What the Dog Saw And Other Adventures

by Gladwell, Malcolm

• ISBN13: 9780316075848
• ISBN10: 0316075841
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-10-20
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Summary

What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century? In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point; Blink; and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw, he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from The New Yorker over the same period. Here is the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer" who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias" and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate. "Good writing," Gladwell says in his preface, "does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head. "What the Dog Saw is yet another example of the buoyant spirit and unflagging curiosity that have made Malcolm Gladwell our most brilliant investigator of the hidden extraordinary.

Author Biography

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He was formerly a business and science reporter at the Washington Post.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius: "To a Worm in Horseradish, The world is Horseradish."	p. 1
The Pitchman: Ron Popeil and the Conquest of the American Kitchen	p. 3
The Ketchup Conundrum: Mustard Now Comes in Dozens of Varieties. Why Has Ketchup Stayed the Same?	p. 32
Blowing Up: How Nassim Taleb Turned the Inevitability of Disaster into an Investment Strategy	p. 51
True Colors: Hair Dye and the Hidden History of Postwar America	p. 76
John Rock's Error: What the Inventor of the Birth Control Pill Didn't Know About women's Health	p. 101
What the Dog Saw: Cesar Millan and the Movements of Mastery	p. 126
Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses: "It was Like Driving Down an Interstate Looking Through a Soda Straw"	p. 149
Open Secrets: Enron, Intelligence, and the Perils of Too Much Information	p. 151
Million-Dollar Murray: Why problems like Homelessness may be Easier to Solve Than to Manage	p. 177
The Picture Problem: Mammography, Air Power, and the Limits of Looking	p. 199
Something Borrowed: Should a Charge of Plagiarism Ruin Your Life?	p. 222
Connecting the Dots: The Paradoxes of Intelligence Reform	p. 244
The Art of Failure: Why some People Choke and Others Panic	p. 263
Blowup: Who can Be Blamed for a Disaster like the Challenger Explosion? No One, and We'd Better Get Used to It	p. 280
Personality, Character, and Intelligence: "He'll be Wearing a Doubled-Breasted Suit Buttoned.'-and he was"	p. 293
Late Bloomers: Why do we Equate Genius with Precocity?	p. 295
Most Likely to Succeed: How Do We Hire When We Can't Tell Who's Right for the Job?	p. 314
Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy	p. 336
The Talent Myth: Are Smart People Overrated?	p. 357
The New-Boy Network: What do Job Interviews Really Tell Us?	p. 375
Troublemakers: What Pit Bulls Can Teach Us About Crime	p. 394
Acknowledgments	p. 413
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