• Fast Company, Wednesday, December 14, 2011 10:11 AM

Malcolm Gladwell, social trendmaker and observer and dead ringer for Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman, does a Q&A about his book, The Tipping Point. He says the impetus for the book was the dramatic crime decrease in New York in the mid-1990s.

"That was right when I moved to the city for the first time. And I was stunned at how New York went from a place that everyone thought of as dangerous to a place that seemed as safe as any major city in the country within the space of such a short time. It made me wonder if there wasn't something that could be learned from that experience that could be applied to other social phenomena." He says he doesn't know why the book was a big hit. "My only real hope was that my mother would like it." Very Neumanesque. Read on.

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