Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Timothy Gladwell was born in Fareham, England in 1963 to a British mathematician father and a Jamaican psychotherapist mother, and grew up in rural Ontario. He studied history at the University of Toronto and worked as a business and science reporter at the Washington Post before joining the New Yorker as a staff writer in 1996, where he has remained.

His method is consistent across the books. He finds a phenomenon most readers have not noticed is strange, locates academic research that appears to explain it, and builds a narrative that makes the research vivid. The Tipping Point in 2000, Blink in 2005, Outliers in 2008, What the Dog Saw in 2009, David and Goliath in 2013, Talking to Strangers in 2019, and The Bomber Mafia in 2021 all follow that shape.

The criticism follows the same shape too. Specialists in the fields he draws on consistently find that cases have been selected because they fit, that contrary evidence is given little space, and that conclusions are stated more confidently than the underlying researchers state them. The ten thousand hours claim in Outliers is the clearest example, since Anders Ericsson, whose research it came from, spent years correcting it publicly.

What is less often granted is that his questions are usually excellent. The observation in Outliers that Canadian hockey selection quietly advantages boys born early in the year is a real finding about compounding structural advantage, and the orchestra screen material in Blink points at something the rest of that book argues against.

He founded the podcast Revisionist History in 2016 and co-founded Pushkin Industries. He has been named to the Time 100 and holds the Order of Canada.