44 Facts About Malcolm Gladwell

1.

Malcolm Timothy Gladwell was born on 3 September 1963 and is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker.

2.

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996.

3.

Malcolm Gladwell is the host of the podcast Revisionist History and co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries.

4.

Malcolm Gladwell was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2011.

5.

Malcolm Gladwell's mother is Joyce Gladwell, a Jamaican psychotherapist.

6.

Malcolm Gladwell's father, Graham Gladwell, was a mathematics professor from Kent, England.

7.

Malcolm Gladwell's great-great-great-grandmother was of Igbo ethnicity from Nigeria, West Africa.

8.

Malcolm Gladwell has said that his mother is his role model as a writer.

9.

Gladwell's father noted that Malcolm was an unusually single-minded and ambitious boy.

10.

When Malcolm Gladwell was 11, his father, who was a professor of mathematics and engineering at the University of Waterloo, allowed him to wander around the offices at his university, which stoked the boy's interest in reading and libraries.

11.

Malcolm Gladwell's grades were not high enough for graduate school, so he decided to pursue advertising as a career.

12.

Malcolm Gladwell subsequently wrote for Insight on the News, a conservative magazine owned by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.

13.

In 1987, Malcolm Gladwell began covering business and science for The Washington Post, where he worked until 1996.

14.

When Malcolm Gladwell started at The New Yorker in 1996 he wanted to "mine current academic research for insights, theories, direction, or inspiration".

15.

Malcolm Gladwell gained popularity with two New Yorker articles, both written in 1996: "The Tipping Point" and "The Coolhunt".

16.

Malcolm Gladwell served as a contributing editor for Grantland, a sports journalism website founded by former ESPN columnist Bill Simmons.

17.

Malcolm Gladwell wanted the book to have a broader appeal than just crime and sought to explain similar phenomena through the lens of epidemiology.

18.

Malcolm Gladwell began to take note of "how strange epidemics were", saying epidemiologists have a "strikingly different way of looking at the world".

19.

However, in the decade and a half since its publication, The Tipping Point and Malcolm Gladwell have both come under fire for the tenuous link between "broken windows" and New York City's drop in violent crime.

20.

Malcolm Gladwell went on to say that he was "so enamored by the metaphorical simplicity of that idea that I overstated its importance".

21.

Malcolm Gladwell stated that once he allowed his hair to get longer, he started to get speeding tickets all the time, an oddity considering that he had never gotten one before and that he started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention.

22.

Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Blink were international bestsellers.

23.

Malcolm Gladwell noted that he knew a lot of people who are really smart and really ambitious, but not worth $60 billion.

24.

The stories share a common theme, namely that Malcolm Gladwell tries to show us the world through the eyes of others, even if that other happens to be a dog.

25.

The book is partially inspired by an article Malcolm Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker in 2009 entitled "How David Beats Goliath".

26.

David Leonhardt wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "In the vast world of nonfiction writing, Malcolm Gladwell is as close to a singular talent as exists today" and Outliers "leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward".

27.

The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, "impervious to all forms of critical thinking" and said Malcolm Gladwell believes "a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule".

28.

Malcolm Gladwell has been criticized for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions.

29.

Malcolm Gladwell's approach was satirized by the online site "The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator".

30.

However, Malcolm Gladwell says he was unaware that Bank of America was "bragging about his speaking engagements" until the Atlantic Wire emailed him.

31.

Malcolm Gladwell is host of the podcast Revisionist History, initially produced through Panoply Media and now through Malcolm Gladwell's own podcast company.

32.

Malcolm Gladwell was recruited to create a podcast by Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of The Slate Group, which includes the podcast network Panoply Media.

33.

In September 2018, Malcolm Gladwell announced he was co-founding a podcast company, later named Pushkin Industries, with Weisberg.

34.

Malcolm Gladwell has a music podcast with Bruce Headlam and Rick Rubin, titled Broken Record where they interview musicians.

35.

Malcolm Gladwell's family attended Above Bar Church in Southampton, UK, and later Gale Presbyterian in Elmira when they moved to Canada.

36.

Malcolm Gladwell wandered away from his Christian roots when he moved to New York, only to rediscover his faith during the writing of David and Goliath and his encounter with Wilma Derksen regarding the death of her child.

37.

Malcolm Gladwell was a national class runner and an Ontario High School champion.

38.

Malcolm Gladwell was among Canada's fastest teenagers at 1500 metres, running 4:14 at the age of 13 and 4:05 when aged 14.

39.

Malcolm Gladwell had his first child, a daughter, in 2022.

40.

Malcolm Gladwell has received honorary degrees from the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto.

41.

Malcolm Gladwell told a story about a well-intentioned wedding toast for a young man and his friends that went wrong.

42.

Malcolm Gladwell has appeared on several television shows for OZY Media, including the Carlos Watson Show and Third Rail With OZY.

43.

Malcolm Gladwell has a chapter giving advice in Tim Ferriss's book Tools of Titans.

44.

Malcolm Gladwell was voiced by Colton Dunn in Solar Opposites S3.