What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures
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Brings together some of Gladwell's writing from The New Yorker in the past decade, including: the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill; the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz; spotlighting Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen; and the secrets
… More »Brings together some of Gladwell's writing from The New Yorker in the past decade, including: the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill; the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz; spotlighting Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen; and the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer." Gladwell also explores intelligence tests, ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias," and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.
« LessPt. 1: 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 -- Pt. 2: 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 -- Pt. 3: Personality, character and intelligence. Late bloomers: why do we equate genius with precocity? -- 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 talent myth: are smart people overrated? -- The New-Boy Network: what do job interviews really tell us? -- Troublemakers: what pit bulls can teach us about crime
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Add Age SuitabilityBazooka_B9 thinks this title is suitable for 12 years and over
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Add a QuoteIt was a textbook dog-biting case: unneutered, ill-trained, charged-up dogs with a history of aggression and an irresponsible owner somehow get loose and set upon a small child. The dogs had already passed through the animal bureaucracy of Ottawa, and the city could easily have prevented the second attack with the right kind of generalization - a generalization based not on breed but on the known and meaningful connection between dangerous dogs and negligent owners.
The kinds of dogs that kill people change over time, because the popularity of certain breeds changes over time. The one thing that doesn't change is the total number of the people killed by dogs. When we have more problems with pit bulls, it's not necessarily a sign that pit bulls are more dangerous than other dogs. It could just be a sign that pit bulls have become more numerous.
They were looking for people who had the talent to think ouside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.
One possibility is simply to hire and reward the smartest people. But the link between, say, IQ and job performance is distinctly underwhelming. . . . 'What IQ doesn't pick up is effectiveness at commonsense sorts of things, especially working with people,' Richard Wagner, a psychologist a Florida State University, says. 'In terms of how we evaluate schooling, everything is about working by yourself. If you work with someone else, it's called cheating. Once you get out in the real world, everything you do involves working with other people.'
in our zeal to correct what we believe to be the problems of the past, we end up creating new problems for the future.
Writing was the thing I ended up doing by default, for the simple reason that it took me forever to realize that writing could be a job. Jobs were things that were serious and daunting. Writing was fun.
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Add a CommentMy first experience with Gladwell, and i very much enjoyed how each essay encouraged me to look at the topics from different points of view. I found myself having discussions about the topics of this book with my family, friends, and even strangers - definitely conversation starter material here! I'm excited to read more Gladwell!
This is a collection of Gladwell's writings from The New Yorker. Love Gladwell’s way of writing, but I need time to digest each article. I guess that is the beauty of his work with The New Yorker; you have time between each issue. My husband and I have had a lot of discussions about some of the topics such as homelessness, teaching, the “naturalness” of the birth control pill. So I got good mileage out of this book. One of the articles I thought was most interesting was the one on Nassim Nicholas Taleb who wrote The Black Swan which I read (or tried to read) earlier this year. What a great way to finally understand Taleb through Gladwell's writing!
This is my least favorite of Gladwell's books. It is just a rehash of his past magazine articles from The New Yorker. There is some very interesting subjects covered in this book, but I could not shake the feeling that Gladwell released this book to monetize his current fame. One article is very interesting as it touches on cancer in women and theories of why it is on the increase in Western society. Overall I would not recommend this book as you can read all of the articles on-line.
Another collection of Malcolm Gladwell articles. Brilliant and entertaining, as always.
I rarely read this kind of book, but I took a chance... It just feels like reading a collection of scholarly articles, not too entertaining by my standards. So I will stick to my fictions.
Overall I liked this book. As my first experience with Gladwell I was impressed by his ability to link two seemingly unconnected things and make witty and almost obvious connections. Although some of the articles were not of interest to me personally, there were enough tidbits in there to keep me reading and add to my ever-growing file of useless but interesting information.
It took me a while to get into this one. I was missing the tightly focused themes of Gladwell's earlier books and found these essays hit and miss. What I liked I really liked, though.
Some interesting pieces, some snoozers too. In both cases though, I gotta say, Malcom Gladwell is certainly thorough! My advice - skim for the stories that spark your interest and get you thinking. Don't feel guilty about skipping some altogether. Gladwell's BLINK is a more worthwhile read.
Could not get through this book at all. The essays seemed to drag on too much. Guess I am not a Gladwell fan, as much as I would like to be.
I've been a huge Gladwell fan from the moment I read The Tipping Point, and I enjoyed Blink even more, but found Outliers to be disappointing, and What the Dog Saw to be even less inspiring. While there are hints of the trademark Gladwell insight into unusual patterns and human behaviors, I found these short pieces to be underwhelming on their own, and as a collection I thought the whole was less than the sum of its parts. While Gladwell tackles many questions of interest to me (Why are there so many varieties of mustard but not ketchup? What do job interviews really tell us? Are smart people overrated?), the questions turned out to be more interesting than the answers. Here's hoping for another Blink in Gladwell's next book.