What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

The New Yorker magazine debuted in 1925. It was intended to be a combination of current affairs, arts criticism, and literature and cartoons for an urban, well-educated audience. It has a roster of famous contributors, including renowned authors like JD Salinger and Dorothy Parker, and also employs staff writers such as Gladwell, who are regular contributors to the magazine.

Staff writers respond to happenings in the cultural milieu but also follow personal interests in their pieces. Many, with lives as content creators outside of the magazine, emerge as personalities who attract a particular readership. This is the case with Gladwell, who has published seven books in addition to his columns and has his own podcast, Revisionist History. Nevertheless, the shorter format of the magazine article was important in offering Gladwell the space and resources to test out his many ideas before committing them to a book. He also benefited from the magazine’s scrupulous editing.

During Gladwell’s tenure as a staff writer, the magazine has strengthened its commitment to accurate reporting to battle against the proliferation of fake news. While Gladwell’s 2002 essay “Blowing Up” included the accidentally invented term “igon values,” from 2010 onward, the magazine has employed dozens of dedicated fact-checkers to weed out such inaccuracies (71). Whereas in a more reliable news climate, the magazine was able to focus on the exploration of ideas without branding itself as a news outlet reporting hard facts, more recently it has changed its approach to stand out as a reliable news source.

Minor geniuses are defined by Gladwell not as “towering architects of the world in which we live” but those like Ron Popeil and Shirley Polykoff who changed the experience of our everyday lives (x). While the major geniuses Gladwell cites, such as Einstein and Winston Churchill, changed the course of world events and our understanding of our place in the universe, the minor genius’s inventions and insights change our daily experiences of the world.

For example, Ron Popeil’s increasingly elaborate kitchen gadgets gave people the feeling of being professional chefs in their own homes. However, Gladwell makes clear that part of Popeil’s genius was the ability to find as many ways as necessary to persuade people that they needed a gadget they never dreamed of. Popeil thereby had a varied portfolio of skills, including those of the actor and storyteller as well as the obsessive inventor in his kitchen. This multiplicity of skills forms the basis of the pragmatism that Gladwell praises elsewhere in the essays’ stories of success.

Shirley Polykoff also had to demonstrate a variety of skills as the copywriter who made hair-dye respectable, whereas her rival at L’Oréal, Ilon Specht, had to use her intuition to step ahead with the times and find a new slogan that matched liberated working women’s higher sense of self-esteem. “Because I’m worth it” became a mantra both for women who already believed that they were worth more expensive hair dye and those who wanted to believe it, as they imagined new, confident versions of themselves (87). While this seems like a small change, Specht was able to coin a catchphrase that would steal a rival’s profits and resonate with women for decades.

Finally, Mexican immigrant dog-whisperer Cesar Millan’s ingenious use of his body not only puts angry dogs at ease but also demonstrates the communications skills that cerebral Americans have lost. His ability to both show empathy and maintain boundaries is a game changer for dogs made insecure by their owners’ erratic behavior. Here, Gladwell points out that essential innovations are not solely the province of Nobel Prize winners but also occur in subtle techniques that enable the harmonious coexistence of different species.

The late-blooming genius is both a literal and metaphorical figure in Gladwell’s book. We are introduced to them on a literal level in Gladwell’s essay “Late Bloomers,” in the figure of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), the French Postimpressionist artist who flourished in his sixties, contrary to the popular understanding that genius was reliant upon the “exuberance and energy of youth” and a premeditated rather than experimental conception of art (299). Cézanne, who became a master of color and form in later life, would have never met the metric of an early-life artistic genius because of his lack of proficiency in drawing, the skill that art masters use to distinguish talented artists from an early age. Instead, late bloomers like Cézanne and the American PEN-winning author Ben Fountain (1958-) achieve greatness through extensive research and trial and error. This more labored, meandering path lies contrary to that of the flash of inspiration associated with early-blooming geniuses and can be therefore dismissed or overlooked by the culture. Still, the time taken can be of value itself, as it produces insights that would not have been available in a short time. For example, Fountain, in his extensive research in Haiti, was able to see the country as a “laboratory” where “everything that’s gone on in the last 500 years—colonialism, race, power, politics, ecological disasters, it’s all there in concentrated form” (300). Gladwell shows how the culture’s discomfort with stories of late-blooming genius means that they are often distorted until they resemble the more “familiar story” of a precocious genius who easily achieves success (296). Such distortion can be damaging on a societal level, as insistence on genius manifesting early might discourage the continued efforts of those with the potential to bloom later.

Late-blooming genius appears on a metaphorical level in Gladwell’s other essays, in people with more applied-art creativity, such as Popeil and Polykoff, who respond to what has come before them and the demands of their society. This concept of innovation as conversation rather than monologue is also apparent in Gladwell’s definition of a good leader, who is not a narcissist or a star-hunter at the recruitment level but rather someone who fosters a culture where everyone can contribute and be rewarded accordingly.