Malcolm Gladwell, the celebrated young (at the time) writer whose first book, The Tipping Point, was a tour de force across the land, pushed his theory hard and well: social change behaves like an epidemic. “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do” (7). Think geometric progression—1 doubles to 2, 2 doubles to 4, 4 doubles to 8, and so on. “We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly” (11).