Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell

Author

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. His newest book, Talking to Strangers (2019), is a darker-than-usual look at the miscommunications and assumptions that occur when we interact with people we don't know, told through historical case studies like Sandra Bland, Bernie Madoff, and Adolf Hitler. Gladwell is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy's Top Global Thinkers.

10 min
The Bomber Mafia nearly changed the world—and you've likely never heard of them.
Join Radiolab's Latif Nasser at 1pm ET today as he chats with Malcolm Gladwell live on Big Think.
7 min
As Malcolm Gladwell – author of numerous New York Times bestselling books – points out, mastery and popularity are sometimes linked, but often they are not. If your goal is to become masterful at what you do, the formula is really quite simple: stay focused and do your time. This is the theory behind the 10,000 Hours Rule that Gladwell made famous. Worrying about whether you’re being recognized for your efforts, i.e. popularity, is a product of the ego, not to mention a distraction. . . . So get over yourself and get to work! In this lesson, Gladwell teaches you how.
1 min
Connecting the dots between hair care and the American belief in reinvention, Polykoff invented one of the most famous advertising taglines in history: “Does she or doesn’t she? Only her […]
2 min
Growing up in a war-torn country and contracting a very rare type of cancer, Nassim Taleb became fixed on the idea that catastrophe is more common than most people think—an […]
1 min
An inventor from the Jersey Boardwalk, Popeil’s great genius was to make the whole world care about something that previously only weirdly obsessed aficionados of kitchen gadget had cared about.
1 min
Can we make a better engine? Yes. Is the state of search technology the reason we haven’t found a cure for cancer? No.