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Dateline: 2000
With an engineering professor at the British University of Waterloo for a dad and a Jamaican psychotherapist for a mom, it's no wonder Malcolm Gladwell ended up looking like a cross between Albert Einstein and Bob Marley.
But Gladwell's claim to fame goes well beyond making Sideshow Bob's hairstyle au courant. The New Yorker staffer behind buzz book bestsellers Blink (2005), and Outliers (2008) made his biggest splash onto the pop-sociology scene with his first tome, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The book discusses how the small-scale actions of a few people can have a massive impact on society. The moment that an idea, product, message or behaviour reaches a flashpoint, "at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable," Gladwell conceptualizes as the tipping point. One example given in the book is how removing graffiti in the 1990s caused New York City's crime rate to drop precipitously.
Other tipping points he cites are Hush Puppies shoes, the novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and the TV show Sesame Street. The release of Gladwell's page-turner itself set off a pop-sociology craze. By proving academic research can be made accessible to the masses, Gladwell paved the way for academics to bring their own research to the mainstream, creating an insatiable appetite for brain candy like Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner's Freakonomics, Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, Clay Shirkey's Here Comes Everybody and many others. Outside the rarified universe of million dollar advances and university speaking tours, Gladwell also has earned some stellar athletic street cred. In 1978 he was quite the track star, winning the 1500m final in his age group at the Ontario High School championships and setting a provincial record time in the process.
This story first ran as part of a larger story in Chill Magazine
Copyright © Mike Dojc 2009
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