Although this event has passed, you can still purchase a streaming pass to view the recording through 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, October 23, 2024.
Twenty-five years after the publication of his groundbreaking first book, Malcolm Gladwell returns with a brand new volume that reframes the lessons of The Tipping Point in a startling and revealing light. Revenge of the Tipping Point is another intellectual adventure, both rigorous and page-turning, from a writer at the top of his game.
Literary Arts Series, Create Your Own Series, and Super SAL subscriptions, as well as single tickets—with the exception of a limited number of Pay What You Can tickets—include a copy of Revenge of the Tipping Point.
Q&A with Marcus Harrison Green.
Why in the late 1980s and early ’90s did Los Angeles become the bank robbery capital of the world? What is the Magic Third and what does it have to do with racial equity? What do big cats and clusters of teen suicide have in common? These are just some of the questions Malcolm Gladwell addresses in this provocative new work, which revisits the phenomenon of social epidemics and examines the ways in which we have learned to tinker with and shape the spread of ideas, viruses, and trends—sometimes with great success, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
Gladwell shows that—whether in neighborhoods, schools, zoos, or conference rooms—today’s epidemics are turbocharged versions of their earlier counterparts, and we are more tempted than ever to try to manipulate tipping points for our own ends. Yet these efforts often come at a cost, creating difficult tradeoffs and unexpected dilemmas. Above all, we must recognize our responsibility—as individuals and as a society—to take tipping points seriously if we want to change our world for the better. With this thought-provoking new book, his most personal yet, Gladwell gives us the insights we need to meet these challenges in innovative ways.
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers: 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 content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. 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. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He lives in New York.
Marcus Harrison Green is the publisher of Hinton Publishing, the founder of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with The Stranger. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity, and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. An award-winning journalist, he was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020, and named the inaugural James Baldwin Fellow by the Northwest African American Museum in 2022.