Description Preface | The Wellspring of My Stories: Others, Curiosity, and Life Part 1: Mavericks, Pioneers, and Other Minor Geniuses 01 True Colors | The Hidden Postwar History of America as Seen Through Hair Dye 02 What the Dog Saw | The Gestures of a Master Who Captivates Dogs 03 The Ketchup Conundrum | Why Are There Dozens of Mustards but Only One Ketchup? 04 Blowing Up | How Nassim Taleb Turned the Inevitability of Disaster into an Investment Strategy 05 The Kitchen King | Ron Popeil Conquers the American Kitchen 06 John Rock's Error | What Even the Inventor of the Pill Didn't Know About Women's Bodies Part 2: Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses 01 Open Secrets | Enron, Espionage, and the Dangers of Too Much Information 02 Million-Dollar Murray | Solving the Problem of Homelessness 03 The Picture Problem | Mammography, Aerial Photography, and the Limits of Looking 04 Something Borrowed | The Harsh Price of a Plagiarism Charge 05 Connecting the Dots | The Paradox of Intelligence Reform 06 The Art of Failure | The Difference Between Choking and Panicking 07 Blowup | Another Truth Behind the Challenger Disaster Part 3: Personality, Character, and Intelligence 01 Late Bloomers | Is Precocity a Prerequisite for Genius? 02 Most Likely to Succeed | What Is He Really Good At? 03 Dangerous Minds | Does Criminal Profiling Actually Work? 04 The Talent Myth | How Smart People Became Overvalued 05 The New-Boy Network | What Is the True Value of a Job Interview? 06 In Defense of Pit Bulls | The Trap of Generalizing Missed by Breed-Ban Laws Inside the Book I wrote that essay after the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. in July 1999. As a novice pilot, he became disoriented in bad weather and crashed. To understand that accident, I flew with a professional pilot in the same type of aircraft, through bad weather, experiencing a steep dive myself. It wasn't a pointless exercise—it was something I had to do. Only then could I truly understand what it means for a plane to crash. Simply knowing the sequence of events wasn't enough. (pp. 10–11) The secret to finding ideas is believing that everyone and everything has a story only they can tell. It's called a "secret," but in reality, holding on to that belief is very difficult. We instinctively assume that the people, objects, and events around us are not interesting. That's why we flip through ten TV channels before finally stopping on the eleventh. At the bookstore, we thumb through a dozen novels before finally choosing just one. We filter, we rank, we judge. This is, in fact, natural behavior—there is simply too much in the world. (p. 13) Frick explained, "Immigrants worried about looking shabby, so many of them made their own clothes to imitate the latest fashions—fitting themselves into the image of Americans. That's when phrases like 'clothes make the man' and 'first impressions matter' came about." In the end, the question "Does she or doesn't she?" is one that arises in an age when we can no longer tell not just someone's natural hair color, but their true self. What this slogan really means isn't "Does she dye it or not?" but simply "Is she or isn't she?"—in other words, "Is she a housewife or not?" (pp. 25–26) Why did the Veg-O-Matic sell like hotcakes? First, consumers wanted a product that made it easier to cut vegetables. Beyond that, the Veg-O-Matic perfectly united the medium (television) with the message (the product). In truth, it was an extremely simple product: you placed a potato on the mold and pressed down, and it was ready to be made into fries. There were no buttons to push, no hidden complicated mechanisms. A two-minute demonstration was enough to dispel any fear of an unfamiliar new product. And simply pointing a camera at a vegetable being sliced was enough to instantly capture viewers' attention. In the end, television turned products into stars more effectively than even the best salesman ever could. (p. 135) When you can't solve a puzzle, it's usually easy to find out who's responsible—the person hiding the information. But when you can't solve a mystery, the cause...