Storytelling has the unique power to connect us, shape our perceptions and drive change in ways that facts alone cannot. It’s through stories that we make sense of complex issues and begin to see the larger picture behind everyday events. Few people understand this better than Malcolm Gladwell, whose ability to weave narratives has made him one of the most influential voices in modern journalism and thought.
Gladwell is a bestselling author, journalist and host of the popular podcast Revisionist History. Known for his ability to blend compelling storytelling with deep insights into culture and society, Gladwell has built a career out of exploring the factors that influence human behavior. One of his most influential works, The Tipping Point, published over 25 years ago, examined how small actions can spark large-scale societal shifts.
In his latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell revisits his original work, exploring new perspectives and addressing some of the issues that have emerged since its publication. We sat down with Gladwell to discuss what inspired him to reexamine his groundbreaking book and the fresh insights he uncovered along the way.
RELEVANT: Why did you want to revisit The Tipping Point?
Malcolm Gladwell: Well, I was originally just going to do a 25th-anniversary edition of my original book because I thought it’d be fun, you know, it was its silver anniversary. Then I got about a third of the way into the revision and decided I had too many new things to say, too many issues with the old book, too much time had passed, and I should really just rewrite it.
So it was kind of an accidental thing, but it ended up being a fascinating experience. Even going back and rethinking things I hadn’t thought about for a quarter of a century was unexpected—a very unexpected thing to go through.
When you were revisiting it, did you anticipate that you would have some changed opinions, or did you think you’d mostly agree with everything you had written?
Well, I really hadn’t read it. I don’t read books once I’ve written them. But I did know, for example, I had long had doubts about the crime chapter in the original Tipping Point. I didn’t think I got it right. In fact, I’m doing an episode of my podcast, Revisionist History, devoted to What Did I Get Wrong?—Why did I get it wrong? What did I get wrong? And what do I think the real answer is?
So I knew there were things. Also, I expected it—I’m someone who is very in favor of changing your mind about things. I like changing my mind. I would have been stunned if I hadn’t had differences of opinion with my 36-year-old self. So that part was not unexpected.
After one quick read of the old book, it was like, a lot has happened. I like to change my mind, so it didn’t surprise me that there would be things I disagreed with in the original book.
When you were doing your research for this new book and formulating your new thoughts and ideas, where did you start? And how did you know where to begin?
Well, I started with the story I wanted to make sure I told in the new book, which is the opioid crisis. I had gotten interested—I’d done an episode of my podcast on it and read a number of books. I came to believe, and I still think, that this is a public health crisis almost without precedent in this country’s history. Given the dimensions of the catastrophe, we don’t talk about it nearly enough. Over 100,000 people die every year in America from overdoses—it’s a catastrophic problem.
I’m here in Portland, a city that has been transformed by the opioid crisis over the last few years. The guy who picked me up at the airport while I’m on my book tour was just talking about it. It never ends here—it may be waning in other parts of the country, but it never ends in Portland. The local service providers are completely overwhelmed. I really thought this was something I had something fresh to say about.
I always like it when I can identify something where I feel like there’s a need for me to weigh in. There are lots of topics where there’s no need for me or anyone else to weigh in. Thinking about the election going on right now—nobody needs another person weighing in on the election. But I did think there’s been too much passive acceptance of what’s happening with the opioid crisis.
The Vietnam War caused the entire country to turn itself upside down, and 50,000 Americans lost their lives. We go through that in six months with opioids and have been going through it for 20 years now. Yet, I don’t see the country being turned upside down.
What are you hoping people take away from this book when they read it and when they walk away from it?
Well, one of the things I always want to do with my books is to provide people with a way of making sense of their experiences. I always say people are experience-rich and theory-poor. The reason books such as mine are intended to be kind of a guide is so people can take the things that have happened to them and come up with some… this can be a helping hand in allowing people to understand what’s going on, to give it some meaning. When you observe, like there’s a whole chapter in the book on what I call the magic third, which is this: when you have a group composed of one kind of person and you introduce someone who’s different, how many of the different newcomers need to join the group before the group changes composition? Before the group recognizes these newcomers and embraces them and allows them to be themselves? The answer is somewhere between a quarter and a third of the group has to be composed of newcomers before the tone of the group shifts.
First of all, lots and lots of people have observed that going on in their lives without understanding what was happening. I talked to so many women, for example, who were joining companies or corporate boards where they were the first women. They talked about how hard it was to be the first woman. Then, as other women joined, there was suddenly a moment when it just wasn’t an issue anymore. That whole chapter and theory, backed up by a lot of social science research, helps you make sense of your experience. That’s why it was so hard at the beginning—there weren’t enough of us.
And that’s why it got easy because suddenly there were enough of us. That change happens all at once. It doesn’t happen gradually. It’s not like it’s a little easier when there are two women and a little more easy when there are three. It’s hard with one, hard with two, hard with three, and then all of a sudden it’s not hard anymore when you reach a certain threshold. That idea, that there was a threshold and that the change is sudden, not gradual, is something that if you tell people, and they think back through their life, they’re like, “I get it. Yes.” When I started in third grade, I was the only Black kid in the room. That was hard. Then I went to middle school, and all of a sudden, there were six students of color in my class, and I felt way different. That’s why.
So, it’s that kind of thing that I want my books to help people with. That’s why I explore subjects that mean something to people and give them insight that could be useful to them.
You do have an amazing ability to use allegories in a way that others don’t. Have you always been like that, or is that something you’ve cultivated over the years?
No, I mean, I wasn’t like this as an 11-year-old. I was playing with Legos and riding my bicycle around. But no, I spent the first part of my career as a science reporter at the Washington Post and got very interested in mining social science for useful insights. I got hooked on social science at that point in my career. I’m still doing versions of that in a more elaborate way than I did back then. It’s something that came about as a function of what my job was in the beginning, and now it’s become my career.
That reminds me a lot of what pastors do in their sermons. What is something you want faith communities specifically to know about the power of storytelling?
A lot of one of the big themes of the book is the importance of stories. I call them over-stories, the kind of shared values of a community that come together to create a narrative that directs the way we live. A lot of what people of faith are trying to build in their society is an over-story—not an explicitly religious one, but they want the world around them to reflect, in the stories it tells itself, some kind of moral perspective. They want that to be embedded in how we behave as a society and in our responsibilities toward each other. I spent a couple of chapters talking about where those over-stories come from, how they change, and how important they are. I think all of that should be of real relevance to people of faith. One of the responsibilities of faith is to help build meaningful narratives that society can use to conduct itself in a spiritual and honorable way.
Can you give me an example of what that would look like?
Yeah, I have a chapter on how, up until the late 70s in the United States, people never talked about the Holocaust. It was absent from history books. There was only one Holocaust museum in the entire country until the 1980s. Holocaust survivors didn’t talk about their experiences. It wasn’t that people were in denial about the Holocaust; they didn’t know how to talk about it. There wasn’t a shared set of understandings that gave people permission to talk about something on that extraordinary moral level. There wasn’t a story that gave people the language and the vocabulary.
In the late 70s, there was a television series on NBC. Half the country watched it. It was called “The Holocaust,” and it was the turning point in people’s understanding of the event. It was more than just a story; it gave people direction about how to think, talk, and feel about this overwhelming historical event. That’s what I’m talking about when I say those stories, those over-stories, guide us. People should be interested in building stories that allow us to have conversations we couldn’t have before, talk about things we didn’t know how to talk about before.