninteresting examples from history and uniting these ideas into a new, exciting thesis.

More specifically, Gladwell doesn’t just revisit — he revises. At the end of the festival talk, Gladwell extrapolated his revisionist tendencies from his writing to an entire way of life — he emphasized how crucial it is to constantly interrogate our own opinions and reconstruct our understanding of the truth.

“The process of finishing a book causes a reflection in which I very often come to the conclusion that I kind of disagree with myself, and I have to do another version,” Gladwell said. “But I’m very comfortable with that idea. I think all of us, if you examine very closely your personal beliefs, will realize they are in contradiction. And I think that’s actually wonderful. It’s part of what it means to be human. And instead of pretending that you don’t hold ideas in contradiction, the better thing is just to own up to it.”

While Gladwell may disagree with some of his previous ideas, the world seems to agree that when Gladwell speaks, we should listen. He has been named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people. This year, he received the 2024 Audio Vanguard Award for his podcast, Revisionist History. His books have sold millions of copies. All of his awards wouldn’t fit into the word limit of this article.

But it didn’t start out that way. In fact, Gladwell was never supposed to be a writer. Or at least, his 22-year-old self didn’t think so.

“I applied to 15 advertising agencies in Toronto and got 15 rejection letters. I would put them up on the wall of my dorm room, and it became a running joke among my friends,” Gladwell said. “At that point, Canada was in the middle of a recession, so I really didn’t think I was going to have a job at all, and I resigned [myself] to that fact. And then a friend of mine showed me an ad on the back of a magazine that he read, which I had never heard of, which was advertising for an assistant managing editor. The pay was nine thousand dollars a year.”

Despite Gladwell’s growth from a fresh-out-of-college journalist to a world-renowned author, podcaster, and business owner, the goal of his writing and the purpose behind his craft have never faltered.

“The spirit of it is exactly the same as what I was doing at a newspaper. And I’m performing the same function, which is to bring ideas and stories and information to the attention of people who would otherwise not necessarily be aware of them,” Gladwell said. “It’s funny. I realize that it seems very different — I’ve moved into books and podcasts — but at its core, I’m doing exactly what I was doing when I was 22 years old.”

At the end of the day, what more prestigious award is there than knowing that you have followed your passion and chose to share it with the world?

—Staff writer Sarah M. Rojas can be reached at sarah.rojas@thecrimson.com.