Originally appeared in the Boston Book Review in 2000
Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker and
author of "The Tipping Point." (2000)
These three characteristics -- one, contagiousness; two, the
fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens
not gradually but at one dramatic moment -- are the same three principles that
define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks
every winter. Of the three, the third, epidemic, trait -- the idea that
epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment -- is the most important,
because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits
the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does. The name
given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all
at once is the Tipping Point
"The Tipping Point"
HB: What got you interested in the material that led to
"The Tipping Point"?
MG: I covered the HIV epidemic for the Washington Post and
got very interested in epidemiology. A lot what I learned about how epidemics
work surprised me. Then, in 1996, I wrote "The Tipping Point" article
for The New Yorker dealing with crime as an epidemic. That was inspired by the
work of Jonathan Crane, who had written on the subject, and by George Kelling,
who had put forward the broken windows idea. Once you have that paradigm, the
fun thing to do is to see how many other places you can make it work.
