BY HAPPENSTANCE, I bought a paperback copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point the day before picking up the DVD of Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Darjeeling Limited. The idea behind Gladwell’s book is that cultural phenomena–books that turn into bestsellers, fashions that sweep across the country, precipitous drops in crime–can be attributed to a series of oftentimes very insignificant changes in the background of society (e.g., removing graffiti from the New York City subway system), or the efforts of taste-making individuals with a broad base of friends to promote something (i.e., great word of mouth on a new restaurant).

On his website, Gladwell compares “tipping points” to “memes,” a meme being an “idea that behaves like a virus–that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects.” I mention this because I can’t think of another director in recent times that so embodies the notion of the tipping point as Wes Anderson.