Who

Gladwell is known for his book The Tipping Point, which made him into a journo-celebrity and provided the world's marketers and executives a trendy new cliché.

Backstory

With no newspaper experience to his name, in 1987 Ontario-raised Gladwell was hired at the Washington Post, where for a decade he toiled in relative anonymity as a science reporter and, later, as New York bureau chief. In 1996, at the invitation of then-editor Tina Brown, he jumped to the New Yorker, and quickly carved out a niche as a business pundit/social scientist. In his first book, 2000's The Tipping Point, Gladwell examined viral buzz, word of mouth, and how things suddenly become cool. In the 2005 follow up, Blink, he looked at intuitive decision making and snap judgments. Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter of Traffic and Syriana, is adapting Blink for the silver screen, with Leonardo DiCaprio to star. Gladwell's latest book, Outliers, is an examination of exceptional achievers, such as Bill Gates and the Beatles, and the forces that propelled their success.

Of note

The massive success of The Tipping Point—the book spent 28 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list—put Gladwell firmly on the map, transforming him into, per Fast Company, "a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud." Blink, while slightly less well-received, nonetheless solidified the author's reputation as a zeitgeist meister. His mix of pop psychology, Marketing 101, and common sense has since spawned an entire genre of non-fiction, such as Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, and Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You. (Not coincidentally, Gladwell blurbed all three.) Yet not everyone is so impressed with Gladwell's theories or so thrilled to see him deified. He's been blasted for his "fuzzy-headed, attention-mongering contrarianism," to use the words of one blogger, and Lee Siegel in the New Republic has penned several pieces critical of Gladwell, describing him as someone who "constantly contrives to present himself as a socially conscious liberal, rather than the capitalist tool in journalist's clothing that he is."

Keeping score

Gladwell collects $80,000 for an hour-long speech, on top of his reported $250,000 annual salary from the New Yorker. He makes millions more from his bestselling books.

The look

Gladwell, whose mother is Jamaican, used to sport an afro. He's written that he's been stopped by the police more frequently when he looks "more black."

Personal

Gladwell is unmarried. (He wrote in 1999 that he liked "dark-haired Jewish girls, spy novels, and thrillers.") In 2005 he sold his Tribeca apartment for $1.995 million. After renting for a few years, he purchased a co-op on Bank Street in 2008 for $1.4 million.