STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Malcolm Gladwell is revisiting the book that made him famous. "The Tipping Point" was a huge bestseller in 2000. Its title proclaimed an alluring idea - a social trend or behavior might spread slowly until a tipping point, when it reaches just enough people, and then suddenly it's everywhere, like an epidemic. Businesses and activists loved this, even as critics questioned some of Gladwell's findings. Recently, he started an update to that book and decided instead on a total rewrite.
MALCOLM GLADWELL: I mean, I'm 61, so I have a little more humility about what I'm doing.
INSKEEP: He also has a darker view of society.
GLADWELL: I'm not as sunny and and full of possibility as I was back then.
INSKEEP: Gladwell's new book, "Revenge Of The Tipping Point," explores how people spread negative social behaviors, like a pharmaceutical company that spread the use of its addictive drugs.
GLADWELL: How Purdue behaved during the OxyContin crisis was a perfect example of someone taking the lessons of how epidemics work to heart and using it to produce something that was a catastrophe for the world.
INSKEEP: Gladwell seeks out nuances of social behavior, like an epidemic of bank robbing in Los Angeles in the 1990s. He finds it didn't really happen because everybody caught the bug. Just a few people robbed banks again and again, like super spreaders. He also writes about place, the way that where you live can influence how you behave. He tries to investigate an epidemic of Medicare fraud in Miami, Fla.
GLADWELL: Miami's in a class by itself - just, like, stratospherically high rates of Medicare fraud. And it stops at the Miami border. It is not Boca, and it's not Fort Lauderdale. It's Miami. Something about the city is contributing to people's attitudes towards this particular practice, right? So Miami appears to be for a number of reasons, a place where all bets are off, where people's respect for institutions, for the rule of law, seems to be diminished, where I argue in the book about a guy named H.N. Griffin (ph), who writes about Miami in the late '70s, and points out that in the late '70s, the city had the Cuban boat lift, which brought in hundreds of thousands of immigrants overnight, a very serious race riot and the rise of the cocaine trade - all happened very dramatically all at once. And his argument is that shakes the city to its core. I think it's a very, very compelling argument.
INSKEEP: And I want to be clear. You're not saying like the Cubans brought some criminal attitude or whatever.
GLADWELL: No.
INSKEEP: You're saying there was stress on institutions and...
GLADWELL: Exactly.
INSKEEP: ...Crime from drugs that discredited institutions.
GLADWELL: Yes, that when you have shocks to the system, it disrupts that shared sense of community, and everything is up in the air.
INSKEEP: I want to ask about some of the implications of this, the idea that when you move, the place influences you rather than you influencing the place. People raise this question about politics all the time. There's been a big move of people from California to Texas, for example, and there are those who watch that and wait for Texas to go from a red state to a blue state because all of these Californians are coming in. What would you think would happen in that situation?
GLADWELL: Well, would depend how many people move. It was the question during white flight in the '60s and '50s. How many Black people moved - had to move into a neighborhood before all the white people fled? Right? And at what point does the character of the existing place shift in response to newcomers? You need to have the newcomers make up somewhere between a quarter and a third of the overall population for the nature of the existing place to change. So I think we're probably a long way from incoming Californians changing Texas. I would think we'd be more likely to see Californians becoming Texas-like than Texans becoming California-like.
INSKEEP: Can I get you to address some of the criticisms of your books, writ large? They're enormously popular. You have many, many fans, obviously. And yet people will sometimes write reviews - The New York Times on more than one occasion comes to mind - just pulverizing, almost enraged kind of reviews. You stir strong emotions. I assume you've...
GLADWELL: Yeah.
INSKEEP: ...Noticed this. Why do you think it is?
GLADWELL: I am oh for eight in The New York Times. Every single book I've written has been - has gotten a very poor review. I don't really know. I think maybe there's - you know, I like to punch up. My favorite thing is punching up. And if I was 30 years old and I was reviewing Malcolm Gladwell's new book, I think I would go after it with both guns blazing 'cause it'd be really fun. In fact, when I was 30 years old, if memory serves, I did exactly that to older established writers.
INSKEEP: One way to describe the criticism in general is Malcolm Gladwell takes these ideas that were already in social science, and he just repackages them and puts his own words on them, and there's nothing too original there. I could think of that criticism a lot of different ways. How do you think about it?
GLADWELL: I don't think that's a criticism. That's the job. Right? That's what journalists do. The job of a journalist is to go and talk to people who know something specific that the rest of the world needs to know about and to translate what they say in a way that makes sense to a broad audience. That is the job description. I'm like, yes. Of course. That's why I wake up in the morning, to do exactly that.
INSKEEP: At the same time, I heard you say that your thinking has become more nuanced over time.
GLADWELL: Yeah.
INSKEEP: And I almost wonder if you've listened to some of this criticism and to an extent agreed with it.
GLADWELL: Yeah. I mean, I don't think you - you can't be a human being and trying to be better and not learn from your critics. So, to the extent that they, early in my career, pointed out where, you know, there were times when I would rush judgment on something, where I got an idea wrong, where I overstated. And I've tried to listen to that, and I've tried to be - to have some greater degree of humility in the way I handle and present ideas.
INSKEEP: Malcolm Gladwell is the author of "Revenge Of The Tipping Point" and many other books. Thanks for the time.
GLADWELL: Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF YO LA TENGO'S "I HEARD YOU LOOKING") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
