“What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures” by Malcolm Gladwell
This is a series of essays by Malcolm Gladwell that were featured in the New Yorker, where Gladwell has been a staff writer since 1996. These dozen+ selected essays are handpicked by Gladwell himself, which he said to be his favorites from his entire career span at the New Yorker. And they are indeed the most mind-bending bunch.
The book is broken down into 3 sections. The first is about obsessive people and minor geniuses: not Einstein, Churchill or Mandela; but true to Gladwell’s style he writes about amazing successful people who are nearly unknown outside their area of expertise, like the founder of Chop-O-Matic, or the writer Ben Fountain, or the criminal behaviour analyst that looks straight from a Criminal Minds episode. The second section is dedicated to theories: how we should see the collapse of Enron, or plagiarism, or disaster such as the crash of JFK Jr’s plane. The third section dives deep into predictions: how do we know whether someone is smart, or bad, or capable of doing something extraordinary.
And this is where the Gladwelian twist comes, as Gladwell explains, “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. I don’t know what to conclude about the Challenger crash. It’s gibberish to me — neatly printed indecipherable lines of numbers and figures on graph paper. But what if we look at that problem through someone else’s eyes, from inside someone else’s head?”
Indeed, seeing a problem through someone else’s perspective, like in the case of Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer. Just with the touch of his hand, Millan can amazingly calm down even the angriest and most troubled dogs. We must be wondering what is going on inside Millan’s head as he performs his miracles? Or better yet, what goes on inside the dog’s head?
This is what this book is ultimately all about, what the dog saw.
THE CHAOS THEORY 