The law of Malcolm Gladwell still holds up

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The Law of Malcolm Gladwell, the one simple ironclad rule that explains the prolific Canadian author’s decades of bestselling books, top-charting podcasts and influential articles, is this: The Laws of Malcolm Gladwell aren’t really laws, per se. Rubrics, perhaps. Interesting symmetries across sets of data, definitely. The magic ingredients for the perfect airplane read, absolutely.

You know some of these observations even if you’ve never read his work: It takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery. Successful hockey players tend to be born earlier in the year. And the Law of the Few, which credits big social changes to a handful of influential mavens, connectors and salesmen.

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“Look, there’s a playful element in my use of the word ‘law,’ ” he says over the phone. “It’s not like the law of thermodynamics. I think people understand that what I’m suggesting is that it’s more than simply a stray observation, that there are numerous cases where it applies. People can sometimes get overly literal the way they read it.”

And read it they do, by the millions, ever since The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference was published in 2000. His latest is Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering, a gloomier look at epidemics informed by the opioid crisis, the pandemic and the rise of Donald Trump. Twenty-four years later, the Law of Malcolm Gladwell still holds.

One of his new frameworks suggests that a minority can best thrive in a larger group when they represent roughly a third of the whole. As he writes: “I think we can call the Magic Third a universal law. (Or at least something very close to universal.)”

Is this an all-caps LAW or more of a playful lower-case law?

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“In the current book where I talk about the Magic Third, it’s not a law in the sense that e equals mc squared is a law,” he says. “What I’m saying is that you can find evidence to support this in multiple places, to the point where it’s worth asking – when you consider an analogous situation – whether this principle applies.”

Among the other principles he proposes is the overstory, a term borrowed from forestry to Gladwell-ify the concept of small area variation – itself a phrase used in health care to explain how medical care differs within specific communities. Why do cardiologists in Buffalo avoid using cardiac catheters, for example?

And further afield, why do parents at Waldorf schools avoid vaccinations? Why do people who move to Miami suddenly realize how fun it is to commit crimes? Is it something in the water? No, it’s the overstory of these places, the overarching shared narrative that subliminally guides how its residents behave.

It’s classic Gladwell, borrowing a neat term from the zeitgeist (The Overstory was the title of Richard Powers’s 2018 Pulitzer-winning novel) and shaping it into an idea that ought to power dinner-party conversations well through the holiday season. You might ask your guests: What’s the overstory of Canada?

Gladwell barely pauses: “The enormous efforts that Pierre Trudeau and the Liberals made in the 1970s to establish the idea of Canada as the home of multiculturalism was a very deliberate attempt to create an overstory of what Canada was,” he says. “It felt absurd to me how much time and attention was focused on that phrase, but now I totally get it. I wish other countries had done the same kind of work.”

If you’re tempted to indulge in some trademark Canadian smugness, don’t. Between temporary foreign workers and the housing crisis, attitudes toward immigration in this country – once the most open in the world – are shifting. And through the Gladwell lens, that makes sense – just as Americans accepted same-sex marriage because of a sitcom about a gay lawyer and only really started to talk about Hitler’s atrocities because of the 1978 Holocaust miniseries.

“The whole point of the chapter on Will and Grace and the chapter on the Holocaust is that overstories can be quite volatile,” he says. “They can be changed by deliberate action or by inadvertent action, or they can decay if they’re not reinforced.”

The other Canadian overstory I suggest, for obvious reasons, is tall poppy syndrome – the idea that we mow down our exceptional talents such that they have to go south to excel. Gladwell politely reframes the premise.

“It’s a belief that there is something as beautiful in equality as there is in extraordinary performance,” he says. “In America the exceptional performer is exalted, and that means you have to tolerate really extraordinary levels of inequality. Both of those are just choices. I think it’s fair to call them overstories because you establish those kinds of preferences through the stories that you tell over time.”

And the way Gladwell has told stories over time has evolved. Comparing The Tipping Point with its follow-up, you can see how the 61-year-old’s writing has changed over the years. There are more charts, tables and dialogue excerpts in his work now, and the influence of podcasting is apparent. Eureka moments are signposted with phrases such as:

“Ready?”

“That’s power.”

“Wait for it … "

“Of course they did.”

“100 per cent!”

They sound like segues on his podcast Revisionist History, though Gladwell insists the formats are very separate.

“Podcasting is a completely different muscle,” he says. “It’s more emotional, it’s more character-driven. At least 50 per cent of the things we do on Revisionist History simply would not work in print.”

With the team at his company Pushkin Industries, he’s created some of the most compelling audio non-fiction of the podcast era: The episode The King of Tears will change the way you think about country music while hitting notes that simply require audio.

“Country music makes people cry because it’s not afraid to be specific,” Gladwell says on that podcast, adding that while rock ‘n’ roll is diverse but repetitive, a genre appeals to everyone by staying general. “If you go deeper, or try to get specific, you lose people.”

In a quarter-century as the leading practitioner of big idea journalism, Gladwell has lost some people. When it comes to favourable reviews of his books, he recently told NPR, he’s zero for eight in The New York Times. But those critics are more than replaced by the new audiences he continually reaches across different media. Is that a law? Not really. But if calling it such with a wink helps the concept stick, so be it.

“I’m a journalist of ideas, so I’m interested in telling stories around ideas. I give people the tools they need to make sense of their experience,” he says. “I think you’ve succeeded if the gist of what you’ve argued remains intact.”