What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

“In the best of these pieces, what we think isn’t the issue. Instead, I’m more interested in describing what people who think about homelessness or ketchup or financial scandals think about homelessness or ketchup or financial scandals.”

Gladwell’s demotion of the personal judgment in favor of the perspectives of experts reveals a humility in his approach. He will be the eternal student rather than the authority. This searching attitude is reflected in his writing; he repeats a list of subjects in which he is not an expert, thereby revealing the extent of his curious mind and his willingness to start from the beginning.

“The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting.”

In a conversational tone, Gladwell tells his readers that the secret to finding stories is to believe that everyone and everything has one. He then swaps the word “trick,” with its connotations of “magic,” for “challenge,” because thinking in this way is counterintuitive and requires driving against the inherent bias toward finding most topics boring and irrelevant.

“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind of writing that you’ll find in this book, anyway. 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—even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’d really like to be.”

Gladwell’s diminishment of the idea of writing as a persuasive argument, in which the author attempts to change the reader’s opinion until it resembles their own, opens new possibilities. The most important factor of good writing, then, is to widen perspectives, encourage empathy, and engage curiosity, which in turn makes for new ideas. The last statement in this extract, which acknowledges that others might not want to be in other people’s heads, indicates that experience, rather than consensus, is Gladwell’s goal.

“And how do you persuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to customers—not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist every time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it.”

Here, Gladwell takes the reader inside a pitchman’s head, showing the elaborate techniques they use to persuade clients that something that was previously superfluous to their existence is essential to it. The repetition of “time” in having to explain the product multiple “times” with “a different twist every time” emphasizes the storytelling labor of being a pitchman. Then the idea of making clients “follow your hands” as you use the device has a mesmeric quality that encourages them to empathize with your efforts.

“After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of ‘amplitude,’ the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that ‘bloom’ in the mouth. ‘The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing ‘Ode to Joy’ on the piano […] they are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist.”

Gladwell draws upon a tasting expert’s definition of amplitude to explain why Heinz’s ketchup is such a satisfying product that no other brand can compete with it. He uses the blooming metaphor of flourishing flowers to create an impression of apotheosis of taste, in addition to that of a masterpiece being played by inexperienced and expert pianists to show how this humble supermarket product is an ingenious invention. This forms part of Gladwell’s ideas that day-to-day objects that we might overlook can be fascinating.

“Nassim Taleb is a tall, muscular man in his early forties, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a balding head. His eyebrows are heavy and his nose is long. His skin has the olive hue of the Levant. He is a man of moods, and when his world turns dark the eyebrows come together and the eyes narrow and it is as if he were giving off an electric charge.”

Gladwell’s detailed physical description of Nassim Taleb, a key figure in one of his essays, is typical of his approach, which aims to embody characters and so bring them closer to the reader rather than making them abstract figments who have ideas. This description indicates that Gladwell has observed Taleb over time and gotten to know him in several moods. The darkening of Taleb’s world is accompanied by the darkening constrictions of his face, as his heavy eyebrows come together and his eyes give an electric charge, as though in a storm. Here, Gladwell uses pathetic fallacy to show that Taleb is an expressive yet brooding person.

“Shirley Polykoff knew immediately what she wanted to say, because if she believed that a woman had a right to be blonde, she also believed that a woman ought to be able to exercise that right with discretion. ‘Does she or doesn’t she?’ she wrote, translating from the Yiddish to the English. ‘Only her hairdresser knows for sure.’”

Gladwell, in his trademark emphasis on lesser-known parts of history, highlights this seemingly minor moment in the feminist movement of Shirley Polykoff deciding that a woman had a right to dye her hair blonde—with privacy—thereby granting her autonomy over her own body. She translated her judgmental mother-in-law’s Yiddish demand into English and took a tongue-in-cheek approach by adding that only a woman’s hairdresser knew the truth. Her wording emphasized not only the naturalness of the color but the autonomy of the woman.

‘“Does she or doesn’t she?’ wasn’t just about how no one could ever really know what you were doing. It was about how no one could ever really know who you were. It really meant not ‘Does she?’ but ‘Is she?’ It really meant ‘Is she a contented homemaker or a feminist, a Jew or a Gentile—or isn’t she?’”

The series of questions in this passage traces how the slogan disrupts notions of stable identity. When this question is replaced with “Is she or isn’t she?” it speaks to the insecurities that newer immigrants had about fitting in with established white American society—and to the power that seemingly trivial products such as hair dye gave them to pass and disguise their origins. The increasing respectability of hair dye lent a woman further camouflage, as no one would be able to ascertain her politics from her appearance.

“It was the fault of the haphazard nature of science, which all too often produces progress in advance of understanding. If the order of events in the discovery of what was natural had been reversed, his world, and our world, too, would have been a different place.”

Here, in discussing the failure of Pill-founder John Rock’s argument—that the contraceptive was made of the same natural components as those found in the female body—to persuade the Catholic Church to sanction it, Gladwell draws attention to a recurring theme in the book: the gap between scientific progress and interpretation. The word “haphazard” is resonant of the capacity for accidents when it comes to scientific discovery. With hindsight, Gladwell asserts the profundity of what would have happened if Rock had presented the Catholic Church with different arguments regarding the Pill’s legitimacy in the repetition of “world,” which serves to contrast the past with the present.

“In Mexico, on his grandfather’s farm, dogs were dogs and humans were humans: each knew its place. But in America, dogs were treated like children, and owners had shaken up the hierarchy of human and animal. Sugar’s problem was Lynda. JonBee’s problem was Scott.”

Gladwell enters dog-whisperer Cesar Millan’s head as he shows us a Mexican immigrant’s perspective on the difference in relationships between animals and humans in his two countries. The notion of dogs being treated like children in America is emphasized in Gladwell’s listing of the troubled dogs’ names prior to that of their human owners and his assertion that the owners are at fault. Moreover, the diminutive nature of the dogs’ names, which sound like the nicknames of children, shows the owners’ doting attitudes toward them.

“Intelligence officers aren’t dependent on scraps from spies. They are inundated with information. Solving puzzles remains critical: we still want to know precisely where Osama bin Laden is hiding and where North Korea’s nuclear-weapons facilities are situated. But mysteries increasingly take center stage.”

Gladwell overturns the common assumption that frustrations in intelligence are due to a lack of information. Instead, the idea of being “inundated with information” conveys notions of an unhelpful surplus of data. While intelligence officers still have the same old problems of wanting to know their enemies’ activities, they must dwell more in ambiguous mysteries than on factual puzzles that can be solved with a single clue.

“Our usual moral intuitions are of little use […] when it comes to a few hard cases. Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.”

Gladwell presents an unsavory ultimatum when it comes to big societal problems like homelessness. The pragmatic measures that would enable us to alleviate if not totally fix the problem—such as giving some homeless people apartments so they do not run up huge medical or social-care bills—go against the moral fact that a proportion of working people are also struggling financially. However, the more altruistic measures such as soup kitchens and shelters are not working to significantly ease the burden of homelessness, for either unhoused people or society. The final phrase in this extract, “We cannot do both,” indicates the necessity of making a choice, however hard, and emphasizes the imperfection of any solution.

“You can build a high-tech camera capable of taking pictures in the middle of the night […] but the system works only if the camera is pointed in the right place, and even then the pictures are not self-explanatory. They need to be interpreted, and the human task of interpretation is often a bigger obstacle than the technical task of picture taking.”

Here, Gladwell shows how the capacity to take increasingly detailed pictures is only half the battle. The allusion to the camera being pointed in the right place indicates the importance of humans knowing where to look and thus needing to apply their own judgment. This, along with interpretation, that other task of judgment, has not necessarily improved as technology has.

“The reason a radiologist is required to assume that the overwhelming number of ambiguous things are normal […] is that the overwhelming number of ambiguous things really are normal. Radiologists are, in this sense, a lot like baggage screeners at airports. The chances are that the dark mass in the middle of the suitcase isn’t a bomb, because you’ve seen a thousand dark masses like it in suitcases before, and none of those were bombs.”

Here Gladwell uses his trademark technique of analogy to show how radiologists screening for cancer and baggage screeners in search of bombs must assume that the largest portion of ambiguities are normal. He thus traces a parallel in human thinking in two different spheres of employment. Gladwell employs repetition to echo the repetitive manual processes of radiologists and baggage screeners and to convey the pattern of thoughts in their heads.

“I got a copy of the script for Frozen. I found it breathtaking. I realize that this isn’t supposed to be a relevant consideration. And yet it was: instead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause.”

When Gladwell finds a portion of his article plagiarized in Bryony Lavery’s play and takes up her script, he finds an unexpected twist in what should be a predictable story of personal outrage. This contradiction—finding himself flattered by this novel channeling of his words—is introduced with a colon for emphasis. Gladwell’s reaction speaks to his curiosity about the workings of other minds, as someone has taken what he has begun and applied it where he never could.

“The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life.”

After Gladwell has shown how influence and the evolution of preexisting ideas are inevitable in every sphere of artistic production, he is adamant that plagiarism fundamentalists do not have a leg to stand on. As a secular rationalist, he feels that pretending “chains of influence and evolution do not exist” is akin to religions like Christianity’s belief in a virgin birth and eternal life. Unlike the virgin birth, ideas do not spring from a single source fully formed but are conceived and altered in their interactions with the world.

“In the real world, intelligence is invariably ambiguous. Information about enemy intentions tends to be short on detail. And information that’s rich in detail tends to be short on intentions.”

Gladwell shows the difficulties in receiving useful information in the sphere of intelligence. While that would hypothetically be material that details enemy intentions, what the interpreters typically get is the opposite kind of intelligence. Here, in this paradox of receiving abundant useless information, Gladwell draws attention to the problem of noise, a concern in other essays as well.

“We live in an age obsessed with success, with documenting the myriad ways by which talented people overcome challenges and obstacles. There is as much to be learned, though, from documenting the myriad ways in which talented people sometimes fail.” 

Here, Gladwell proposes the recording of an alternative history of human achievement, one that is based on documenting and studying failure as well as success. Turning our back on the American-dream narrative of how people overcome obstacles to investigate why talented people fail has its own important lessons, on a collective scale as well as an individual one, and will encourage us to reconsider how we assess people.

“The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.”

Gladwell shows how in an age where genius is inextricably linked to precocity, the late-blooming talents of artists like Cézanne are misunderstood. While people are tempted to attribute the timing of the late bloomer’s genius to obstacles in life, Gladwell argues that the obstacles are actually necessary to this alternative creative process.

“But no one is saying that Dan Shonka is somehow missing some key ingredient in his analysis; that if he were only more perceptive he could predict Chase Daniel’s career trajectory. The problem with picking quarterbacks is that Chase Daniel’s performance can’t be predicted. The job he’s being groomed for is so particular and specialized that there is no way to know who will succeed at it and who won’t.”

Here Gladwell shows the limitations of pre-performance analysis in his assessment that the football coach’s quality of perception is not the problem in predicting how quarterbacks will fare. Gladwell introduces notions of a more uncertain world than we might be comfortable with when he states that there is no alternative to seeing how things will play out in performance.

“Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous. The hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It’s a party trick.”

Gladwell exposes the phony nature of Brussel’s techniques for predicting the identity of serial killers and developing a profile for them (making the mystery a “hedunit” rather than a “whodunit”). The secret of early profilers like Brussel lay not in accuracy but in amplitude of predictions, knowing that in this numbers game, the larger the number of predictions, the higher the likelihood of some of them being true. The juxtaposition of the serious field of forensic analysis with the levity of party tricks blurs the boundaries between the two and diminishes the professionalism of Brussel’s investigative tradition.

“They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.”

Enron’s propensity to look for talented individuals who broke the mold ultimately led to the company’s downfall, owing to a lack of systemic integration. Gladwell plays with the colloquial expression to “think outside the box” to illustrate this, as the alternative image of a box in need of repair finds fault with the entire talent-seeking system.

“Most of the time, we assume that people display the same character traits in different situations. We habitually underestimate the large role that context plays in people’s behavior.”

Gladwell here illustrates the common mistake of believing that others, especially those we don’t know well, will behave analogously across different situations, as though their personality is a fixed entity. Instead, the truth is that behavior and even perceptions of personality are determined by context as much as they are innate.