Malcolm Timothy Gladwell (born 3 September 1963) is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has published seven books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000); Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005); Outliers: The Story of Success (2008); What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), a collection of his journalism; David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013); Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know (2019) and The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (2021). His first five books were on The New York Times Best Seller list. He is also the host of the podcast Revisionist History and co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries. Gladwell's writings often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences, like sociology and psychology, and make frequent and extended use of academic work. Gladwell was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2011. Early life Gladwell was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England. His mother is Joyce (née Nation) Gladwell, a Jamaican psychotherapist. His father, Graham Gladwell, was a mathematics professor from Kent, England. When he was six his family moved from Southampton to the Mennonite community of Elmira, Ontario, Canada. He has two brothers. Throughout his childhood, Malcolm lived in rural Ontario Mennonite country, where he attended a Mennonite church. Research done by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed that one of Gladwell's maternal ancestors was a Jamaican free woman of colour (mixed black and white) who was a slaveowner. His great-great-great-grandmother was of Igbo ethnicity from Nigeria, West Africa. In the epilogue of his book Outliers he describes many lucky circumstances that came to his family over the course of several generations, contributing to his path towards success. Gladwell has said that his mother is his role model as a writer. Gladwell's father noted Malcolm was an unusually single-minded and ambitious boy. When Malcolm 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. The University of Waterloo granted Gladwell an honorary doctorate in 2007. In the spring of 1982, Gladwell interned