欧宝娱乐

To understand "The Tipping Point," one must understand what led to its creation: In the year 2000 A.D. (Anal Dominos), there were 5.5 billion people living on the planet Earth. Many of them were considered human beings, but a few were thought to be celery. The difference between the two categories bewildered the top dog breeders of the day.

To help us think more deeply about the consequences of the problem, consider the following fact: If you were born after 1975 and tried to ride a bicycle from Iceland to Darfur, the chances of colliding with a British nanny increased 13% based on the number of Blossom reruns you watched as a child. Whether or not your parents are divorced is immaterial, as is the amount of padding in your seat. Social Scientists had a term for this late 20th century phenomenon: "Whoa!"

Meanwhile, in Canada (if that's your real name), a young, mild-mannered boy named Malcolm recognized the unique power of combining individual letters into meaning-units called 鈥渨ords.鈥�

He quit his job making ice sculptures out of rusted fenders and moved south of the border to America (the nation, not the toy store).

His timing was impeccable. At the end of the 90s, America had just entered a period of reckless behavior wherein, with little prompting, Americans would try to arrange words into "sentences" and, if sufficiently coked-up, slap those sentences into "paragraphs."

Conservatives like Pat Buchanan were furious. Senator Bob Dole went on Meet the Press and blamed his erectile dysfunction on syntax. The era ended suddenly on December 31st, 1999, when, according to a budding bow-tie fanatic named Bill Nye, both the year AND the century had run their course.

Feeling threatened, Gladwell went on national television to declare "writing" is the radical, counterintuitive explanation for the existence of what he called "books" but what conservatives called "syphilis".

The strategy worked: He signed a contract with the biggest publishing house in America, which then promptly issued his first minor masterpiece: "Writing: How Letters, Sentences, Paragraphs, and Chapters Add Up To The Thing That Came Before the Colon." From that point on, it was all gin and roses (until Slash and Hypen left the band).