Malcolm Gladwell, influential author and columnist, has a literary repertoire as eclectic as his roots. Born to a British mathematician father and Jamaican psychotherapist mother, he grew up in Canada and has a family tree that includes West Indian, Irish, and Igbo ancestors. He has developed into one of the most culturally stimulating and thought-provoking modern American writers. Gladwell´s professional journalism career began in 1987 with The Washington Post and in 1996 brought him to The New Yorker, where he has proven to be one of the publication’s most followed columnists.

Gladwell´s natural curiosity and ability to find the reflexive in the everyday allows him to connect seemingly unrelated events and put them into a cause and effect relationship. The irony is that he never wanted to be a writer, and only when he had been rejected by eighteen advertising jobs and a fellowship abroad did he land in the profession by default. Gladwell´s column is a multi-disciplinary response to, and contemplation of, current events. In these ponderings of our culture and interactions, he has developed lexicons that could arguably define our generation such as “Tipping Point” (infectious behavior) and “outliers” (remarkable success stories). Gladwell is engaging in a way that merits reflection because he tells the stories we have heard before, but from a perspective that intersects and connects multiple ideas. Some of his published books include The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008), and What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009).