MALCOLM GLADWELL’s Revenge of the Tipping Point begins with three puzzles: How did Los Angeles in the 1990s become, as the author puts it, “the bank-robbery capital of the world”? Why did a respectable nursing-home operator from Chicago turn into one of the greatest fraudsters in Medicare history after he moved to Miami? Why did teenagers in an idyllic community start killing themselves—and were their parents somehow responsible? To which I might add a fourth puzzle: How does Mr. Gladwell tie all this together into anything resembling a coherent whole?

REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering, by Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown & Co., 368 pages

The Tipping Point, published in 2000, was Mr. Gladwell’s first book, written with no clear expectations of success or even, by his own account, a full understanding of what he was doing. Yet it became the kind of bestseller that rewires people’s brains and turns its author into a household name. It not only showed how ideas and trends could “tip” into mass “social epidemics” but fed into the slowly dawning realization that we live in a networked world.

Revenge of the Tipping Point essentially asks why we were all so ready to think anything that spreads like a virus could be good for us. In the first book we had connectors, mavens and salesmen. Now we have overstories, superspreaders and social engineering—in addition to Covid-19, which really is a virus, and the opioid epidemic, a for-profit scourge that acts like one. Ideas that a quarter-century ago seemed illuminating and empowering have turned treacherous and dark. The match that so elegantly graced the cover of The Tipping Point is now on fire.

Journalists at The New Yorker, where Mr. Gladwell became a staff writer in 1996, used to be known for a certain degree of subtlety; many still are. While never lacking a point of view, they leave some degree of interpretation to the reader. Mr. Gladwell is different. He is never without a thesis. The stories he tells to support it always fit—goodbye to any that don’t. And he rarely tells one story when 10 or 20 will do, shuffled like a deck of cards. Invariably he pulls out an ace at the end. Your job as the reader is to be dazzled and to walk away feeling edified if maybe a little lightheaded.

After introducing us to the nursing-home chiseler, for example, Mr. Gladwell revisits a story told earlier in the book about a group of private schools where vaccination rates are oddly low. From there he veers into a discussion of cardiac catheterization—a complicated, expensive and somewhat risky medical procedure that is often performed in Boulder, Colo., but seldom in Buffalo, N.Y. (Don’t worry, you’ll find out why eventually.) Then it’s back to Medicare for a few pages, followed by the arrival in South Florida of Latin American drug cartels, Cuban refugees and wholesale money laundering in the early 1980s. Only then, and after a brief digression on Florida’s Sen. Rick Scott, do we learn how blatant Medicare fraud has become in Miami and its environs. The point of all these reportorial backflips? To demonstrate what Mr. Gladwell calls “the overstory,” the unspoken code that governs a culture—in this case, as he puts it, the “abyss of Miami-ness.” And that’s just chapter 2.

The thing about puzzles is that they dare us to solve them. Mr. Gladwell gives us a sort of interactive nonfiction, not unlike a detective story. The effect is amplified by his habit of speaking directly to the reader. “Let me give you an example,” he’ll say, or “I think we can now venture a theory of what happened.” He’s a tour guide who takes you by the elbow and steers you to his latest find. And what he wants to show you is how everything can be explained by some universal rule.

“When we look at a contagious event, we assume that there is something fundamentally wild and unruly about the path it takes,” he writes. But no: “There must be a set of rules, buried somewhere below the surface.” Who doesn’t want to know the secret rules and where they’re hidden—particularly if they can tame the chaos of the world around us? Little wonder his books are bestsellers.

The question is whether his rules actually hold. Toward the end of the book, Mr. Gladwell addresses gay marriage—a goal that even its supporters thought unattainable until, as with the collapse of the Soviet empire, it just happened. To explain why, the author turns to Will & Grace, the sitcom that was part of NBC’s “Must See TV” lineup around the turn of the millennium. Because Will was gay but otherwise perfectly normal, and because television is uniquely seductive, Will & Grace, we are told, changed the overstory on homosexuality. Change the overstory, Mr. Gladwell says, and you can change anything—in this case, the long-held view that homosexuals are predatory and promiscuous by nature and deserve to be outcasts.

Unfortunately, this presumes some degree of social cohesion. Television provided that for decades. But even as Will & Grace was rewriting the overstory on gay people, network ratings were collapsing. With the rise of the internet, audiences today seem hopelessly fragmented—and society along with them. More than ever, the overstory is up for grabs.

The bigger problem is that Mr. Gladwell’s rules mainly seem to work in hindsight. Was the collapse of the Soviet Union something we could have seen coming, or was it one of many possibilities that might have come to pass? If Will & Grace was going to make gay marriage acceptable, why didn’t he tell us in his first book? Change is messy. Often it leaves bodies in the street. Mr. Gladwell wants the world to be tidy and predictable. Too bad it isn’t. ◆