Malcolm Gladwell's "What the Dog Saw"

What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I liked The Tipping Point, and I was kind of liking this collection of essays at first. Made up of seemingly random topics that all lead to a "now you know the rest of the story" kind of reveal, it is mostly an intriguing read. Some of the stories are, frankly, quite dull, but they all seemed to have at least one place where he mined the research to make an interesting connection or had a useful insight. But when he started in one essay to make a case for the pseudo-science of "value added measurement" for teachers, and made extravagant claims both for the impact of individual teachers and for the difference in outcomes between so-called good and bad teachers--claims that have since been debunked by statisticians and researchers and courts of law--I soured on his discernment. And, because I knew how wrong he was on this one topic, I had to wonder how many of his other clever connections were based on faulty information.

Maybe this was the only one, but likely not. And there went the main source of pleasure in reading the essays.

You know how, when you get a nasty surprise in a bite of your restaurant food, it puts you off the rest of the meal? That's how I feel about this collection.

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