Synopses & Reviews
What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20
th century?
In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point; Blink; and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw, he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from The New Yorker over the same period.
Here is the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer" who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias" and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.
"Good writing," Gladwell says in his preface, "does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. 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." What the Dog Saw is yet another example of the buoyant spirit and unflagging curiosity that have made Malcolm Gladwell our most brilliant investigator of the hidden extraordinary.
Synopsis
For readers of Wired magazine, a collection of journalism that touches on the past, present, and future of technology, by a New York Times bestselling author.
Synopsis
New York Times,
Wired,
Atlantic Monthly,
Discover bestselling author Steven Kotler has written extensively about those pivotal moments when science fiction became science fact…and fundamentally reshaped the world. Now he gathers the best of his best, updated and expanded upon, to guide readers on a mind-bending tour of the far frontier, and how these advances are radically transforming our lives. From the ways science and technology are fundamentally altering our bodies and our world (the world’s first bionic soldier, the future of evolution) to those explosive collisions between science and culture (life extension and bioweapons), we’re crossing moral and ethical lines we’ve never faced before.
As Kotler writes, “Life is tricky sport—and that's the emotional core of this story, the real reason we can’t put Pandora back in the box. When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the promise of an easier tomorrow. It’s the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?”
Join Kotler in this fascinating exploration of our incredible next: a deep dive into those future technologies happening now—and what it means to be a part of this brave new world.
About the Author
Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and cofounder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project. His books include the nonfiction works The Rise of Superman, Abundance, A Small Furry Prayer, and West of Jesus, as well as the novel The Angle Quickest for Flight. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. His articles have appeared in more than sixty publications, including the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Wired, GQ, Outside, Popular Science, Men's Journal, and Discover. He also writes Far Frontiers, a blog about technology and innovation for Forbes.com, and The Playing Field, a blog about the science of sport and culture for PsychologyToday.com. He lives in New Mexico with his wife, the author Joy Nicholson.