Wagging the dog

by Scott Garceau of The Philippine Star

WHAT THE DOG SAW (Malcolm Gladwell)

You have to ad-mit one thing about Malcolm Gladwell: he’s in love with ideas. The bestselling author of Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers is a magpie when it comes to ideas. He seems to store them away somewhere, then stitch them together in (seemingly) weird and random combinations. You’re left bewildered — reading, say, Outliers, trying to follow the unpredictable connections between hockey players, Bill Gates, the Beatles in Hamburg, and why Korean pilots have the worst crash records. Logic may sometimes take a backseat, but it’s usually an interesting ride. You may not buy all of Gladwell’s arguments; but you’ll be entertained while reading them.

A staff writer for The New Yorker before hitting pay dirt with the above titles, Gladwell has a kind of cultural precocity — a certain ability to tap into phenomena and relate it back to human curiosity. He reads the public pulse well, in other words, and explains it all with a certain showmanship. It’s the kind of P.T. Barnum, funhouse quality that Tom Wolfe used to brandish back when he was writing non-fiction pieces for Esquire and New York magazine in the ‘60s and ‘70s (notably profiles like “There Goes [Varoom! Varoom!] That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” which helped usher in the New Journalism). Wolfe seemed to intuitively grasp then that it was important to be a cultural lightning rod — whether for criticism or acclaim was really beside the point. Gladwell is similarly not too fussy about what kind of reader reception he gets.

What the Dog Saw is a collection of Gladwell’s New Yorker articles grouped together in three categories (“Obsessives, Pioneers and Other Varieties of Minor Genius,” “Theories, Predictions and Diagnoses” and “Personality, Character and Intelligence”). He claims to be interested in approaching his diverse subjects from unusual viewpoints (hence the book’s title).

Arguably, this collection is treading water for Gladwell. His first books sewed together theories about intuition (Blink) and marketing (The Tipping Point) in convincing, refreshing ways. Outliers left many people scratching their heads. They said Gladwell had gone to the well once too often, was overstating the obvious, was overreaching his point (something about, um, ability relying on talent plus life circumstances, I think).

Still, it was mostly an entertaining read. The Gladwell phenomenon appeared in our midst around the same time as Freakanomics, that bestselling collection of statistical anomalies which tried to challenge people’s preconceptions about, well, everything: crack dealers, nomenclature and success, and whether sumo wrestling was fake or not.

It’s not surprising that Gladwell and Freakanomics do so well in an era when we are engulfed by reality programming. It seems that fiction cannot keep up with the weird stuff that people do. Like, for real. Every day.

In What the Dog Saw, Gladwell is content to sell the sizzle, though occasionally he does serve up some filet mignon. His piece titled “The Picture Problem” (“Mammography, Air Power and the Limits of Looking”) focuses on the peril of relying on increasingly precise technology — whether it’s targeting breast cancer lumps or suspected WMD sites in Iraq. When we use satellite images to shape war policy, or high-tech x-rays to diagnose women’s breasts, we are still relying on a lot of human error and speculation, he notes (the case of US Gen. Colin Powell “selling” the Iraq war to the US public is one example).

Other times, we have too many facts at our fingertips — a phenomenon he writes about in “Open Secrets” (“Enron, Intelligence and the Perils of Too Much Information”), which can make it impossible to decipher reality.

These are meaty topics, and Gladwell serves them up with a fair amount of sizzle. Again, his curiosity and nimble way with research helps us to overlook logical lapses or the absence of any Big Conclusion (these are, after all, New Yorker pieces, meant for light reading).

Gladwell has a way with a profile, too. His piece on inventor Ron Popeil — the guy who turned the Veg-O-Matic into a household name and immortalized spray-on “instant hair” — is a lot of fun, mostly because Popeil is a gifted raconteur. His tales are laced with mother-in-law jokes and corny gags, but it’s clear he knows how to sell. In the age of blogs and cable TV, it’s worth noting that Popeil’s approach was radical way back in the ‘70s: buy TV air time (usually after 11 p.m. when it was cheap), film cheesy commercials showing your product in action, talk nonstop… and watch the product fly off the shelves. All those “time-saving” items you see on sale in local department stores with the “As Seen On TV” sign and the Filipino salesmen or ladies trying to corral you into buying with “Sir, ma’am” microphone pitches and demonstrations owe something to Ron Popeil.

Why did the Veg-O-Matic sell so well? Doubtless, Americans were eager for a better way to slice vegetables. But it was more than that: the Veg-O-Matic represented a perfect marriage between the medium (television) and the message (the gadget)… You could train the camera on the machine and compel viewers to pay total attention to the product you were selling. TV allowed you to do what the best pitchmen strove to do in live demonstrations — make the product the star.

Gladwell doesn’t go a step further, but it could be added that this is why we are so attracted to reality TV: the simple act of aiming a camera at something confers upon it a significance beyond its actual content. We watch, because they’re on TV. The medium is, indeed, still the message.

Give Gladwell credit, too, for roving the landscape for interesting trivia. In his piece titled “The Ketchup Conundrum” (“Mustard Now Comes in Dozens of Varieties. Why Has Ketchup Stayed the Same?”), he focuses on the difference between condiments and sauces, and how there are five fundamental tastes in the human palate: “salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami.” Umami? Yes, umami is “the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or cooked mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato.” It’s the “X factor,” apparently, that determines whether a food becomes an ingredient or a mere condiment.

As he did in Outliers, Gladwell spends a lot of his book — the third section — focusing on intelligence, or how society measures intelligence, and how this often says more about us as a people than the person being measured. In “The Talent Myth,” for instance, he claims that narcissism in people is often rewarded by society, giving the narcissist a disproportional sense of power that is mistaken for talent. I can’t think of a more compelling explanation for Paris Hilton.

In the age of McSweeney’s and Dave Eggars’ roustabout ambitions, Malcolm Gladwell’s retro approach to pulling the lapels of our interest doesn’t seem so quaint. In fact, it seems almost postmodern. After all, there’s a lot of stuff out there competing for our attention. The fact that people have made Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers bestsellers says something about Gladwell’s P.T. Barnum, tail-wagging-the dog approach: it still sells.

 “What The Dog Saw” is available at National Book Store branches.