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.

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. Although he's followed up with other books, 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." 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." [Image via Getty]