Malcolm Gladwell is writer and journalist famous for his ability to tell stories from information he digs up in scientific research papers, popularizing concepts such as “the 10,000-hour rule.” His books, such as The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, have sold millions of copies and have been Read moretranslated into more than thirty languages.

Born in England in 1963, Gladwell's family moved to Elmira, a small town in southern Ontario when he was six years old. Gladwell's mother Joyce worked as a psychotherapist, and his father Graham was a math professor at the University of Waterloo. Gladwell graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in history in 1984 with grades too low to carry on to graduate school as he'd intended.

When his plan to launch a career in advertising fell through, he took a position at The American Spectator, a conservative magazine based in Indiana. In 1987, after a stint writing for another conservative outlet, Insight on the News, Gladwell was hired to cover business and science for The Washington Post. He worked there until 1996, when he started writing for The New Yorker with the intention of highlighting points of insight and inspiration in current academic research for a general audience. Covering science, technology, and business as he did at The Post but with the additional space allowed in magazine articles, Gladwell's New Yorker writing ultimately led to his first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, which was published in 2000.

The Tipping Point looked at how ideas spread through society, but he borrowed the term “the tipping point” from epidemiology, which he learned about when covering the AIDS epidemic at The Post. Among the many examples it drew on, the book popularized the “broken windows” theory of policing, in which police enforcement addresses minor infractions to prevent greater crimes from being committed—a concept which has been largely disproven and which Gladwell has admitted to having been overly “enamoured by the metaphorical simplicity” of the idea.

In 2016 Gladwell launched a new podcast, “Revisionist History,” in which he studies a topic that he thinks is broadly misunderstood. In 2018 he founded Pushkin Industries, which publishes podcasts as well as audiobooks. In 2021 Pushkin published Gladwell's The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, an audiobook based on a season of the podcast (his book publisher Little, Brown published the book and eBook based on the audio production).

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