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By Root 6922 0

and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting. We flip through the channels on the television and reject ten before we settle on one. We go to a bookstore and look at twenty novels before we pick the one we want. We filter and rank and judge. We have to. There’s just so much out there. But if you want to be a writer, you have to fight that instinct every day. Shampoo doesn’t seem interesting? Well, dammit, it must be, and if it isn’t, I have to believe that it will ultimately lead me to something that is. (I’ll let you judge whether I’m right in that instance.)

The other trick to finding ideas is figuring out the difference between power and knowledge. Of all the people whom you’ll meet in this volume, very few of them are powerful, or even famous. When I said that I’m most interested in minor geniuses, that’s what I meant. You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world. My friend Dave, who taught me about ketchup, is a middle guy. He’s worked on ketchup. That’s how he knows about it. People at the top are self-conscious about what they say (and rightfully so) because they have position and privilege to protect — and self-consciousness is the enemy of “interestingness.” In “The Pitchman” you’ll meet Arnold Morris, who gave me the pitch for the “Dial-O-Matic” vegetable slicer one summer day in his kitchen on the Jersey Shore: “Come on over, folks. I’m going to show you the most amazing slicing machine you have ever seen in your life,” he began. He picked up a package of barbecue spices and used it as a prop. “Take a look at this!” He held it in the air as if he were holding up a Tiffany vase.

He held it in the air as if he were holding up a Tiffany vase. That’s where you find stories, in someone’s kitchen on the Jersey Shore.

4.

Growing up, I never wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a lawyer, and then in my last year of college, I decided I wanted to be in advertising. I applied to eighteen advertising agencies in the city of Toronto and received eighteen rejection letters, which I taped in a row on my wall. (I still have them somewhere.) I thought about graduate school, but my grades weren’t quite good enough. I applied for a fellowship to go somewhere exotic for a year and was rejected. Writing was the thing I ended up doing by default, for the simple reason that it took me forever to realize that writing could be a job. Jobs were things that were serious and daunting. Writing was fun.

After college, I worked for six months at a little magazine in Indiana called the American Spectator. I moved to Washington, DC, and freelanced for a few years, and eventually caught on with the Washington Post — and from there came to The New Yorker. Along the way, writing has never ceased to be fun, and I hope that buoyant spirit is evident in these pieces. Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else’s and says, angrily, “I don’t buy it.” Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind of writing that you’ll find in this book, anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head — even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’d really like to be. I’ve called these pieces adventures, because that’s what they are intended to be. Enjoy yourself.

PART ONE

OBSESSIVES, PIONEERS, AND OTHER VARIETIES OF MINOR GENIUS

“To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.”

The Pitchman

RON POPEIL AND THE CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAN KITCHEN

1.

The extraordinary story of the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ begins with Nathan Morris, the son of the shoemaker and cantor Kidders Morris, who came over from the Old Country in the 1880s, and settled