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Revenge of the Tipping Point excerpt © 2024 Malcolm Gladwell

Twenty‑five years ago, in The Tipping Point, I was fascinated by the idea that in social epidemics little things could make a big difference. I came up with rules to describe the internal workings of social contagions: the Law of the Few, the Power of Context, the Stickiness Factor. The laws of epidemics, I argued, could be used to promote positive change: lower crime rates, teach kids how to read, curb cigarette smoking.

“Look at the world around you,” I wrote. “It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push — in just the right place — it can be tipped.”

In Revenge of the Tipping Point, I want to look at the underside of the possibilities I explored so long ago. If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the per‑ son who knows where and when to push has real power. So who are those people? What are their intentions? What techniques are they using? In the world of law enforcement, the word forensic refers to an investigation of the origins and scope of a criminal act: “reasons, culprits, and consequences.” Revenge of the Tipping Point is an attempt to do a forensic investigation of social epidemics.

In the pages that follow, I’m going to take you to a mysterious office building in Miami with a very strange group of tenants, to a Marriott Hotel in Boston for an executive retreat that went badly awry, to a seemingly perfect town called Poplar Grove, to a cul‑de‑sac in Palo Alto, and on from there to places you’ve heard of and places you haven’t. We’re going to investigate what’s weird about Waldorf schools, meet a long‑overlooked drug warrior named Paul E. Madden, learn about a 1970s television miniseries that changed the world, and raise an eyebrow at Harvard University’s women’s rugby team. All of these are cases where people — either deliberately or inadvertently, virtuously or maliciously — made choices that altered the course and shape of a contagious phenomenon. And in every case those interventions raised questions we have to answer and problems we have to solve. That’s the revenge of the Tipping Point: The very same tools we use to build a better world can also be used against us.