What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

The essays in What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures are extracted from The New Yorker magazine and appeared as articles around the turn of the 21st century. Chronologically, the selection in the book spans from the 1996 “Blowup,” about who is to blame for disasters, near the beginning of his tenure as a staff writer for The New Yorker, to December 2008’s “Most Likely to Succeed,” which looks at the disparity between predictors of success and actual performance.

Gladwell wants readers to consider his essays thematically rather than chronologically and thus arranges his work in three parts according to the broad categories of minor geniuses, faulty predictions, and personality traits. Still, in some cases, the timing of his essays coincides with the writing and publication of his three earlier books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005) and Outliers: The Story of Success (2008). In other aspects, his writing reflects recent world events.

Gladwell’s idea that small things make a big difference, expressed in The Tipping Point, features in these essays in his conscious decision to look for genius and innovation in lesser-known people and events. While this notion underpins all of Part 1, the minor-genius section, it is especially evident in “True Colors,” written on March 22, 1999, in which Gladwell traces the women’s-liberation movement through the so-called frivolous household product of hair dye. The role of Shirley Polykoff in making the once scandalous process of dyeing one’s hair respectable is essential, Gladwell argues, as it is in dialogue with the feminist process of allowing women to reinvent themselves and try on different roles. Further evidence of Gladwell’s interest in minutiae is apparent in “The Art of Failure,” written in 2000, which discusses the difference between panicking and the less-studied phenomenon of choking in athletic and scholastic performance. The distinction between the overwhelmed underthinking of novices and the overthinking of capable, experienced people in stressful contexts is essential in order to correctly assess candidates’ skill and aptitudes.

Gladwell’s preoccupation with decision-making, particularly the instantaneous kind examined in Blink, also manifests in the mid-2000s essays. This is evident in “The New Boy Network,” written in May 2000, which explores why three potential employers reached the same fast decision about a candidate’s suitability for a role despite knowing very little about him. This suggests that Gladwell’s curiosity about how and why people make decisions on instinct has been a sustained preoccupation and that the fruits of such early essays were instructive in the production of his 2005 book. While the essays in Part 2 about predictions and diagnoses are about decision-making, Gladwell critiques not the swift form of choosing but that guided by data and imagery. In “The Picture Problem,” written in December 2004, Gladwell compares the continued unreliability of increasingly advanced imaging in the fields of both military defense and medicine. While decisions made in locating military targets or diagnosing breast lumps are educated, researched-backed ones, the impossibility of 100% accuracy indicates that there will always be potential for error in decision-making, regardless of the processes we undertake.

The interests reflected in Outliers: The Story of Success (2008) have been present since at least 2000, when Gladwell wrote “The Pitchman” and explored exactly why the men of the Morris Popeil clan were able to sell kitchen gadgets when their competitors could not. His exploration of winning formulas continues in his study of Heinz ketchup in “The Ketchup Conundrum” (2004), which—uniquely, in the history of American condiments—cannot be outdone or replaced by competitors. Here, he employs research from several quarters to test his claim. The essay selections chronologically close to the publication of Outliers, however, are divergent in focus, almost exclusively centering on standout individuals and how to identify them—whether the serial killers of “Dangerous Minds” (November 2007) or the effective teachers and quarterbacks of “Most Likely to Succeed” (December 2008).

Gladwell’s essay selection can also be examined in light of the seismic global events that occurred during the 12 years over which they were written. Overall, the essays reflect personal interests and reference events from history, both recent and deep back into the 20th century, which allows Gladwell to gain perspective on his subject matter and form theories with the gift of hindsight. The turn of the millennium does not explicitly feature in the selection; however, in the earlier essays especially, Gladwell is looking back to the geniuses, wars, and inventions of the 20th century and trying to make sense of them from his point in time. This is especially the case with “John Rock’s Pill Error” (2000), where Gladwell examines whether the contraceptive’s founder might have achieved a different result with the Catholic Church back in the 1960s if he had promoted the Pill as a lifesaver rather than a life preventative. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, Gladwell joins others who tried to puzzle out why this seemingly random event occurred in “Connecting the Dots” (2003), in which he argues that focusing on the wrong data was a problem but that a different intelligence strategy might not have worked in preventing the incident either. Here, he works toward a conclusion shared by many of his essays: Disasters are seldom preventable, regardless of the amount of data available.

The essays’ publication in 2009 came at the start of the global downturn following the financial crash of 2007 and 2008, bookended by events such as the widespread loss of subprime loan investment in 2007 and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. While Gladwell does not directly address the recession, some of the essays, such as “Open Secrets” (January 2007) and even “The Talent Myth,” which was written as early as 2002, address the egocentric, star-fixated nature of companies like Enron, where the few thrive at the expense of the many and there is a lack of systemic efficiency and integration. These essays foreshadow the larger-scale problem of individual greed and unsustainable growth that precipitated the crash. Although Gladwell typically does not directly respond to current news and world events in his feature writing, he reflects contemporary societal concerns in his understanding of history and willingness to make comparisons between oblique and pressing phenomena.