AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, IT JUST TIPPED ITSELF...:

The Tipping Points (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, 2/27/05, NY Times)

The other night on ABC's "Nightline," the host, Ted Koppel, posed an intriguing question to Malcolm Gladwell, the social scientist who wrote the path-breaking book "The Tipping Point," which is about how changes in behavior or perception can reach a critical mass and then suddenly create a whole new reality. Mr. Koppel asked: Can you know you are in the middle of a tipping point, or is it only something you can see in retrospect?

Mr. Gladwell responded that "the most important thing in trying to analyze whether something is at the verge of a tipping point, is whether it - an event - causes people to reframe an issue. ...A dumb example is the Atkins's diet, which reframes dieting from thinking about it in terms of avoiding calories and fat to thinking about it as avoiding carbohydrates, which really changes the way people perceive dieting."

Mr. Koppel was raising the question because he wanted to explore whether the Iraqi elections marked a tipping point in history. I was on the same show, and in mulling over this question more I think that what's so interesting about the Middle East today is that we're actually witnessing three tipping points at once.

We are, of course, far past the Tipping Point in two of the cases he discusses and just past in the third. But this is likely to be a kind of outlier column as Mr. Friedman manages to work himself into the essay and thinks things may be tipping because even he finally recognizes that they are, but doesn't find room to mention the Tipper-in-Chief who's been telling anyone who'd listen that we'd crossed the Rubicon for several years now.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 27, 2005 12:00 AM