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In Part Two, Gladwell examines intentional attempts to create a tipping point or epidemic. Poplar Grove and Miami both experienced epidemics involuntarily. How might an individual or group orchestrate contagious behavior?

Chapter Four: The Magic Third

Chapter Four, “The Magic Third,” starts with an explanation of urban upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s. When Black families moved from the South to other cities in the United States, their relocation had ripple effects. Gladwell offers many examples, from cities and towns of varying size, where a single Black family moved into a white neighborhood and within a few years, the neighborhood was mostly Black, because of a phenomenon known as “white flight.” Gladwell shifts to a discussion about Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s sociology study on women who worked in groups that were predominantly male. In a group with skewed proportions, members in the minority do not have a chance to show what they can do. One of the examples given is a study on how men and women behave on juries. How women behave when they are outnumbered two-to-one is not representative of how they would behave when serving on more balanced juries.

Gladwell next offers the example of Ursula Burns, who in 2009 became the first Black woman to become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company (specifically, Xerox). Burns was regularly described as brilliant and successful, but that assessment was not entirely complimentary; Burns’s coworkers characterized her as uniquely superhuman, enabling them to continue believing negative stereotypes about Black people and women.

A tipping point exists once enough people from a specific group have become members of the larger group. For neighborhoods to avoid white flight, Gladwell’s research suggests that a given neighborhood or apartment building’s population has to remain less than a third non-white. For women on corporate boards, the minimum number for the women to be seen as team members and not as “the female board members” was three (on corporate boards of typically nine people). Gladwell calls this principle the Magic Third. In studies designed by sociologist Damon Centola, group opinions were swayed by dissidents who were secretly working for the researchers, when the proportion of dissidents began to approach one-third.

Returning to the topic of CEOs, Gladwell points out that while Black women are still underrepresented in the ranks of corporate chiefs, a tipping point was reached for South Asians. People are no longer surprised, he claims, when someone of Indian descent is named a CEO. The chapter closes with a description of a neighborhood in Palo Alto, CA in the 1950s, where one-third of the houses were reserved for white people, one-third for Black people, and one-third for Asian people. The neighborhood was racially integrated, and families got along well with one another—but, he explains, the neighborhood had to discriminate against potential buyers on the basis of race in order to maintain the desired ratios.

Chapter Five, “The Mysterious Case of the Harvard Women’s Rugby Team

Chapter Five opens with a description of a women’s rugby match between Harvard and Princeton. The Harvard team is far superior. Harvard, on a percentage basis, has the most student athletes of any college. Athletes are admitted to Harvard under different academic standards than non-athletes, much like legacy students or children of faculty.

Gladwell contends that Harvard aggressively recruits student athletes to maintain a ratio in the school’s population that is predominantly white. Caltech, which also has strict admissions, has fluctuating ratios of ethnicities. In a pair of tables summarizing student demographics from Harvard from 1992 to 2014, Harvard consistently had 60 percent white students, with other groups almost never breaking 20 percent (avoiding the Magic Third). Harvard is not the only school with such systems in place. Gladwell gives examples from other institutions, including Georgetown, that recruit students from sports popular with affluent white high schools and families (tennis, rowing, squash, etc.). Despite multiple Supreme Court cases, these efforts to maintain an affluent white population have not been affected. In 2022, however, the Supreme Court ruled that all race-based affirmative action admissions programs were unconstitutional. (At the same time, it should be noted that in Harvard’s more recent entering classes, the percentage of white students has been lower than in Gladwell’s tables.)

Chapter Six: Mr. Index and the Marriott Outbreak

Chapter Six opens with a description of a Biogen company meeting in late February 2020. Public health researchers’ final estimate regarding the meeting of 175 employees is that, starting most likely with just one person infected with COVID-19, the virus spread to more than 300,000 people through that meeting. Because the strain in question was not especially transmissible, Gladwell wonders why it spread so effectively. He brings up the Law of the Few, which he first invoked in The Tipping Point: a small number of a population are responsible for a majority of any given problem. For example, in any given city, around 10 percent of cars are responsible for more than 50 percent of the air pollution (due to malfunction, lack of service, etc.). Gladwell states that it is much easier to approach a problem under the pretense that everyone shares responsibility, instead of singling out a small group of individuals—“no one,” he claims, “wants to act on asymmetry.”

In April 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, an article was published in the journal Aerosol Science and Technology. Aerosolists, who study tiny, airborne particles, were the first to accurately describe COVID-19 as airborne. The World Health Organization initially stated that COVID-19 was not airborne and was primarily passed through physical contact. While later strains were more effectively transmitted through the air, the first strains of COVID-19 were also airborne. Further research during the pandemic, including research done by aerosolists, also discovered that certain people are more effective at spreading airborne illnesses than others. They produce more infected droplets of saliva when they exhale, sometimes upwards of 20 times more. This is a likely explanation for why everyone at the Biogen meeting in 2020 became infected: the initial person (the index case) was a superspreader. Gladwell again points out that identifying potential superspreaders could lead to stigma and segregation, meaning there could potentially be difficult choices ahead when public health officials try to respond to the next pandemic.

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