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Now, most of my questions will be quite short, but my first question will be really, really long.

Since everyone knows you and your work so well, I ask myself, who is Malcolm Gladwell?

And I try to come up with an answer.

And I'll give you my answer, and then you can correct me or add to that.

And this will take just a little while.

So I think of you as a figure set really coming out of the post-war Caribbean enlightenment.

So I put you in a context with, say, Sylvia Winter, CLR James, Ron Spannon.

And a common theme in their work is the notion that science is something potentially liberating

and emancipatory.

So you're picking up on that with one of the channels of influence being your mother,

who is herself, a very well-known Caribbean writer and intellectual.

So there's that Caribbean background, power of science to deliberate human individuals.

There's then, on you, a men and-night influence, both from your childhood and your family,

where you grew up in Canada.

So my understanding of men and-night is they tend to stress the notion that in the scriptures,

there's not much talk of original sin.

So you see the possibility for goodness in people.

...