Essay Questions

What does the dog see?

The title essay is a profile of Cesar Millan, known to millions of television viewers as “The Dog Whisperer.” He is a trainer whose ability to transform even the wildest, most feral and aggressive dog into a lovable mutt who only wants to lick a human face. It is a sort a magic act from one perspective, but Gladwell brings the magic down to the science. And the science is most clearly distinguished by revealing the difference between chimps and dogs. The available data suggests that in every way chimps are more intelligent than dogs, yet this same species fails spectacularly in comparison to dogs when asked to find the food hidden beneath a cup—even when the human points to correct cup. The dog sees humans as creatures that will help them figure things out in a way that not only chimps, cows, giraffes and even cats don’t.

What does Gladwell identify as, for the cost of manufacture and the price of purchase, perhaps the single greatest kitchen appliance in history?

The book opens with a profile of the man who almost single-handedly changed the face of television advertising: Ron Popeil. Popeil is, of course, the head of RonCo, the company which gave the world the Pocket Fisherman, Mr. Microphone and the Cap Snaffler. Popeil is also the man who transformed the world advertising products from the limitations of the 30- and 60-second commercial into the thirty minute long presentations that revolutionized marketing and television programming with wildly successful new programming type know as the informercial. Of all the many products RonCo products which Popeil developed and turned into massively blockbuster products, however, none captures Gladwell’s imagination quite like the Showtime Rotisserie & BBG. Not only does Gladwell term it the best appliance for the kitchen ever made, but it also produced a tagline which transcended its marketing and moved into the realm of pop culture: “Just set it and forget it.”

What is Gladwell’s assessment of the development of vaunted FBI criminal profiling system which would later be dramatized to high ratings and critical raves in the Netflix series Mindhunter?

This description of the methodology used in the now-famous history of meeting with famous serial killers in prisons across the country is a very instructive clue as Gladwell’s opinion: “Douglas and Ressler didn’t interview a representative sample of serial killers to come up with their typology. They talked to whoever happened to be in the neighborhood. Nor did they interview their subjects according to a standardized protocol. They just sat down and chatted, which isn’t a particularly firm foundation for a psychological system.” Indeed, Gladwell will go on to compare the methodology which forms the FBI serial killer profiling to that which carnival fortune-tellers perfect to demonstrate the “magic” of cold readings: fuzzy facts lacking specificity, the general assertion that could fit nearly anybody, and a lots of guessing. Ultimately, Gladwell’s assessment of the actual usefulness of the FBI criminal profile is that it is less an example of data-driven forensic analysis than a cool party trick that seems to get it right a lot more often than it actually does.