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Book excerpt: “Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
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In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell published the first of several bestselling books, “The Tipping Point,” in which he applied the laws of epidemics to promote positive social change. Now, he’s returned to that optimistic book’s lessons in “Revenge of the Tipping Point” (to be published October 1 by Little, Brown & Co.), to examine the flip side of those theories.
The new book’s topics range from cheetah reproduction and the Harvard women’s rugby team to the Holocaust.
Read the excerpt below, and don’t miss David Pogue’s interview with Malcolm Gladwell on “CBS Sunday Morning” September 29!
“Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
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In the 1970s, zookeepers around the world began to invest more and more resources in breeding their animal populations in captivity. The logic was clear. Why go to all the trouble of capturing animals in the wild? The growing conservation movement also favored breeding programs. The new strategy was a big success — with one big outlier: the cheetah.
“They seldom had offspring that survived, and many of them when put together couldn’t breed,” remembers the geneticist Stephen O’Brien, who was then working at the National Cancer Institute.
It didn’t make sense. The cheetah seemed a perfect example of evolutionary fitness: a massive nuclear reactor for a heart, the legs of a greyhound, a skull shaped like a professional cyclist’s aerodynamic helmet, and semi-retractable claws that, as O’Brien puts it, “grip the earth like football cleats as they race after their prey at sixty miles per hour.”
“It’s the fastest animal on earth,” O’Brien said. “The second fastest animal on earth is the American pronghorn. And the reason that it’s the second-fastest is that it was running from the cheetahs.”
The zookeepers wondered if they were doing something wrong, or whether there was something about the make-up of the cheetah that they didn’t understand. They came up with theories and tried experiments — all to no avail. In the end, they shrugged and said that the animals must be “skittish.”
Things came to a head at a meeting in 1980 in Front Royal, Virginia. Zoo directors from around the world were there, among them the head of a big wildlife-conservation program in South Africa.
“And he says, ‘Do you have anybody that knows what they’re doing scientifically?’ ” O’Brien remembers. ” ‘[To] basically explain to us why our breeding program of cheetahs in South Africa has something like 15 percent success while the rest of these animals — elephants and horses and giraffes — they breed like rats?’ “
Two scientists raised their hands — both colleagues of O’Brien’s. They flew to South Africa, to a big wildlife sanctuary near Pretoria. They took blood and sperm samples from dozens of cheetahs. What they found astonished them. The sperm counts of the cheetahs were low. And the spermatozoa themselves were badly malformed. That was clearly why the animals had such trouble breeding. It wasn’t that they were “skittish.”
But why? O’Brien’s laboratory then began testing the blood samples that had been sent to them. They had done similar studies in the past on birds, humans, horses, and domestic cats, and in all those cases the animals showed a healthy degree of genetic diversity: In most species, around 30 percent of sampled genes will show some degree of variation. The cheetah’s genes looked nothing like that. They were all the same. “I never saw a species that was so genetically uniform,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien’s findings were greeted with skepticism by his colleagues. So he and his team kept going.
“I went down to Children’s Hospital in Washington and I learned how to do skin grafts at a burn unit,” he said. “They taught me how to keep it sterile and how to take the . . . slices and how to suture it up and everything. And then we did [skin grafts on] about eight cheetahs in South Africa, and then we did another six or eight in Oregon.”
Winston, Oregon, was home to the Wildlife Safari, the largest collection of cheetahs in the United States at the time.
The idea was simple. If you graft a piece of skin from one animal onto another, the recipient’s body will reject it. It will recognize the genes of the donor as foreign. “It would blacken and slough off in two weeks,” O’Brien said. But if you take a patch of skin from, say, one identical twin and graft it onto another, it will work. The donor’s immune system thinks the skin is its own. This was the ultimate test of his hypothesis.
The grafts were small — one inch by one inch, sewn onto the side of the animal’s chest, protected by an elastic bandage wrapped around the cat’s body. First, the team gave some of the cheetahs a skin graft from a domestic cat, just to make sure the animals had an immune system. Sure enough, the cheetahs rejected the cat graft: It got inflamed, then necrotic. Their bodies knew what different was — and a domestic cat was different. Then the team grafted skin from other cheetahs. What happened? Nothing! They were accepted, O’Brien said, “as if they were identical twins. The only place you see that is in inbred mice that have been brother-sister mated for twenty generations. And that convinced me.”
O’Brien realized that the world’s cheetah population must have at some point been devastated. His best guess was that it happened during the great mammal die-off 12,000 years ago — when saber-toothed cats, mastodons, mammoths, giant ground sloths, and over thirty other species were wiped out by an ice age. Somehow the cheetah survived. But just barely.
“The numbers that fit all the data are less than one hundred, maybe less than fifty,” O’Brien said. It’s possible, in fact, that the cheetah population was reduced to a single pregnant female. And the only way for those lonely few cheetahs to survive was to overcome the inhibition that most mammals have against incest: Sisters had to mate with brothers, first cousins with first cousins. The species eventually rebounded, but only through the endless replication of the same narrow set of genes. The cheetah was still magnificent. But now every cheetah represented the exact same kind of magnificence.
From “Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering” by Malcolm Gladwell. Copyright © 2024 by Malcolm Gladwell. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.
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CBS News
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, was investigated for alleged sexual assault in 2017
Monterey, Calif. – Pete Hegseth, the Army veteran turned Fox News host selected by President-elect Donald Trump to be defense secretary during his second term was investigated for an alleged sexual assault in 2017, Monterey, Calif. officials confirmed.
In response to multiple public record requests to the city, including one from CBS News, officials released a public statement late Thursday evening about a 2017 police investigation into Hegseth. The statement form the City Manager’s Office and Monterey Police Department contained few details about the case and said they would not make any other public statements related to the investigation.
The incident allegedly occurred somewhere between a minute before midnight on Oct. 7, 2017 and 7 a.m. on Oct. 8, 2017 at 1 Old Golf Course Road, the location of the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel. A police report was filed with Monterey Police Department three days later, on Oct. 12, 2024.
John Lamparski / Getty Images
Police did not disclose the name or age of the alleged victim but did describe the injuries as “Contusions” “right thigh.”
The statement said no weapons were involved.
News of the sexual misconduct allegation was revealed on Thursday by Vanity Fair when the magazine reported that Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was briefed about the alleged sexual misconduct by Hegseth involving a woman, citing unnamed sources — one of whom reportedly said the incident took place in Monterey.
The allegation prompted a discussion among Wiles, Trump’s legal team and Hegseth, who described the allegation as a consensual encounter and a classic case of he-said, she-said, the magazine reported.
Timothy Parlatore, a former Trump lawyer who frequently represents current and former members of the U.S. military, told Vanity Fair: “This allegation was already investigated by the Monterey police department and they found no evidence for it.”
Hegseth is a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan with a handful of military medals, including two Bronze Stars, and has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Princeton and Harvard.
Since 2019, Hegseth has been married to his third wife, Fox News producer Jennifer Rauchet. The two were married at Trump’s National Gold Club in Colts Neck, New Jersey.
Hegseth and his first wife, Meredith Schwarz, divorced in 2009. He and his second wife, Samantha Deering, divorced in 2017, the year he was investigated for the alleged sexual assault.
Disagreement over Hegseth’s qualifications
Following Trump’s Tuesday night announcement that he would nominate Hegseth to be his defense secretary, many have questioned whether the 44-year-old co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekends” can handle managing the Defense Department, which has a budget of $842 billion, almost three million employees and 750 military installations around the world.
“The Pentagon is in need of real reform, and they’re getting a leader who has grit to make it happen,” said Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Republican Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida, in a post on the social media platform X. Waltz is a former Army Green Beret colonel.
Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, who served in the Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Hegseth was not “remotely qualified” to be defense secretary.
“The SecDef [secretary of defense] makes life-and-death decisions daily that impact over 2 million troops around the globe. This is not an entry-level job for a TV commentator,” Crow said on X. “The Senate should do its job and deny this nomination.”
Hegseth’s controversial views
Hegseth is a longtime conservative and staunch Trump ally who has talked about changes Trump should make at the Pentagon.
He said the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown should be fired for “pursuing the radical positions of left-wing politicians.”
And he believes women should not be in combat for the U.S. military, a point he reiterated last week in an interview with “The Shawn Ryan Show” podcast.
Ahead of then President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, The Associated Press reported that 12 U.S. National Guard members were removed from helping to secure the event after vetting by the U.S. military and FBI. The members made extremist statements in posts or text messages or had ties with right-wing militia groups.
Hegseth revealed during his interview Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL, that he was one of the National Guard members removed from securing the inauguration.
CBS News
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, was investigated for alleged sexual assault in 2017
Monterey, Calif. – Pete Hegseth, the Army veteran turned Fox News host selected by President-elect Donald Trump to be defense secretary during his second term was investigated for an alleged sexual assault in 2017, Monterey, Calif. officials confirmed.
In response to multiple public record requests to the city, including one from CBS News, officials released a public statement late Thursday evening about a 2017 police investigation into Hegseth. The statement form the City Manager’s Office and Monterey Police Department contained few details about the case and said they would not make any other public statements related to the investigation.
The incident allegedly occurred somewhere between a minute before midnight on Oct. 7, 2017 and 7 a.m. on Oct. 8, 2017 at 1 Old Golf Course Road, the location of the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel. A police report was filed with Monterey Police Department three days later, on Oct. 12, 2024.
John Lamparski / Getty Images
Police did not disclose the name or age of the alleged victim but did describe the injuries as “Contusions” “right thigh.”
The statement said no weapons were involved.
News of the sexual misconduct allegation was revealed on Thursday by Vanity Fair when the magazine reported that Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was briefed about the alleged sexual misconduct by Hegseth involving a woman, citing unnamed sources — one of whom reportedly said the incident took place in Monterey.
The allegation prompted a discussion among Wiles, Trump’s legal team and Hegseth, who described the allegation as a consensual encounter and a classic case of he-said, she-said, the magazine reported.
Timothy Parlatore, a former Trump lawyer who frequently represents current and former members of the U.S. military, told Vanity Fair: “This allegation was already investigated by the Monterey police department and they found no evidence for it.”
Hegseth is a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan with a handful of military medals, including two Bronze Stars, and has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Princeton and Harvard.
Since 2019, Hegseth has been married to his third wife, Fox News producer Jennifer Rauchet. The two were married at Trump’s National Gold Club in Colts Neck, New Jersey.
Hegseth and his first wife, Meredith Schwarz, divorced in 2009. He and his second wife, Samantha Deering, divorced in 2017, the year he was investigated for the alleged sexual assault.
Disagreement over Hegseth’s qualifications
Following Trump’s Tuesday night announcement that he would nominate Hegseth to be his defense secretary, many have questioned whether the 44-year-old co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekends” can handle managing the Defense Department, which has a budget of $842 billion, almost three million employees and 750 military installations around the world.
“The Pentagon is in need of real reform, and they’re getting a leader who has grit to make it happen,” said Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Republican Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida, in a post on the social media platform X. Waltz is a former Army Green Beret colonel.
Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, who served in the Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Hegseth was not “remotely qualified” to be defense secretary.
“The SecDef [secretary of defense] makes life-and-death decisions daily that impact over 2 million troops around the globe. This is not an entry-level job for a TV commentator,” Crow said on X. “The Senate should do its job and deny this nomination.”
Hegseth’s controversial views
Hegseth is a longtime conservative and staunch Trump ally who has talked about changes Trump should make at the Pentagon.
He said the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown should be fired for “pursuing the radical positions of left-wing politicians.”
And he believes women should not be in combat for the U.S. military, a point he reiterated last week in an interview with “The Shawn Ryan Show” podcast.
Ahead of then President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, The Associated Press reported that 12 U.S. National Guard members were removed from helping to secure the event after vetting by the U.S. military and FBI. The members made extremist statements in posts or text messages or had ties with right-wing militia groups.
Hegseth revealed during his interview Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL, that he was one of the National Guard members removed from securing the inauguration.
CBS News
Mysterious far side of the moon once had erupting volcanoes, lunar soil retrieved by Chinese spacecraft confirms
Volcanoes were erupting on the mysterious far side of the moon billions of years ago just like on the side that we can see, new research confirms.
Researchers analyzed lunar soil brought back by China’s Chang’e-6, the first spacecraft to return with a haul of rocks and dirt from the little-explored far side.
Two separate teams found fragments of volcanic rock that were about 2.8 billion years old. One piece was even more ancient, dating back to 4.2 billion years.
“To obtain a sample from this area is really important because it’s an area that otherwise we have no data for,” said Christopher Hamilton, a planetary volcano expert at the University of Arizona who was not involved with the research.
Scientists know there were active volcanoes on the near side, the part of the moon seen from Earth, dating back to a similar time frame. Previous studies, including data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, suggested the far side might also have a volcanic past. The first samples from that region facing away from Earth confirm an active history.
/ AP
The results were published Friday in the journal Science.
China has launched several spacecraft to the moon. In 2020, the Chang’e-5 spacecraft returned moon rocks from the near side, the first since those collected by NASA’s Apollo astronauts and Soviet Union spacecraft in the 1970s. The Chang’e-4 spacecraft became the first to visit the moon’s far side in 2019.
The moon’s far side is pockmarked by craters and has fewer of the near side’s flat, dark plains carved by lava flows. Why the two halves are so different remains a mystery, said study co-author Qiu-Li Li from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Li said the new findings reveal over 1 billion years of volcanic eruptions on the lunar far side. Future research will determine how the activity lasted so long.
China’s moon program is part of a growing rivalry with the U.S. — still the leader in space exploration — and others, including Japan and India. China launched a three-member crew on its own space station orbiting the Earth, and it aims to put astronauts on the moon by 2030. More Chinese lunar probe missions are planned over the next four years.
NASA plans its first piloted Artemis mission late next year, launching three NASA astronauts and a Canadian flyer on a looping voyage around the moon and back to test the agency’s Orion crew transport ship.
contributed to this report.
Journalist and author Larry Millett highlights St. Paul history
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, was investigated for alleged sexual assault in 2017
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, was investigated for alleged sexual assault in 2017
Journalist and author Larry Millett highlights St. Paul history
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, was investigated for alleged sexual assault in 2017