IRB Intro Post #3- The Tipping Point

Malcolm Gladwell is a Canadian journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker, bestselling author, and speaker. He has written five different books, all of which ending up on the New York Times Best Sellers list. In his nonfiction piece, The Tipping Point, Gladwell introduces us to the butterfly effect or, as some prefer, the domino effect, in which one event can lead to something else on a much larger scale. We hear these often, in matters of cause and effect or ‘everything happens for a reason’. However, we never consider how far back something could go, whether the flap of a wing of a butterfly could really cause a tornado elsewhere, or if that bad grade on the test in junior year will really come back to haunt you in your adulthood career. In a Q&A, Gladwell calls his book “a book about change” that presents a new way of understanding why change happens so quickly and unexpectedly. He plans on analyzing the social epidemics that have erupted over time, such as the increase of teen smoking or decrease of crime in 1990s New York City. His goal for writing the book is to help people recognize the pattern that emerges from these butterfly effects and easily find sources of cause and effects. Despite being an in-the-moment person, I tend to also have curiosities and constant questionings of ‘where did that even come from?’ As a person also trying to put together novels and stories, I hope that I may be able to use this to my advantages in order to make a successful plot. For a book that has settled itself on the New York Times Best Sellers list, I hope that I’m not disappointed with the content within the book. However, I find that books concerning matters that I’m not familiar with often go over my head, so hopefully this is something that can keep a hold of my attention span and introduce me to a world I am unfamiliar with.