Malcolm Gladwell’s life has changed; he doesn’t have that

A new book by Malcolm Gladwell will be released on Tuesday. And if history is any guide, it will be a bestseller. “They’re stories about ideas,” he said. “They have characters. They have plots. Usually I’m trying to say something about the world.”

His first book, ‘The Tipping Point’, published in 2000, established the Gladwell recipe: he explores a theme through anecdotes and little-known scientific studies. ‘Tipping Point’ was about the epidemic as an incredibly useful way to understand how ideas move through society,” Gladwell said. ‘And epidemics have rules. Let’s learn the rules, right?’

His seven New York Times Best-sellers have sold 23 million copies in North America alone. His honorarium for corporate speeches is $350,000. His fans have downloaded a quarter of a billion episodes of his podcast “Revisionist History” and he has created a company called Pushkin Industries to produce them.

In other words, Gladwell has come a long way from the small Canadian town where he grew up, the son of a British father and a Jamaican mother, whom he describes as “subversive,” someone who would write notes to excuse her son from class with an empty space. “I would just fill in the date,” said the man who skipped school a lot.

He attended the University of Toronto, but his best education came from his ten years working for the Washington Post. “I didn’t know anything about newspapers,” he said. “I was so raw. I was 23, I think, or 24. Bob Woodward was two rows away from me. I learned at the feet of the greatest journalists of my generation.”

In 1996, Gladwell joined The New Yorker. He wrote about why New York’s crime rate plummeted in the 1990s in an article titled “The Tipping Point.” A book followed. It introduced a recurring Gladwellian theme: hidden patterns in the way the world works.

He is a world-class contrarian when it comes to studying (“You should never go to the best institution you end up in, never; go to your second or third choice. Go to the place where you are guaranteed to be at the top of the university your class”); about working from home (“It’s not in your best interest to work from home. … If you’re just sitting in your bedroom in your pajamas, that’s the work life you want to live, right? Want to? you don’t feel like you’re part of something?”); about football (“I find the sport a moral abomination”).

Gladwell says he likes to be provocative: “Of course!” he said. “I like poking the bear. I mean, journalists should poke the bear.”

Gladwell’s fans love his stories, and the A-ha! moments they bring. His critics, on the other hand, have described his writing as “generalizations that are banal, obtuse, or downright wrong” and “simple, hollow truths [dressed] with flowery language.’ “I believe that not everyone will like my work,” Gladwell said. ‘100% of people don’t like anything.’

In a 2021 “Sunday Morning” interviewGladwell said, “I’d rather be interesting than correct.” He called that “an overly provocative way of saying things! No, I think what I meant was, if I turn out to be wrong, I won’t be devastated. I accept that as the price of doing business.”

Gladwell often turns his mistakes into new chapters or podcast episodes. In “The Tipping Point,” he explained that New York’s crime drop was the result of “broken windows policing.” As he described it, “Small crimes were tipping points for major crimes.” But that philosophy led to New York’s policy of “stop and frisk.”

“Doing 700,000 police stops a year on young black and Hispanic men is deeply problematic,” Gladwell said. ‘We were wrong. I was part of that. I’m sorry.’

That brings us to the new book ‘Revenge of the Tipping Point’. “The original ‘Tipping Point’ is a very optimistic, rosy book about the possibilities of using the laws of epidemics to promote positive social change,” he said. “Over the past 25 years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the other side of that problem: What happens when people use the laws of epidemics in ways that are malicious, harmful, or self-interested?”

The book’s stories range from topics as dark as reproduction of cheetahsto stories as big as the Holocaust. He writes that almost no one talked about the Holocaust, or even called it that, until NBC aired a miniseries in 1978 called “Holocaust.” [snaps fingers]. I mean, there was just a tipping point in our understanding of the Holocaust,” he said.

This book reaches a turning point in Gladwell’s own life. In the space of five years, he got engaged, had two children, turned 61 and moved from Manhattan to pastoral Hudson, New York. “It’s a lot to deal with. There’s not a single person who ever lived whose parents didn’t say, ‘This is a lot!'” he laughed. “I have become the person I once despised, and nothing makes me happier.”

He also despises Ivy League colleges, accusing them of prioritizing their own reputations over their attention to their students.

Has parenthood affected his views on things he has previously written about? “Well, it prepared me for the possibility that I might be a huge hypocrite!” Gladwell laughed. “So you know, it’s one thing to write about what to do with your kids when you don’t have them.”

Despite all his success, Malcolm Gladwell insists nothing has changed in his approach, his work ethic or his contrarianism. “It hasn’t changed what I do,” he said. “I don’t outsource my research; I still cover travel. It hasn’t gotten old. In fact, I’m sorry I don’t have time to do more.”

READ AN EXCERPT: “The Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell

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Story produced by Wonbo Woo. Editor: Remington Korper.