Malcolm Gladwell has nice hair.

Malcolm Gladwell sports a fro that would have put Hendrix to shame, and a brain that would have made Einstein just a little bit jealous. It’s not an ineffable, ivory tower kind of mind, but one that can look at people and how they work, both individually and in groups, and come up with spectacular revelations about the human creature.

In What the Dog Saw we get a glimpse of Gladwell crafting his style, through 19 articles from his last 13 years as a staff writer at The New Yorker. His previous three books, Blink!, The Tipping Point and Outliers rocketed to No. 1 status on the bestseller lists. In this book, Gladwell takes fascinating premises — such as why homelessness might be easier to solve than to manage, or the history of the birth control pill — and opens it up for us in ways we likely wouldn’t have considered. Switching back and forth between narrative and research, he shows us profound connections without ever drowning us in academic detail. Gladwell delves into pop culture and goes beyond trite trend-spotting to grasp deep anthropological truths about homo sapiens that reveal us in an honest, compelling way.

For instance, he pulls the rug out from criminal profiling — revealing the research into how many times it’s been accurate, versus the number of times it’s been grossly inaccurate. He shows us how much our desire to believe something supports the sweeping generalizations made by many profilers. He even describes some of the tricks of the fortune-telling trade, and how often they crop up in criminal profiles. Then he jumps to an assessment of Cesar Milan, television’s Dog Whisperer. Taking research from anthropologists, ethologists and other “ologists” I didn’t even know existed, he shows us what Milan looks like from the eyes of the dog, and then relates those discoveries to the public-speaking differences between Clinton and Bush. In another chapter which will likely stick with you for a while, he includes a chillingly prescient story from 1996 that predicts the inevitable consequences of space exploration, which was proven by Columbia almost exactly seven years after the article was published.

Gladwell is a cultural economist — even if he might not say so. How people work in society’s petri dish, is strongly influenced by how other people work. Finding those underlying connections and revealing them in a provocative way is the meat of Gladwell’s writing. I have yet to read another author that evokes so many moments of “Aha!” and “Oh, I never thought of it that way.” What The Dog Saw is the perfect primer for any Gladwell-phobes who might want to make the leap. It reads like 19 little, brilliant, bite-sized books.