“You don’t start at the top if you want to find a story,” writes ­Malcolm Gladwell, the quirky and immensely popular social theorist, in this ­collection of essays taken from The New Yorker. “You start in the ­middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work.”

Ever since his debut, The Tipping Point (2000), Gladwell has been interested in what he calls “the middle guys”. They are the ones we should go to, runs his logic, if we want to learn about the big changes in our society. His new book is full of seemingly minor characters and events that, in fact, encode the social shifts and upheavals of our time. In Gladwell’s articles, hair dye becomes a cipher for the mutations in the concept of individualism in post-war American society, while the launch of a new brand of extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the 1980s is revealed as a watershed in consumer ­history, ushering in an era of overwhelming choice.

Gladwell’s formula is deceptively simple. Each essay starts with a question so straightforward it almost seems naive. In the case of Open Secrets (one of the most enlightening accounts of the fall of Enron you will ever read), he asks how it ­differed from ­previous American scandals, such as Watergate. In The Ketchup Conundrum, he wonders why there are many types and brands of mustard, while the ketchup ­market is dominated by the original Heinz product, a phenomenon that seems to undermine the trend towards consumer choice. Then he tells the story, teasing out the ­curiosities and interviewing a range of experts. By the end, from this ­specific narrative, he draws general and extremely convincing conclusions. Ketchup’s superiority, for instance, lies in its ability to appeal to all five taste centres at once. Any deviation from the formula is, quite simply, a different sauce. The Enron affair, meanwhile, becomes the “paradigmatic scandal of the information age”, proof that the big problems of our time, whether in the world of intelligence-gathering or transparency in the financial sector, are not due to a lack of knowledge but an excess of information.

But it is Gladwell’s storytelling qualities and his eye for the human drama at the heart of his inquiries that make his essays so compelling. Blowing Up retells Wall Street’s recent past as a clash between two titans with vastly different ­perspectives on how to play the financial markets: Victor Niederhoffer, a kind of Great Gatsby of the trading world, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, and Wall Street’s “primary dissident”. In True Colours, the history of post-war consumerism in America is retold through the ­stories of two Madison Avenue copywriters and their campaigns for Vidal Sassoon and L’Oréal.

The key to Gladwell’s popularity is his tone. He never presents ­himself as an expert who is willing to share some of his knowledge with his lucky readers. He comes across as just another “middle guy”, who thinks about things longer and harder than the rest of us, and has the patience to ask questions about the invisible ­architecture of our daily lives.

What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell
Allen Lane £20 pp410

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