I was surprised, a few years ago, to see Malcolm Gladwell being celebrated by a couple of acquaintances of mine online: after all, I’ve always thought of him as an author of, er, low-quality pop-theory books of the sort that could be boiled down into a paragraph or two, with scanty evidence and a lot of flattering platitudes directed at the reader: The Tipping Point: Social change occurs in a mysterious way involving critical mass: it is society that decides (collectively) how society ought to change, and once consensus reaches a critical mass, the change occurs. Blink: He focuses on the …