Is Malcolm Gladwell Out of Ideas?

REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering, by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell could have written a fresh book. Instead, he created a brand extension of his 2000 hit, “The Tipping Point.”

The result, “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” is a genre bender: self-help without the practical advice, storytelling without the literariness, nonfiction without the vital truths, entertainment without the pleasure, a thriller without actual revelation and a business book without the actionable insights.

But it will be big! For Gladwell’s books belong to that special category where books are not books so much as advertisements. “Revenge of the Tipping Point” might get you to sign up for Gladwell’s MasterClass course on storytelling. It might lead you to Pushkin Industries, the podcast company he helped start. Or it could inspire a business to hire him to give the new talk his speaking agency is already marketing on “how not to miss the forest for the trees.”

My criticism isn’t that Gladwell speaks to a wide audience. That is what I admire most about him. He is the literary equivalent of those politicians who get nonvoters to the polls. With legacy media eroding and book sales sluggish and disinformation spreading and truth under attack by some of our own leaders, millions of people live in idea deserts. For them, Gladwell is a farm stand.

The problem is that he has chosen to be a farm stand that serves salty, fatty, sugary pseudo-thinking. His signature methodology is to convey relatively boilerplate, already well-known ideas, by rebranding the ideas and wrapping them in stories. And the lubricant of this engine is turning everything into little mysteries — why bank robberies spread in Los Angeles in the 1990s, but not in New York in the 1950s — that he, having created them, can now solve for you.

Some may find the faux-thriller construction annoying, but I believe it is necessary as a subsidy to, and concealer of, weak-sauce ideas. In his earlier books, Gladwell at least coined catchy rules of thumb (the mastery of a skill takes 10,000 hours, for instance), even if their validity was questionable. But in “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” even the rules have the consistency of a slushy.