His 2000 debut The Tipping Point introduced the world to the concept of social contagion. Two decades on, and after a global pandemic, how have his ideas changed?
• Read an interview with Malcom Gladwell here

Twenty-five years ago, I published my first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference. Back then I had a little apartment in the Chelsea neighbourhood of Manhattan, and I would sit at my desk, with a glimpse of the Hudson River off in the distance, and write in the mornings before I headed to work. Because I had never written a book, I had no clear idea how to do it. I wrote with that mix of self-doubt and euphoria common to every first-time author.

“The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea,” I began, “and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life, is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do.”