Malcolm Gladwell to save book business by recycling old stories

Victory lap time for Malcolm Gladwell, whose fourth book is but an anthology of his 13 years of feature writing for The New Yorker. Published today, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures is divided into three parts: profiles in minor genius, organizing people through theories, and predictions. Lest the reader think this is the non-fiction equivalent of a contractual-obligation greatest hits album, the official blurb notes that Gladwell “selected the essays himself.” Frankly, they shouldn’t even be publishing this one on paper, except Amazon hasn’t gotten around to making title-specific gift cards for the Kindle yet. Still, no one loves perpetuating the Gladwell myth more than old media: his old Elmira, Ontario hometown newspaper The Record got a chance to ask him how he made it all happen: “I don’t know … I never really planned my career … There has never been a master plan …” and etc. Last year, Gladwell made three different appearances on the stage of Convocation Hall at his alma mater, the University of Toronto, which he fled in 1984 to work as an intern at arch-conservative magazine The American Spectator. This year, he needn’t work so hard to draw attention to himself. Want to be a journalist like him? “Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school,” he tells TIME. “The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.” But the inevitably kind review from Ian Sample of The Guardian boils the book down to a Gladwellian dilemma, given how all the stories are available online for free on the author’s website: “Is the feeling of being mugged by the publisher trumped by the virtue of convenience?”