He’s the friendly face of big thinking, but his most recent book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, has been panned by critics. As people still stop him in the street for selfies, does he care?

Malcolm Gladwell was still in his thirties when his debut bestseller in 2000, The Tipping Point, divided readers into two tribes. For a quarter of a century since, no matter what he wrote, to one he would be an intellectual rock star, to the other
a showman peddling cod social science. The hero worship has been no less fanatical than the hate; all eight of his titles have been global bestsellers, with sales exceeding 23 million in North America alone. Gladwell’s books seem to make people feel either pleasingly clever for reading them or poisonously envious for making him rich and famous.

For anyone who hasn’t read them, The Economist summarised his oeuvre well last year: “You know what you’re getting when you open a book by Malcolm Gladwell. It will centre around a modestly counterintuitive argument: being huge and strong is often a disadvantage, for instance, or talent and genius are overrated.” To prove it, Gladwell will offer a “combination of briskly written reportage, historical anecdote and social science that draws out unexpected connections – between, for example, Lawrence of Arabia and a girls’ basketball team, or a high-achieving school district and the wild cheetah population”.

His fans and critics have been arguing for decades over whether these unexpected connections are ingenious or specious. Even people unfamiliar with Gladwell’s books are probably aware of their cultural impact: The Tipping Point explored “the moment of critical mass” when a new idea or product or behaviour spreads through society like a virus. In 2008’s Outliers, his notion that true expertise comes after at least 10,000 hours of practice entered common parlance as “the 10,000-hour rule”. And his podcast, Revisionist History, launched in 2016, pioneered the genre a full four years ahead of Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s The Rest Is History.

Last year the writer, now 61, revisited the idea that first made him a star, with a book called Revenge of the Tipping Point. The New York Times headline read “Is Malcolm Gladwell out of ideas?”

Few non-fiction authors command this intensity of attention. An introvert by his own account, his public persona is low-key and slightly nerdy – more postgraduate research fellow than celebrity – so I’m curious about his relationship with his own fame. But when his face appears on Zoom, the signature shock of hair now tamed by age, his features still gauntly boyish, it is wearing a polite expression that says “let’s get this over with”.

His manner is coolly distant, not unfriendly but unenthusiastic, and suggests someone who expects to be the cleverest person in any conversation but wouldn’t want this to show. When he laughs, which he does often, it tends to sound more like private than shared amusement. He is often described as a contrarian – an intellectual provocateur – but by temperament is conflict-averse and mild-mannered. This tension between humility and self-belief can create a faintly tetchy impression.

Getting Gladwell to direct the curiosity he displays in his writing towards himself is not easy. On Kirsty Young’s BBC podcast, Young Again, last November, he replied to her first question with, “A good question is…” and replaced hers with one of his own. He told Young that the interview format is a “deeply flawed process” because interviewees are unreliable witnesses on the subject of themselves and prone to tell “fairytales”. I see what he means when he tells me, “I don’t think I’m famous.”

The word Gladwell prefers to apply to himself is “known”, though he concedes he can’t walk through Manhattan without strangers stopping him to ask for a selfie. “But that’s not the definition of famous. I saw Bradley Cooper on the street in Manhattan not long ago. He’s famous.”

Another questionable assertion comes moments later: “I never get good reviews.” His latest book certainly didn’t, but I have read dozens of glowing reviews for his others. Nevertheless, he maintains that “hostile is the norm”. He doesn’t care, he says, “because I don’t think my audience particularly cares. It bothered me a little bit in the beginning, but then I quickly realised it was irrelevant. I don’t lack for positive affirmation. You’ve made a big point about how often I walk down the street and people take selfies with me.” I’m not sure it was a big point, but he goes on, “If your life is full of people wanting to take selfies with you, why would a review written by one person in a newspaper you may not ordinarily read make any difference to you?”

I suspect it’s difficult for him to examine the sensation of his own career because he must be aware – but won’t like to say – that most of the hostile attention is probably motivated by envy. Gladwell was reportedly paid an advance of more than US$1 million for his first book and is said to charge $350,000 for a corporate speech. Revisionist History is a big hit, with more than 750,000 listeners, and Gladwell co-founded its production company, which makes more than 40 other podcasts. Newspaper critics – not to mention the keyboard armies online who parse his every word for flaws in Reddit threads with titles like “Malcolm Gladwell is not that smart” – almost certainly wish they could be him.

“I don’t think that’s true,” he says.

It would be hard, I suggest, for him to agree without sounding self-aggrandising. “My friend said this beautiful thing once,” he deflects elegantly. “If you want to be some part of someone’s life, you have to be jealous of their whole life. So you can’t say, ‘I love how handsome Bradley Cooper is.’ You have to want Bradley Cooper’s entire existence if you want to sustain your jealousy. And if you ask yourself that question – ‘Do I actually want his entire existence?’ – no, I don’t want to be Bradley Cooper. I don’t want to walk down the street and have paparazzi following me.”

This of course makes me wonder what Gladwell would consider unenviable about his own life. “Oh, I mean, lots of things I’m not going to tell you about. Why would I confess my deepest flaws to someone over Zoom? Maybe you can go and talk to my shrinks and they can tell you about my darkest, you know…” He tails into silence.

Then, “I have many people in my life who take astrology very seriously,” he volunteers unexpectedly. “And they will tell you that my Virgo-ness is a defining negative characteristic of my life.”

Gladwell’s social circle is populated by people who believe in astrology?

“Yes. I’m constantly being attacked by all kinds of people in my life for my Virgo-ness. Constantly being told, with an eyeroll, ‘That’s so Virgo of you.’ Virgos are supposed to be the worst kind of hypercritical perfectionists. We’re supposed to be judgmental.”

Perhaps they find it easier to blame his star sign than his character. “Maybe it’s a kind of polite way,” he concurs playfully. “For the record, I do not believe myself to be judgmental.” He grins. “I’m quite sure the first characteristic of the judgmental is that they deny being judgmental.”

Having thwarted any discussion of his critics’ envy, Gladwell seems to find flattery equally uncomfortable. The Tipping Point was widely credited with inventing a whole new literary genre of popular social science. The Daily Beast even published a list of books by “Gladwell clones and wannabes” – which included Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner. But when I ask if he is flattered by his imitators, he refuses to recognise his own invention.

“I’m going to disagree with you again. We’re all part of a long chain and I’m part of that chain. It didn’t start with me, I have my own antecedents.” He cites Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis – “I literally took that book apart and studied it” – and The Person and the Situation by Lee Ross and Richard E Nisbett for their “enormous impact on the way I perceived the world and the way I wrote. And I would describe myself as a wannabe Janet Malcolm [the New Yorker writer, who died in 2021]. So I’m flattered by the notion that I invented a genre, but I don’t think it’s true. The project of this interview,” he complains, making us both laugh, “has been to push me to make all kinds of self-aggrandising statements.”

‘Nobody likes a victory lap’

There is no danger of that when we come to discuss Revenge of the Tipping Point, the first of his books that – I would agree with his critics – was not very good.

When I heard Gladwell was revisiting the themes of The Tipping Point, it sounded interesting. The “moment of critical mass” in any social epidemic, he wrote in 2000, observes rules. It must be driven by a small number of powerful influencers – “the law of the few” – and “sticky” enough to capture our attention. These rules of contagion, he wrote, apply to everything from a fashion trend to a crime wave or suicide rate.

Written before social media was invented, the intervening years have proved Gladwell’s rules breathtakingly prescient. Social media platforms, and an actual epidemic, have vividly dramatised the phenomenon of virality in all of our daily lives. So I was bewildered to read Revenge of the Tipping Point and find Covid gets only a modest mention near the end – and the words “social media” don’t appear even once.

Instead Gladwell writes about the power of television to change societal norms. He credits Holocaust, a hit 1970s drama about the Nazi genocide, for popularising the term “holocaust” and the 1990s sitcom Will & Grace for moving public opinion in favour of gay marriage. If The Tipping Point was ahead of its time, its follow-up feels bafflingly dated. Many people today spend less time watching telly than they do scrolling social media, which is engineered for virality, so why didn’t he write about it?

“I think virality is much more of a feature of the pre-internet age than the post-internet age,” he says. “Things spread quickly now, but they don’t spread widely.”

What? “Yeah, a viral post on Twitter reaches an extraordinarily small number of people, whereas a viral book or TV show in the 1970s changed the culture. The day after that show Holocaust aired, you could sit down and have a conversation with anyone in America about that show.”

It is true that 120 million Americans watched it. But is he unaware that the YouTube star MrBeast’s channel, for example, has to date clocked up more than 70 billion views? Even in TV’s heyday, its viewing figures paled into insignificance compared with those of today’s social media stars. Schoolchildren are now following the same trends – fashions, conversations, opinions – as teens all over not just their own country but the world, due to the virality of social media videos. How could he think online trends don’t spread widely?

“Well, to use the Holocaust example again, it was a media moment that permanently changed the conversation. Permanently is the crucial question. An Andrew Tate video, say, comes today and is gone tomorrow.”

Tell that, I say, to teenage girls growing up in a culture of rampant misogyny. Their entire generation’s attitudes to gender have been defined by social media stars such as Tate peddling misogyny online. “But Will & Grace and the whole cultural movement around accepting gay people is a tectonic shift in the culture that has persisted. There hasn’t been a backlash.” He evidently hasn’t heard that the go-to insult today on every video gaming platform is “gay”.

“I wonder whether what we’ve done is trade a small number of viral phenomena that have huge importance for a large number that have less importance,” he says. “There are two different things here; one is the reach of something. But the other is its impact.” Online conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant populism have helped upend 80 years of postwar liberal consensus across the world within a decade, I say. Isn’t that impact?

“It just feels to me difficult to speculate,” he says. “It takes more than a generation for a new media technology to mature for us to understand how it fits into the culture. We’ve gone through a period where we basically let big tech companies do whatever they wanted to do, without any regulation. Why don’t we change our mind?” He makes this sound as if he thinks it would be easy. He concedes that social media influencers are the living definition of the “law of the few” he wrote about 25 years ago. “Yeah, they are the human proof.” Why not mention them, then? He smiles. “Nobody likes a victory lap.”I think the real reason becomes clearer a little later. In an interview with The Times in 2020, Gladwell predicted the psychological legacy of the pandemic would have little lasting impact on society. “I’m a little more inclined now,” he says, “to think of the individual scars being more consequential than I realised back then.” Given that he was a childless writer already leading a somewhat solitary lifestyle when Covid struck, it’s easy to see how the misjudgment occurred. “I’m constantly underestimating,” he volunteers a little later, “the extent to which people can isolate themselves from the experience of others in society.” I suspect this might apply to him equally, and explain the puzzle of his naivety about the power of social media.

A rarefied sphere

Gladwell was born in Hampshire in 1963, the youngest of three brothers, to a British maths professor father and a Jamaican psychotherapist mother. He was six when the family moved to Ontario in Canada to live among a community of Mennonites – a pacifist Christian sect who disavow modern consumerist society and drive horse-drawn buggies. Even before they “eventually” joined the faith, his parents participated in Mennonite community life. The family had no television and seldom went to the cinema. They read books.

After studying history at the University of Toronto, he joined The Washington Post in 1987 and, nine years later, The New Yorker, where he remains a staff writer. The world of a highbrow celebrity writer in Manhattan is one of culture and letters; he opened a Twitter account in 2008 but only follows 100 or so accounts, many of whose bios feature words like nerd or geek.

In the past five years he met an unnamed woman – he is famously unforthcoming about the relationship – with whom he lives; they have two daughters aged two and one. He wanted to insulate their family from the “high-stakes war on childhood” waged by competitive Manhattan parents who perceive “childhood as preparation for some adult future, as opposed to a stage in and of itself”, so home is now upstate. For as long as his daughters are toddlers in the countryside, free from screens, Gladwell himself can be insulated from the power of social media. Give it 10 years, I say, and he may find it’s worth writing about.

“Yeah, I’m curious about whether there might be a truth in this characterising my position on social media. I just don’t understand it, and I don’t know where it’s going. I feel lots of other people know more about these things.”

The fuel of the online algorithms is outrage, but Gladwell has said in the past, “What I don’t get is angry.” Politically non-partisan, the only candidate he has ever publicly endorsed was Kamala Harris – but only, he says, because they share Jamaican heritage. He is the first North American that I’ve spoken to since Donald Trump’s re-election to sound unmoved by it.

“I never entirely bought the idea that this election was a kind of existential one for the United States. I’m not apocalyptic by nature. Do I think it’s going to be a little bit crazy for the next four years? Yes. I think I’m curious, a little bit apprehensive, about how much of a wrecking ball Mr Musk will take to various programmes. But the more unhinged they are, the greater the possibility that the whole Republican takeover will just fall apart. So my concern about what they do is tempered by the fact that the crazier they are, the shorter the duration.”

Our conversation took place before Trump resumed office. Whether Gladwell remains as sanguine today I don’t know – but quite possibly, because he says his implacable calm is physiological.

“I’m a runner. Runners have very, very low heart rates, and if you have a low heart rate, the state of emotional arousal is, like, 120, or something like that, and it’s very hard for us in the normal course of events to hit 120. We have to tick up 80 beats. Physiologically, we just can’t get there.”

His one guilty pleasure is very modern. “I spend an enormous amount of time thinking about cars and reading car magazines. My favourite magazine in the whole world is the English magazine Car. I read endless reviews of cars that I own. Serving no consumer purpose whatsoever.”

How many cars does he own? “I’m not telling you.” Oh, go on. “Well, I have a family minivan and I have a vintage fast car that’s in storage. Then I have a kind of beater that I drive around myself. And then I have a fast car that I don’t keep in storage.” If he could own any car in the world, what would it be? He doesn’t need to think. “An immaculate early-1970s BMW 2002.” What colour? “Orange.”

The New York Times critic who asked “Is Malcolm Gladwell out of ideas?” was almost certainly wrong. However, the ascetic intellectual sensibility formed by his Mennonite childhood is increasingly anachronistic in the modern media landscape. I ask what his ambition is now, but the question makes little sense to him.

“I’m not someone who has ever thought about the future. I don’t really think about the past. I don’t think about what old age will look like, I don’t imagine my children when they’re 19, I don’t dwell on what I was doing when I was 25. This morning when I woke up I thought about what would happen today and what will happen tomorrow. That’s it.”

Written by: Decca Aitkenhead

© The Times of London