Malcolm Gladwell Talks about Follow-up to “Tipping Point”

Live Talks Los Angeles brings Malcolm Gladwell, author of seven New York Times bestsellers, to Santa Barbara’s Granada Theatre on Sunday, October 6, 2024, 3pm, for an onstage discussion about his newest work The Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and The Rise of Social Engineering.  Tickets and details can be found at www.livetalksla.org.

The Revenge of the Tipping Point is Gladwell’s most personal and urgent book yet, as he examines with new eyes the phenomenon of social epidemics in light of the events and lessons of the last twenty-five years. Published in 2000, his seminal work, The Tipping Point launched the global “big idea” publishing phenomenon—a hugely popular genre blending social science, history, pop culture, and business to revolutionize the way we view ourselves and the world.  In his new book, Gladwell draws on completely fresh case studies to rethink and expand on his original models from The Tipping Point about how trends are born, catch on, and spread.

Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena. Through a series of riveting stories, he traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. Gladwell takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world’s most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis. With his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science, Gladwell offers a guide to making sense of the contagions of the modern world. This brand-new volume reframes the lessons of The Tipping Point in a startling and revealing light.

Gladwell’s New York Times bestsellers include The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, and The Bomber Mafia. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio production company that produces audiobooks like Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, as well as podcasts including Revisionist History, Broken Record, The Happiness Lab, Against the Rules, and Medal of Honor: Stories of Courage.

Gladwell has been included in the Time 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers. Previously, he was a staff writer for The New Yorker. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario.