By CRAIG SELIGMAN

Bloomberg News

Serial killers, bad dogs, late bloomers, mammograms, the lady who wrote, "If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!" — Malcolm Gladwell can write engrossingly about just about anything.

His witty, probing articles are as essential to David Remnick’s The New Yorker as those of Wolcott Gibbs and A.J. Liebling were to Harold Ross’. Gladwell has collected 19 of them in What the Dog Saw, and they’re uniformly delightful.

The book opens with six studies of "minor genius." My favorite is the profile of Shirley Polykoff, author of the aforementioned sales pitch for Clairol (and of the even more immortal "Does she or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.").

But the portraits of Nassim Taleb, the financial guru (written before The Black Swan made him famous), and John Rock, one of the inventors of the birth-control pill, are just as scintillating and raise more troubling questions.

Gladwell has a gift for capturing personalities, a Borscht Belt comic’s feel for timing and a bent for counterintuitive thinking. He loves to start a piece by settling you onto a cushion of received ideas, then yanking it out from under you.

For example, he’ll tell you about how leading companies became "obsessed with the talent issue" in the 1990s, how they "singled out and segregated their stars" because "in the modern corporation, the system is considered only as strong as its stars," and how one stellar firm in particular became the poster child for the "talent mind-set."

"The company, of course" — ba-da-bam — "was Enron."Gladwell knows how to assimilate complex material fast and shape it so that it goes down easy, and unlike some of his predecessors at the magazine — most famously Joseph Mitchell, who would spend eons polishing his gemlike articles — he churns out his own at breakneck speed. (The 19 in What the Dog Saw, he informs us, have been culled from the "countless" sum he has written since 1996.)

In other words, it would take a real curmudgeon to find fault with this outstanding collection. And I’m now going to disclose more about myself than Gladwell is ever willing to reveal by doing just that.

Other class acts

If I were teaching a class on reporting, I might use any of these pieces as a model. For a class on literary nonfiction, though, I’d go with Liebling or Mitchell or Janet Malcolm or Ian Frazier — there’s a long list of great New Yorker writers to choose from — but not Gladwell.

Why not? Because his writing is so graceful and tic-free that I find it evaporates almost as soon as I put it down. Like Malcolm, Gladwell likes to worry an idea until it starts yielding unexpected dividends. But Malcolm constructs her pieces (which, granted, run much longer than Gladwell’s efficient 6,000 words or so) around the drama of her own confusion and enlightenment.Gladwell, in contrast, tosses in the occasional "I," but he doesn’t mean it. He much prefers anonymity.

Exceptional exception

The main exception here is a piece called Something Borrowed, which recounts how the dramatist Bryony Lavery used someone else’s words from a magazine article in her hit play Frozen and, as a result, mired herself in a plagiarism scandal.

Gladwell’s initially straightforward thinking on the topic ("Words belong to the person who wrote them") grows more nuanced and complex, Malcolm-style, as he considers her case. The twist is the article from which she lifted. "It was written," he reports, "by me."

Lavery explains to him that she often draws on "news" in her plays, and it’s uncomfortably clear that when she read Gladwell’s article what she saw was impersonal information — "news" — rather than the work of a fellow artist. Miserably, she acknowledges her naiveté; the story ends with her sitting at Gladwell’s kitchen table, crying.

Not surprisingly, it’s the best thing in the book.

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