Malcolm Gladwell

Celebrated in Fast Company magazine as a "rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud," and named to Time's list of the "100 Most Influential People" in 2005, Malcolm Gladwell is perhaps the hottest nonfiction author of the 2000s. Gladwell is the author of two bestsellers: The Tipping Point, which explored how trends, ideas, and products "tipped" into phenomena of much greater importance, and Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, which examines the wisdom and folly of snap decisions. Gladwell's mixed-race background played a significant role in shaping Blink, for the genesis of the book came when the light-skinned Gladwell grew his hair out into an Afro style and was suddenly stopped far more frequently by the police. "The theme of the book," he explained to Rebecca Caldwell of the Toronto Globe & Mail, "is that what goes on in the first two seconds is really important in that those kinds of judgments are capable of being extraordinarily good but are also capable of being so screwed up and so biased that they can throw us off the track entirely."

Gladwell was born in England in 1963, but grew up in the Ontario, Canada, community of Waterloo, where his father taught mathematics at the local university. His father was British and white, while his mother Joyce was a native of Jamaica and black. Like his two brothers, Malcolm was encouraged to read in the television-free home. At the age of age 16 he won a writing contest for an essay in which he interviewed God.

Gladwell studied history at the University of Toronto, and had a brief career as an advertising copywriter before landing a job at the American Spectator, a conservative political journal, before moving on to the Washington Post in 1987 as a reporter. Over the next nine years he moved up at the paper to become its science writer and then New York City bureau chief. In 1996 he was lured away from the Post by Tina Brown, the then-editor of the prestigious weekly magazine The New Yorker. Gladwell soon carved out at niche for himself at the New Yorker with articles that offered explorations of the curious, unexplained phenomena of everyday life.

Published in 2005, Blink examines how and why the human mind makes snap decisions, which seem to rely on a hunch or a subconscious "feeling." Traditional wisdom holds that these quick judgments are inferior to a more careful, reasoned analysis in coming to a conclusion, but Gladwell argues that most decisions we make are based on our subconscious and occur in just a fraction of a second.