From his new book, What the Dog Saw, a collection of essays that originally appeared in New Yorker magazine.
The Pitchman
Ron Popeil and the conquest of the American kitchen
8,737 words
The Ketchup Conundrum
Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same?
5,332 words.
Blowing Up
How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy
7,787 words
True Colors
Hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America
7,167 words
John Rock’s Error
What the co-inventor of the Pill didn’t know about women’s health
7,373
What the Dog Saw
Cesar Millan and the movements of mastery
unavaialable
Open Secrets
Enron, intelligence, and …

Music Edition
I find that people who don’t know much about music tend to ask the same few questions when given the task of interviewing an artist. I’m guessing there’s an equivalent in every line of work, but I’ll leave it to someone else to inform us of the complete list of banal questions in politics (“What’s it feel like to be a senator/congressman/president?”), movies (“What’s it like to be famous?”) or plumbing (“Why did you choose urine and feces as your work medium?”).
For music though, here are the questions that …