“Today” | Betabeat | The Awl | School for the Dogs
Anna Jane Grossman got her idea to train dogs to use iPads from an article in The Awl. The article was intended to be a joke: David Parker was attempting to write “The Most Emailed ‘New York Times’ Article Ever.”
“It was not real. But I was like, ‘Oh, I can teach my dog how to use the iPad!,'” Grossman tells Today.
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Grossman used to work at The New York Observer, Kelly Faircloth writes. She’s also written for The New York Times about issues affecting creatures with various numbers of legs, and she’s written for The Awl.
Awl readers have been “making things happen since 2009,” Alex Balk writes in a piece about Grossman.
In the “Today” piece, Grossman says dogs can use iPads to take “dog selfies” but won’t be able to order stuff on Amazon. In a blog post about the lessons, she writes that “the more silly behaviors your dog can learn to do reliably on cue, the better he’ll be at understanding you when you need to teach important stuff.” Her dog, she notes in the piece, used its iPad know-how to predict on TV that Obama would win the 2012 presidential election:
Grossman isn’t the only former journalist to abandon her trade for the probably far more secure world of pet training: Former Chicago Reader Editor Kiki Yablon (who is a friend of mine) now operates a dog-training service in Chicago.
