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Not long after Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point was published, in the winter of 2000, it had a tipping point of its own. His first book took up residence on the New York Times best-seller list for an unbelievable eight years. More than 5 million copies were sold in North America alone, an epidemic that spread to the carry-on bags of many actual and aspiring
Gladwell offered three “rules” for how any social contagion happens—how, say, a crime wave builds (and can be reversed), but also how a new kind of sneaker takes over the market. The rules turned out to explain his own book’s success as well. According to his “Law of the Few,” only a small number of Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are needed to discover and promote a new trend. (If this taxonomy sounds familiar, that’s just another sign of how deep this book has burrowed into the culture.) In the case of The Tipping Point, word of the book spread through corporate boardrooms and among the start-up denizens of Silicon Valley. As for the second rule, “The Stickiness Factor”—the somewhat self-evident notion that a fad needs to be particularly accessible or addictive to really catch on—Gladwell’s storytelling was the necessary glue. Many readers and fellow writers over the years have correctly noted, out of jealousy or respect, that he is a master at extracting vibrant social-science research and then arranging his tidbits in a pleasurably digestible way.
Gladwell’s third Tipping Point rule, “The Power of Context,” may have been the most crucial to his breaking out: the (again rather self-evident) notion that the environment into which an idea emerges affects its reception. He emphasizes this in the author’s note of his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, in which he revisits his popular concepts nearly 25 years later. His debut took off, he has concluded, because “it was a hopeful book that matched the mood of a hopeful time. The year 2000 was an optimistic time. The new millennium had arrived. Crime and social problems were in free fall. The Cold War was over.”
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992, is a good counterpart; both books epitomize an era of confidence in which clear-cut laws could lead us, in steady progression, toward ideologies, economic systems, and sneakers that would conquer all others. “Look at the world around you,” Gladwell cheerily ends The Tipping Point. “It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.”
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
On hot, cloudy nights, the artist and writer Brent Holmes will sometimes stand in the backyard of his house, near Las Vegas’s Chinatown, and look to the east. Behind a screen of clouds, he’ll see flashes of light and the desert -dweller in him will feel instinctive relief: A thunderstorm is on its way, something to cool off the intense, lingering heat of the day. Holmes will take a deep inhale but then frown. No smell of an impending storm. And then it will hit him:
“Oh. No. It’s the fucking Sphere.”
We were standing in the parking lot of a strip mall in Chinatown, contemplating a third dinner of dim sum, after previously eating at a Japanese izakaya and a nearby fusion restaurant. It was 10 p.m. and 102 degrees. The day had already taken us from the Rat Pack casinos and urbanist experiments of Downtown, through the traditionally Black neighborhood of the Historic Westside, to taco trucks and catfish-plate lunches, through the galleries and hidden museums of Las Vegas’s art scene and beyond. But inevitably, we came around to the one thing you need to talk about if you want to talk about Las Vegas as we approach the quarter mark of the 21st century.
You spot Sphere (not, sadly, The Sphere, just Sphere) out of the window on approach to Harry Reid International Airport. You glimpse Sphere between the glimmering towers of casinos as you navigate the Strip. Sometimes, you turn a corner and Sphere is actually looking at you. With eyes. At night, on the other side of your blackout curtains, you can feel it pulsing, flashing its loop of screen savers, concert promos, and UPS ads.
Sphere, on the off chance you haven’t met, is the $2.3 billion, 366-foot-tall, immersive venue built by Madison Square Garden Entertainment CEO James Dolan. It is a supercharged, sci-fi plaything that has hosted residencies by the likes of U2, Phish, Dead & Company, and, currently, the Eagles. (Much like Sphere, they are officially just Eagles, but there’s only so far a man can go.) What exactly happens when the place runs out of tenants with such broad and financially liquid fan bases is the subject of widespread puzzlement in Las Vegas, but maybe it’s beside the point. Sphere may more properly belong in the genre of other billionaires’ because-I-can dreams—somewhere on the moral scale between building submarines for obscenely rich passengers and everything else you could accomplish with $2.3 billion.
Read the rest of this article at: GQ
Great novelists do not always make great writers of memoirs, but André Aciman is a brilliant master of both. Call Me by Your Name may be his best-known novel, but his five subsequent novels have only fortified his reputation. (Eight White Nights, which takes place on New York’s Upper West Side, is a particular favorite.) Out of Egypt was his first memoir, and, as Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times, the book has scenes “as strange and marvelous as something in García Márquez, as comical and surprising as something in Chekhov.”
Aciman has now followed that 1994 best-seller with Roman Year, his tale of living in Italy as a teenager after leaving Egypt and before moving to New York. It is Aciman at his most moving and poetic, capturing the ache and yearning of what it is like to be on the cusp of adulthood.
Read the rest of this article at: Airmail
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In late January, I visited Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to watch an infamous, practically unstreamable film. The Lincoln is the hub of old-guard, uptown prestige and culture and the headquarters of the New York Film Festival. On Saturday night at 8:45, prime time for pregaming before a night out, it’s maybe the last place you’d expect to see 20-something socialites. Yet the line outside the Walter Reade Theater on West 65th was full of them, braving the late-winter cold and a light rain for a sold-out screening of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 49-year-old Italian snuff film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a modernized adaptation of Marquis de Sade’s 18th-century novel. The film is a critique of fascism that at one point features graphic depictions of young, beautiful captives eating bowls of their own shit. There is very little in the way of arc or character development, and—spoiler alert for anyone who had other plans that Saturday night—the film ends abruptly following the sadistic, gleeful slaughter of the prisoners.
It’s far from blockbuster fare. But this crowd was not one I would’ve recognized from 10 years earlier, when I hit sparsely attended weeknight showings of Antonioni or Imamura or Godard with mostly older moviegoers who drank coffee or dozed off. The Lincoln Center crowd was full of nerds like me, for sure—bespectacled, wearing beanies or keffiyehs and holding dog-eared paperbacks on their laps—but most of the Salò audience looked like they had taken the train down a few stops from Columbia. They sat in large, diverse groups and sipped on cans of wine or beer, huddling and talking excitedly with mouths full of popcorn before the lights went down, after which they were rapt through the entire film. It was surprising and completely absurd.
It was the culmination of a change I’d noticed developing over the past decade. The types and number of repertory films being shown are changing, as are the types of people attending them. Since the pandemic, I’d heard the oft-repeated narrative that fewer movies are being released in theaters, movie theaters are dying out at an unprecedented clip, and these are harbingers of streaming ultimately killing the moviegoing experience. But it didn’t feel that way that night at the Lincoln Center. It felt like I was a part of something—a culture or a phenomenon. Both a random event and a surprisingly coherent evolutionary step in a burgeoning movement. I wondered whether this was just my anecdotal experience in New York or a larger shift that could portend a future for moviegoing across the country.
Read the rest of this article at: The Ringer
In the fall of 2004, Hunter S. Thompson visited Los Angeles for a signing at a place on the Sunset Strip called Book Soup. Even though he’d barely written anything worthwhile since I’d been born, he remained one of my few heroes still breathing. A mythic artifact of an analogue culture on the verge of extinction.
So on a rainy and miserable October night, I left my entry-level job on the outer rings of journalism to fight an hour of rush hour traffic. By the time I arrived in West Hollywood, the line already stretched three blocks long. I didn’t have an umbrella, but I took a number, and headed to the back of the queue. The crowd was what you’d expect: self-styled eccentrics sipping flasks of rotgut whiskey, smoking dirt weed spliffs, and proudly showing each other their Gonzo-related tattoos.
After an hour and a half, I strolled up to the windows to see if I could glimpse the Good Doctor. Some commotion was brewing inside and the security guards quickly shut the door. Within a few minutes, a clerk came out to tell us that “Mr. Thompson had to leave. No more books will be signed at this time.” Someone exiting from the shop cracked that he’d seen Thompson start uncontrollably puking. He’d been openly guzzling a bottle of champagne while hanging with Benicio del Toro. Once he got sick, the pair quickly escaped into a white stretch limousine.
Today, this is the Thompson that most people remember. The slurring and vulgar Halloween costume caricature idolized for his overindulgence.
But over half a century ago, he produced one of the most memorable feats of political writing in American history: Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. In retrospect, it was the last of his three full-length masterpieces. He was just 35 on publication day.
Read the rest of this article at:Tablet
