What the dog saw and other adventures

Pt. 1: Obsessives, pioneers, and other varieties of minor genius

The pitchman : Ron Popeil and the conquest of the American kitchen

The ketchup conundrum : mustard now comes in dozens of different varieties

why has ketchup stayed the same?

Blowing up : how Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy.

True colors : hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America

John Rock's error : what the inventor of the birth control pill didn't know about women's health

What the dog saw : Cesar Millan and the movements of mastery

Pt. 2: Theories, predictions and diagnoses. Open secrets : Enron, intelligence and the perils of too much information

Million dollar Murray : why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage

The picture problem : mammography, air power, and the limits of looking

Something borrowed : should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?

Connecting the dots : the paradoxes of intelligence reform

The art of failure : why some people choke and others panic

Blowup : who can be blamed for a disaster like the Challenger explosion? No one, and we'd better get used to it

Pt. 3: Personality, character and intelligence. Late bloomers : why do we equate genius with precocity?

Most likely to succeed : how do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job?

Dangerous minds : criminal profiling made easy

The talent myth : are smart people overrated?

The New-Boy Network : what do job interviews really tell us?

Troublemakers : what pit bulls can teach us about crime.