What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures »

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a bestselling author of narrative nonfiction that examines the intersection of science and culture. In 2005, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People.

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 20^th 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 TheNew 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.

The New York Times Book Review - Steven Pinker

Gladwell is a writer of many gifts. His nose for the untold back story will have readers repeatedly muttering, "Gee, that's interesting!" He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to think again and think different. His prose is transparent, with lucid explanations and a sense that we are chatting with the experts ourselves. Some chapters are masterpieces in the art of the essay.

Preface

PART ONE:
"To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish."
Obsessives, pioneers, and other varieties of minor genius.

The Pitchman
Ron Popeil and the conquest of the American kitchen

The Ketchup Conundrum
Mustard now comes in dozens of different varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same?

Blowing Up
How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy.

True Colors
Hair Dye and the hidden history of postwar America

John Rock's Error
What the inventor of the birth control pill didn't know about women's health

What the Dog Saw
Cesar Millan and the movements of mastery

PART TWO:
"It was like driving down an interstate looking through a soda straw."
Theories, Predictions and Diagnoses

Open Secrets
Enron, intelligence and the perils of too much information

Million Dollar Murray
Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage

The Picture Problem
Mammography, air power, and the limits of looking.

Something Borrowed
Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?

Connecting the Dots
The paradoxes of intelligence reform.

The Art of Failure
Why some people choke and others panic

Blowup
Who can be blamed for a disaster like the Challenger explosion? No one, and we'd better get used to it.

PART THREE:
" 'He'll be wearing a doubled breasted suit. Buttoned.'-and he was."
Personality, character and intelligence.

Most Likely to Succeed
How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job.

Dangerous Minds
Criminal profiling made easy

The TalentMyth
Are smart people over-rated?

Late Bloomers
Why do we equate genius with precocity?

The New Boy Network
What do job interviews really tell us?

Troublemakers
What pit bulls can teach us about crime