Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. He previously worked at the monthly magazine The American Spectator, and was a writer and the New York bureau chief of The Washington Post from 1987 to 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil for The New Yorker won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of two books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (Little, Brown and Company, 2000) and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown and Company, 2005), both of which were on the bestseller list of The New York Times.

His latest book is Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company, 2008), which ex-amines the nature of success, taking the reader on an intellectual journey to explore the qualities -- and specific-case conditions -- that produce the “extreme overachiever.” It will be published in German with the title Überflieger: Warum manche Menschen erfolgreich sind - und andere nicht by the Campus Verlag in early 2009.