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Twenty-five years after his bestselling debut, the author has updated it for ‘a more anxious age’. So which of his theories stood the test of time – and what does he find ‘embarrassing’ to read now?• Read an exclusive extract from his new book hereWhen Malcolm Gladwell’s good friend Jacob Weisberg sug­gested he update his best­selling first book, The Tipping Point, a quarter of a century after its publication, Gladwell was sceptical. “It seemed like the sort of thing you would do at the end of your life – like when a rock band puts out the greatest hits album, or the acoustic version,” he says, laughing. The analogy is apt. Gladwell has come as close as any writer could to rock stardom. He’s the rare journalist famous enough to be recognised on the street. He has a look. He’s the small skinny guy with the big hair, and at 61, he has retained a certain boyishness, evident when he speaks to me on a video call from his home in upstate New York, dressed in a yellow T-shirt and a grey zip-up fleece.Gladwell has known Weisberg for decades. He is the executive chair of Pushkin Industries, the audio production company responsible for Gladwell’s blockbuster Revisionist History podcast, clearly a man with a keen commercial nose. And Gladwell overcame his scepticism quickly, because when he returned to his early writing, he realised he didn’t want to simply update the book – he wanted to write an entirely new one. This wouldn’t be the acoustic version of The Tipping Point. It would be more like the revisionist version. Continue reading...