It’s been a quarter-century, and he’s back, with a vengeance.  No, it’s Malcolm Gladwell talking Tipping Points, not Pennywise the Clown.  This part deux of his seminal work feels less positive, hence the “revenge” label.   It’s more of the same fascinating ilk, searching for (this time negative) trends at the intersection of science and culture.  Here we have several compelling case studies how a little yellow snowball can roll downhill to form a sociological avalanche.

He 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.

Gladwell teases qualitative meaning out of a heap of data, actually making statistics, well, interesting.

But there is another goal — tracing why things end up getting turned on their head in an astonishingly short period of time.  We’re talking years, not millenia.  How can we prevent a similar repeat?  And, what does the “overstory” say about us?  It’s disturbingly not so much the butterfly effect as unintended consequences of run-of-the-mill man-made meddling.  We have the power to radically reshape our world (this time NOT for the best) with or without intention.