What the Dog Saw (Gladwell)

What the Dog Saw And Other Adventures
Malcolm Gladwell, 2009
Little, Brown & Co.
410 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316075848


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 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. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—September 3, 1963
• Where—Fareham, Hampshire, England, U.K.
• Raised—Elmira, Ontario, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto
• Currently—New York, New York, USA


Malcolm T. Gladwell is an English-Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has written five books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013). The first four books were on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Gladwell's books and articles often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences and make frequent and extended use of academic work, particularly in the areas of sociology, psychology, and social psychology. Gladwell was appointed to the Order of Canada 1n 2011.

Early life
Gladwell was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England. His mother is Joyce (Nation) Gladwell, a Jamaican-born psychotherapist. His father, Graham Gladwell, is a British mathematics professor. Gladwell has said that his mother is his role model as a writer. When he was six, his family moved to Elmira, Ontario, Canada.

Gladwell's father noted that Malcolm was an unusually single-minded and ambitious boy. When Malcolm was 11, his father allowed him to wander around the offices at his university, which stoked the boy's interest in reading and libraries. During his high school years, Gladwell was an outstanding middle-distance runner and won the 1,500 meter title at the 1978 Ontario High School 14-year-old championships in Kingston, Ontario. In the spring of 1982, Gladwell interned with the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. He graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto's Trinity College in 1984.

Career
Gladwell's grades were not good enough for graduate school (as Gladwell puts it, "college was not an... intellectually fruitful time for me"), so he decided to go into advertising. After being rejected by every advertising agency he applied to, he accepted a journalism position at The American Spectator and moved to Indiana. He subsequently wrote for Insight on the News, a conservative magazine owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.

In 1987, Gladwell began covering business and science for the Washington Post, where he worked until 1996. In a personal elucidation of the 10,000 hour rule he popularized in Outliers, Gladwell notes, "I was a basket case at the beginning, and I felt like an expert at the end. It took 10 years—exactly that long."

When Gladwell started at The New Yorker in 1996 he wanted to "mine current academic research for insights, theories, direction, or inspiration." His first assignment was to write a piece about fashion. Instead of writing about high-class fashion, Gladwell opted to write a piece about a man who manufactured T-shirts, saying

...it was much more interesting to write a piece about someone who made a T-shirt for $8 than it was to write about a dress that costs $100,000. I mean, you or I could make a dress for $100,000, but to make a T-shirt for $8 – that's much tougher.

Gladwell gained popularity with two New Yorker articles, both written in 1996: "The Tipping Point" and "The Coolhunt." These two pieces would become the basis for Gladwell's first book, The Tipping Point, for which he received a $1 million advance. He continues to write for The New Yorker and also serves as a contributing editor for Grantland, a sports journalism website founded by ESPN's Bill Simmons.

Works
When asked for the process behind his writing, Gladwell has said...

I have two parallel things I'm interested in. One is I'm interested in collecting interesting stories, and the other is I'm interested in collecting interesting research. What I'm looking for is cases where they overlap.

The title for his first book, The Tipping Point (2000), came from the phrase "tipping point"—the moment in an disease epidemic when the virus reaches critical mass and begins to spread at a much higher rate.

Gladwell published Blink (2005), a book explaining how the human subconscious interprets events or cues and how past experiences can lead people to make informed decisions very rapidly.

Gladwell's third book, Outliers (2008) examines the way a person's environment, in conjunction with personal drive and motivation, affects his or her possibility and opportunity for success.

What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009) bundles together Gladwell's favorite articles from The New Yorker since he joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1996. The stories share a common idea, namely, the world as seen through the eyes of others, even if that other happens to be a dog.

David and Goliath (2013) explores the struggle of underdogs versus favorites. The book is partially inspired by a 2009 article Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker, "How David Beats Goliath."

Reception
The Tipping Point and Blink became international bestsellers, each selling over two million copies in the US.

David Leonhardt wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "In the vast world of nonfiction writing, Malcolm Gladwell is as close to a singular talent as exists today" and that Outliers "leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward." Ian Sample of The Guardian (UK) also wrote of Outliers that when brought together, "the pieces form a dazzling record of Gladwell's art. There is depth to his research and clarity in his arguments, but it is the breadth of subjects he applies himself to that is truly impressive."

Criticism of Gladwell tends to focus on the fact that he is a journalist and not a scientist, and as a result his work is prone to oversimplification. The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, "impervious to all forms of critical thinking" and said that Gladwell believes "a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule."

Gladwell has also been criticized for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions. Steven Pinker, even while praising Gladwell's attractive writing style and content, sums up Gladwell as "a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning." Pinker accuses him of using "cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies" in Outliers.

Despite these criticisms Gladwell commands hefty speaking fees: $80,000 for one speech, according to a 2008 New York magazine article although some speeches he makes for free. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/02/2013.)

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Book Reviews 
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.
New York Times Book Review- Steven Pinker

This book full of short conversation pieces is a collection that plays to the author's strengths. It underscores his way of finding suitably quirky subjects (the history of women's hair-dye advertisements; the secret of Heinz's unbeatable ketchup; even the effects of women's changing career patterns on the number of menstrual periods they experience in their lifetimes) and using each as gateway to some larger meaning. It illustrates how often he sets up one premise (i.e. that crime profiling helps track down serial killers) only to destroy it.
New York Times - Janet Maslin

Uniformly delightful...Malcolm Gladwell can write engrossingly about just about anything...His witty, probing articles are as essential to David Remnick's New Yorker as those of Wolcott Gibbs and A.J. Liebling were to Harold Ross's...Gladwell has a gift for capturing personalities, a Borscht Belt comic's feel for timing and a bent for counterintuitive thinking. He loves to start a piece by settling you onto a cushion of received ideas, then yanking it out from under you.
Craig Seligman - Bloomberg News

In What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell leads the reader on delightful side excursions, shows with insightful conversation how one path interweaves with another, and suggests meaning-he is, in short, an interpretative naturalist of American culture.
Alice Evans - Oregonian

Malcolm Gladwell triumphantly returns to his roots with this collections of his great works from The New Yorker magazine....Do yourself a favor and curl up with What the Dog Saw this week: It is more entertaining and edifying than should be legal for any book.
Louisville Courier-Journal - Scott Coffman

(Audio version.) Gladwell's fourth book comprises various contributions to The New Yorker and makes for an intriguing and often hilarious look at the hidden extraordinary. He wonders what... hair dye tell[s] us about twentieth century history, and observes firsthand dog whisperer Cesar Millan's uncanny ability to understand and be understood by his pack. Gladwell pulls double duty as author and narrator; while his delivery isn't the most dramatic or commanding, the material is frequently astonishing, and his reading is clear, heartfelt, and makes for genuinely pleasurable listening.
Publishers Weekly

Gladwell has gathered 22 of his pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker since 1996, arranging them into three sections: "Obsessive, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius," "Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses," and "Personality, Character and Intelligence." Fans who are not familiar with Gladwell's articles will be delighted to discover that his shorter work contains the same level of insight, wit, and talent for making the mundane fascinating as they've come to expect from his longer work. Gladwell's writing here is filled with colorful characters, acute analyses, and intriguing questions. However, be warned that the organization of the articles by topic rather than by date can be confusing, especially since much of what Gladwell is discussing has since changed. For instance, although articles about the Challenger explosion, the stock market, and Enron all have postscripts about developments that occurred after the original publication of these pieces, the original publication dates are indicated neither in the table of contents nor at the start of the pieces, frustrating readers' attempts to learn what time period each article covers.
Library Journal

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Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for What the Dog Saw:

1. According to Steven Pinker's review in the New York Times, Gladwell's essays in What the Dog Saw have to do with "counterintuitive knowledge." In this book what findings, specifically, seem to subvert or turn common sense on its head?

2. Another way in which Gladwell styles his essays is that he uses specific set pieces and and expands them into a wider inquiry. Consider some examples—say, ketchup or hair dye. Where else does Gladwell move from an initial focus on a narrow topic to the larger implications.

3. Gladwell also uses the "straw man" method of persuasion. He begins with a premise that we easily accept (the straw man) then proceeds to knock it down. It leads to surprise, a sort of "wow, I never saw it that way!" What are some of the essays in which Gladwell uses the straw dog approach? Do you find it affective?

4. Which essays did you most enjoy and why? Which surprised you the most?

5. Gladwell has sometimes been described—in this and other works—as facile. In other words, he's been accused of reaching for easy conclusions that fit his overall view, while sometimes ignoring messy evidence that doesn't. Can you find any evidence that this is the case? Does Gladwell present a world that is too neatly wrapped? Or is he simply exploring anomalies where he finds them?

Now for more a few specific questions:

6. Why do we have one type of ketchup as opposed to multiple varieties of mustard?

7. From the essay, "Blowing Up," talk about Taleb Nassim and his theory of markets and investment. Can his basic ideas be applied to other experiences or events?

8. If by any chance you've read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, do Cesar Millan's dog training methods seem familiar...or completely different than what David Wroblewski wrote about in his novel?

9. In "Open Secrets," how does Gladwell connect Enron, Watergate, prostate cancer research, and Osama Bin Laden— three seemingly disparate subjects? Do you agree with his assessment? What is the difference, according to Gladwell, between puzzles and mysteries? Is this just semantics...or is he reaching for something deeper?

10. Talk about what Gladwell has to say about the accuracy of mammograms as a diagnostic tool.

11. Do you accept Gladwell's argument about plagiarism in the essay, "Something Borrowed"?

12. In "The Art of Failure," Gladwell discusses the difference between choking and panicking? How does he differentiate the two? Are they really mutually exclusive as he presents them? What do you think of his assessment of John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s plane crash? Is Gladwell's analysis glib... or has he hit on some buried structure of the human psyche?

13. In his chapter about the Challenger explosion, do you agree with his assessment that "we don't really want the safest of all possible worlds"? Do you believe that any of the disasters in Part Two could have been foretold and prevented?

14. In what way is criminal profiling not "a triumph of forensic analysis," but a "party trick"? Does Gladwell make his point?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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