For all Goodreads members:
Goodreads is interviewing Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, for our December newsletter, so we thought we'd check to see what our members would like to ask him! Post your question here, and we'll choose a few member questions to ask in the interview. Feel free to ask about the new book, Outliers, or past books, or anything you can think of!

Were you surprised by the response to The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference?

Or given the nature of your work, did you anticipate it?

Your recent article in the Guardian newspaper described computer programming as "a world where the best men won". How can it be "the purest of meritocracies" if half the population is excluded?

Is this exclusion of women symptomatic of your book? Or do they get a look-in?

What were the range of personal emotions that you experienced while writing Outliers? Jealousy? Guilt?

How did critical feedback from your past books affect the outcome of your new book, Outliers?

I have two questions for Malcolm Gladwell:

1. I just started Outliers, but I gather from what I have read so far that you think success comes not just from innate ability and hard work but also from where you come from and the people you know and the opportunities that happen to have been presented to you. Do you see the fact that a child born to a poor family in the U.S. has a pretty poor shot at opportunity compared to a child born to a middle class or wealthy family as a fact of life or as something that we should try to change? I heard somewhere that you used to be a Reaganite. If you think the inequality of opportunity in this country is something that needs to be changed, given Reagan's lack of interest in investing in public education or anything leading to equal opportunity, have you been able to reconcile your political viewpoint with what you describe in Outliers?

2. In the three books you have written, did you first come up with an idea and then find anecdotes to support it? Or did you collect interesting stories until they cumulatively led to a revelation which you then turned into a book?

Narrative fallacy: creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have an identifiable cause. How are the examples in Outliers diifferent from the narrative fallacy?

I have tons of ideas, but it is difficult for me to remember them or keep track of them, and a lot of them are interrelated.

How do you organize your thoughts/ideas?

Thanks everyone! We conducted the interview - it will be out in the December newsletter :)