In his first book, The Tipping Point (2000), Malcolm Gladwell described how ‘social epidemics’ – things like crimewaves, fashion trends, political opinions – are governed by certain laws, most notably a ‘law of the few’. Social epidemics, he argued, start with, and are sustained by, a relatively small group of people. Most crimes, for example, are committed by a few prolific offenders rather than by a large number of occasional criminals. The laws that make isolated phenomena ‘tip’ and become widespread could be harnessed, Gladwell argued, to engineer favourable social outcomes.

It’s taken Gladwell twenty-four years to realise that these laws can be used for nefarious purposes as well. The Tipping Point, he wants to say, has been too successful: its insights have fallen into the wrong hands. For every Bill Clinton, whom, Gladwell reminds us, praised his debut book, there is a Sackler family. And indeed, Revenge of the Tipping Point begins with excerpts from the Sacklers’ testimony to a congressional committee in 2020 about the opioid epidemic, which their company, Purdue Pharma, and its signature drug, OxyContin, have played a large part in causing. Purdue, assisted by the consultancy firm McKinsey, discovered the ‘tipping point’ for increasing OxyContin sales. If a Purdue sales representative visited a physician at least twice a month, the number of prescriptions that doctor wrote soared. Anything less and prescription numbers fell or flatlined. Gladwell, perhaps feeling a little guilty about this, thinks it’s time ‘for a hard conversation about epidemics’ and ‘to acknowledge our own role in creating them’. In this book, he sets out to perform a ‘forensic investigation of social epidemics’. In other words, he’s looking for culprits.

Across nine chapters, arranged in four parts, Gladwell considers a flurry of social contagions (and one case of virological contagion, though Gladwell is loose with his terminology). The exposition is meandering, the conclusions are scattered and mobile. In the first part we’re asked to ponder why Los Angeles had a