What the Dog Saw

Last updated
What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures
What the dog saw.jpg
Paperback edition
Author Malcolm Gladwell
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreNon-fiction
Publisher Little, Brown and Company
Publication date
October 20, 2009
Media typeHardback, e-book, audiobook
Pages432 pp.
ISBN 978-0316075848
Preceded by Outliers, 2008 
Followed by David and Goliath, 2013 

What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures is the fourth book released by author Malcolm Gladwell, on October 20, 2009. The book is a compilation of the journalist's articles published in The New Yorker . [1]

Contents

Background

Gladwell initially covered business and science in The Washington Post before joining the staff at The New Yorker in 1997. [2] Each of the articles first appeared in The New Yorker and was handpicked by Gladwell. The stories share a common theme, namely that Gladwell tries to show us the world through the eyes of others, even if that other happens to be a dog, hence the title. [1]

Synopsis

What the Dog Saw is a compilation of 19 articles by Malcolm Gladwell that were originally published in The New Yorker which are categorized into three parts. The first part, Obsessives, Pioneers, and other varieties of Minor Genius, describes people who are very good at what they do, but are not necessarily well-known. Part two, Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses, describes the problems of prediction. This section covers problems such as intelligence failure, and the fall of Enron. The third section, Personality, Character, and Intelligence, discusses a wide variety of psychological and sociological topics ranging from the difference between early and late bloomers [3] to criminal profiling. [4]

Reception

What the Dog Saw was met with mainly positive reviews. It received profiles in many high-profile publications, including the New York Times , The Guardian , Time Magazine , The Los Angeles Times and The Independent . [1] [5] [6] [7] [8] In particular, Gladwell was praised for his writing and storytelling, and reviewers looked upon the essay format positively, with The Guardian stating "one virtue of What the Dog Saw is that the pieces are perfectly crafted: they achieve their purpose more effectively when they aren't stretched out." [5] What The Dog Saw was criticized for its use of statistics and its lack of technical grounding. [1]

What the Dog Saw debuted at #3 on the New York Times Bestseller List. [9] It spent three weeks in the top 3 and a total of 16 weeks on the chart, appearing concurrently with Gladwell's previous book Outliers . [10] [11] It was also an Amazon Top 25 seller for the month of November. [12] What the Dog Saw was named to Bloomberg's top 50 business books of 2009. [13]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ron Popeil</span> American inventor and marketing personality (1935–2021)

Ronald Martin Popeil, was an American inventor and marketing personality, and founder of the direct response marketing company Ronco. He made appearances in infomercials for the Showtime Rotisserie and coined the phrase "Set it, and forget it!" as well as popularizing the phrase, "But wait, there's more!" on television as early as the mid-1950s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Malcolm Gladwell</span> Canadian journalist and science writer

Malcolm Timothy Gladwell is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has published seven books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can 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), a collection of his journalism; David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013); Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know (2019) and The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (2021). His first five books were on The New York Times Best Seller list. He is also the host of the podcast Revisionist History and co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries.

<i>Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking</i> 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005) is Malcolm Gladwell's second book. It presents in popular science format research from psychology and behavioral economics on the adaptive unconscious: mental processes that work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information. It considers both the strengths of the adaptive unconscious, for example in expert judgment, and its pitfalls, such as prejudice and stereotypes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prego</span> American trademark pasta sauce brand name

Prego is a trade mark brand name pasta sauce of Campbell Soup Company. It was introduced internationally in 1981.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard E. Nisbett</span> American psychologist

Richard Eugene Nisbett is an American social psychologist and writer. He is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished Professor of social psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Nisbett's research interests are in social cognition, culture, social class, and aging. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his advisor was Stanley Schachter, whose other students at that time included Lee Ross and Judith Rodin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Veg-O-Matic</span> Pioneering kitchen appliance marketed via infomercials

Veg-O-Matic is the name of one of the first food-processing appliances to gain widespread use in the United States. It was non-electric and invented by Samuel J. Popeil and later sold by his son Ron Popeil along with more than 20 other distributors across the country, and Ronco, making its debut in 1963 at the International Housewares Show in Chicago, Illinois. It was also sold in Australia by Philip Kives, who purchased it from Samuel Popeil and sold it as one of the first products through his own marketing firm, K-tel.

Nice ’n Easy is a shampoo-in permanent hair-colouring product for home use. It was introduced in 1965, billed as the first shampoo-in hair colour, with the advertising tagline, “The closer he gets...the better you look.”

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heinz Tomato Ketchup</span> Brand of tomato ketchup

Heinz Tomato Ketchup is a brand of ketchup manufactured by the H. J. Heinz Company, a division of the Kraft Heinz Company.

<i>Made to Stick</i>

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is a book by brothers Chip and Dan Heath published by Random House on January 2, 2007. The book continues the idea of "stickiness" popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, seeking to explain what makes an idea or concept memorable or interesting. A similar style to Gladwell's is used, with a number of stories and case studies followed by principles.

<i>The Tipping Point</i> 2000 book by Malcolm Gladwell

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is the debut book by Malcolm Gladwell, first published by Little, Brown in 2000. Gladwell defines a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states: "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do." The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the steep drop in New York City's crime rate after 1990.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Fountain</span> American fiction writer

Ben Fountain is an American writer currently living in Dallas, Texas. He has won many awards including a PEN/Hemingway award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2007) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for his debut novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012).

<i>Outliers</i> (book) 2008 book by Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers: The Story of Success is the non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, how the Beatles became one of the most successful musical acts in human history, how two people with exceptional intelligence—Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer—end up with such vastly different fortunes, how Joseph Flom built Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom into one of the most successful law firms in the world, and how cultural differences play a large part in perceived intelligence and rational decision making. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill, is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours, though the authors of the original study have disputed Gladwell's usage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonah Lehrer</span> American science writer

Jonah Richard Lehrer is an American author and blogger. Lehrer studied neuroscience at Columbia University and was a Rhodes Scholar. Thereafter, he built a media career that integrated science and humanities content to address broad aspects of human behaviour. Between 2007 and 2012 Lehrer published three non-fiction books that became best-sellers, and also wrote regularly for The New Yorker and Wired.com.

<i>Free</i> (Anderson book) Economics book

Free: The Future of a Radical Price is the second book written by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. The book was published on July 7, 2009 by Hyperion. Free is Anderson's follow-up to his book The Long Tail, published in 2006.

Howard Moskowitz is an American market researcher and psychophysicist. He is best known for the detailed study he made of the types of spaghetti sauce and horizontal segmentation. By providing a large number of options for consumers, Moskowitz pioneered the idea of intermarket variability as applied to the food industry.

MovieLens is a web-based recommender system and virtual community that recommends movies for its users to watch, based on their film preferences using collaborative filtering of members' movie ratings and movie reviews. It contains about 11 million ratings for about 8500 movies. MovieLens was created in 1997 by GroupLens Research, a research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, in order to gather research data on personalized recommendations.

Jonathan Weil is an American journalist, analyst and attorney. Born July 20, 1970, he grew up in Hollywood, Florida, and attended Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale. He earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1991 and a juris doctor degree from Southern Methodist University in 1995.

<i>David and Goliath</i> (book) 2013 book by Malcolm Gladwell

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants is a non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on October 1, 2013. The book focuses on the probability of improbable events occurring in situations where one outcome is greatly favored over the other. The book contains many different stories of these underdogs who wind up beating the odds, the most famous being the story of David and Goliath. Despite generally negative reviews, the book was a bestseller, rising to #4 on The New York Times Hardcover Non-fiction chart, and #5 on USA Today's Best-Selling Books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sir Kensington's</span>

Sir Kensington's is an American food company with headquarters in New York City, New York. It was founded by Mark Ramadan, Scott Norton, Brandon Child, and Win Bennett. The company produces Non-GMO Project Verified condiments including ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, ranch dressing, and "Fabanaise", a vegan mayo whose name is a portmanteau of the substitute ingredient aquafaba and mayonnaise which it mimics.

<i>Talking to Strangers</i> Non-fiction book by Malcolm Gladwell

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know is a nonfiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on September 10, 2019. The audiobook version of the book follows Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast-style structure, using Gladwell's narration, interviews, sound bites, and the theme song "Hell You Talmbout".

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Pinker, Steven (2009-11-07). "Book Review - 'What the Dog Saw - And Other Adventures,' by Malcolm Gladwell". New York Times .
  2. Millar, Anna. What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures - Malcolm Gladwell Interview The List . April 29, 2010.
  3. Malcolm Gladwell (October 20, 2008). "Late Bloomers. Why do we equate genius with precocity?". The New Yorker . Retrieved January 4, 2016.
  4. Maslin, Janet (2009-10-19). "Changing the Subject, Maintaining the Tone". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-11-09.
  5. 1 2 Sample, Ian Gladwell's great strength is his ability to make his readers think The Guardian . October 17, 2009.
  6. Altman, Alex Q&A: Author Malcolm Gladwell Time Magazine . October 20, 2009.
  7. The New Yorker writer's sense of curiosity burns bright in this collection of essays Los Angeles Times . November 22, 2009.
  8. A 'New Yorker' stalwart incounterintuitive mood The Independent . November 1, 2009.
  9. New York Times Bestseller List 11-08-2009
  10. New York Times Bestseller List 01-07-2010
  11. New York Times Bestseller List 11-08-2009
  12. Bestsellers in Books for November 2009 Amazon.com.
  13. Pressley, James Top 50 Business Books, Animal Spirits to What the Dog Saw Bloomberg. Jun 17, 2010.

All of the articles in What the Dog Saw can be read for free on Gladwell's website.

Part 1: Obsessives, Pioneers, and other varieties of Minor Genius

Part 2: Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses

Part 3: Personality, Character, and Intelligence