{"id":1465,"date":"2017-06-19T13:28:05","date_gmt":"2017-06-19T17:28:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/?page_id=1465"},"modified":"2017-07-20T10:25:22","modified_gmt":"2017-07-20T14:25:22","slug":"podcast-review-malcolm-gladwell-revisionist-history","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/previous-issues\/impact-summer-2017\/podcast-review-malcolm-gladwell-revisionist-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Podcast Review: Revisionist History<\/em>, Season 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by Malcolm Gladwell. Produced by The Slate Group. 2016.<\/h4>\n

Reviewed by John W. Mackey, Boston University<\/h5>\n

\u201cWelcome to Revisionist History<\/i>,\u201d host Malcolm Gladwell greets the listener, \u201cwhere every week we reexamine something from the past that\u2019s been forgotten or misunderstood.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a good title, and a promising description, but both are curiously at odds with what follows in ten roughly half-hour podcast episodes.\u00a0 In fact, most episodes in season 1 of the series are not revisionist history in any commonly understood sense of the term; Gladwell doesn\u2019t seek to revise our understanding of established narratives by introducing new historical evidence or theoretical approaches.\u00a0 Rather, Revisionist History<\/i> is an eclectic mixture of stories, most of them engaging, on subjects ranging from artistic genius to college accessibility, from misogyny to automobile accidents.\u00a0 If the season\u00a0has a common thread, it might be that Gladwell wants us to realize that if we adopt a few social science-ish concepts\u2014moral licensing, capitalization, conceptual innovation, the threshold model of behavior, and so on\u2014we would all be less likely to stumble through life misunderstanding everything we see.<\/p>\n

As his career as a best-selling author would attest, Gladwell knows how to package a narrative, and is skilled at making ideas digestible to a wide range of readers (or in this case, listeners).\u00a0 And podcast fans with a natural sense of curiosity about diverse subjects will find much to ponder in Revisionist History<\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0 The problem, however, is that the narratives are too<\/i> neatly packaged, and the ideas are so digestible as to be oversimplified. Season 1 of\u00a0Revisionist History <\/i>is seductive and fun, but it\u2019s also full of questionable dichotomies and selectively told stories. (As of the publication of this review, the roll out of Season 2 is underway).<\/p>\n

The episode titled \u201cHallelujah,\u201d which draws its title from the legendary Leonard Cohen song, highlights some of the shortcomings of the series.\u00a0 In \u201cHallelujah,\u201d Gladwell examines the long and interesting history of the song, along with Elvis Costello\u2019s \u201cDeportee,\u201d a more mature remake of his own 1984 tune \u201cThe Deportees Club.\u201d\u00a0 The episode becomes a meditation on artistic genius, or rather types of artistic genius, based on a distinction theorized by the economist David Galenson.\u00a0 Galenson suggests that modern artists fall into one of two categories\u2014conceptual innovators or experimental innovators.\u00a0 The former, like Picasso, work quickly and have clear ideas that they want to articulate, while the latter, like Cezanne, work by trial and error, producing numerous drafts of their work.\u00a0 Gladwell appears to accept this distinction unquestioningly, even going as far as to list familiar geniuses, fitting them neatly into one of the categories. Herman Melville and Orson Welles, we are told, are Picassos, while Mark Twain and Alfred Hitchcock are Cezannes, and so on.\u00a0 Gladwell\u2019s insistence on shoehorning human creativity into this simplified, binary framework is part of the problem.\u00a0 But the host also fails to interrogate the underlying assumptions of the episode.\u00a0 To Gladwell, \u201cgenius\u201d is a taken-for-granted category, rather than a highly subjective, gendered social construct.<\/p>\n

Superficial analysis continues throughout much of the centerpiece of season 1 of Gladwell\u2019s podcast series, a three-episode sequence focused on economics, class, wealth, and education.\u00a0 Gladwell here examines the relationship between education and social mobility, sensibly concluding that Americans are not as good at providing opportunity as we think we are.\u00a0 \u201cFood Fight,\u201d the second of the three episodes, has sparked a mini-controversy in the world of liberal arts colleges.\u00a0 At the heart of the episode is Gladwell\u2019s outrage that wealthy colleges seldom do enough to recruit, admit, and support low-income students.\u00a0 On that point, the podcast offers some useful insight.\u00a0 And Gladwell\u2019s indictment of the college amenities \u201carms race,\u201d whereby well-heeled institutions try to lure students with luxurious creature comforts and dazzling facilities, is fair enough.\u00a0 But the episode\u2019s insistence on gimmicky storytelling descends into absurdity. Gladwell sets up a misleading, dichotomous opposition between two elite liberal arts colleges: Vassar College, which does an admirable job of welcoming low-income students but serves terrible food in its dining halls, and Bowdoin College, which serves gourmet food but admits too few students from lower-income backgrounds.\u00a0 The problem, perhaps predictably, is that Gladwell insists that these things are intrinsically linked; one can either attend a college that serves delicious food, or one that has an economic conscience.\u00a0 This is transparently nonsense.\u00a0 But what is worse is that Gladwell proceeds to single out Bowdoin for a kind of demonization that it does not deserve.<\/p>\n

To make his case, Gladwell cites The New York Times Access Index, which measures the extent to which colleges serve low-income students.\u00a0 The Index uses a score of 1 as average; Vassar\u2019s score of 1.36 is indeed well above the average, good enough to earn the school a laudable eighth place.\u00a0 Bowdoin, which Gladwell tells us scandalously wastes its resources serving high-end meals to the bourgeoisie, earns a score of 1.05, placing it fifty-first on the Index (Leonhardt).\u00a0 Bowdoin\u2019s score is above average<\/i>.\u00a0 In other words, the school on which Gladwell focuses his indignation does a pretty good job, comparatively speaking, of admitting low-income students\u2014better than most liberal arts colleges.\u00a0 If Gladwell\u2019s point were that all wealthy institutions of higher education should do more to combat inequality and to admit students from underserved populations, and that Bowdoin has a good deal of room for improvement, he\u2019d have a point.\u00a0 But a nuanced, contextualized examination of this issue is not what Gladwell is after here.\u00a0 He wants a neatly packaged story that pits fancy food against ethics, featuring a hero and a villain, and thus he implores his listeners \u201cif you\u2019re looking at liberal arts colleges, don\u2019t go to Bowdoin. Don\u2019t let your kids go to Bowdoin. Don\u2019t let your friends go to Bowdoin. Don\u2019t give money to Bowdoin, or to any other school that serves amazing food in its dining hall.\u201d\u00a0 One imagines that administrators at, say, Oberlin College, which scores 0.77 and ranks eighty-one spots below Bowdoin on the Index, must be wondering how they escaped Gladwell\u2019s ire. (But, by extension, the food at Oberlin must surely be sublime).<\/p>\n

Like \u201cFood Fight,\u201d another of Revisionist History\u2019<\/i>s education episodes, \u201cCarlos Doesn\u2019t Remember,\u201d asks hard questions about social mobility and our education system.\u00a0 And once again, up to a point, Gladwell deserves credit. He follows the story of the episode\u2019s title character, an academically gifted young man who grows up amid gang violence in the poor Lennox section of Los Angeles.\u00a0 That students like Carlos face often insurmountable obstacles to educational opportunity, Gladwell argues, is evidence of America\u2019s lagging level of social mobility or \u201ccapitalization rate\u201d\u2014the percentage of people who are able to develop or capitalize on their potential.\u00a0 Fortunately for Carlos, we learn, he has a wealthy patron, a former entertainment lawyer and philanthropist whose organization works to match poor but brilliant young people with excellent schools.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the challenges of Carlos\u2019 underprivileged life mean that his story is more complicated than we first expect.\u00a0 In many ways, Gladwell\u2019s narration of Carlos\u2019s struggle is an important story, well told.<\/p>\n

But what borders on disturbing is the story that Gladwell refuses to tell\u2014the story of Carlos\u2019s mother.\u00a0 We learn little about the young man\u2019s father, other than his absence for much of Carlos\u2019s life.\u00a0 And we learn almost nothing concrete about his mother, either.\u00a0 Yet a kind of barely spoken sexist narrative emerges from the episode, whereby Carlos\u2019s mother is implicitly to blame for his situation, and directly responsible for denying Carlos a chance to attend Choate, an elite prep school in Connecticut.\u00a0 The clear implication was that his mother was an unfit, selfish parent.\u00a0 The listener has no reason to doubt this.\u00a0 But when Gladwell asks Carlos where his mother is now, the young man replies that she is in prison.\u00a0 Gladwell the narrator, maddeningly, tells the listener that he will \u201clet you use your imagination\u201d as to why she is incarcerated.\u00a0 After going to great lengths to lead the listener to identify with Carlos, who appears a very likable and sympathetic young man, Gladwell willfully elides his mother\u2019s story, othering her in the process. Gladwell, who so generously empathizes with Carlos and the tens of thousands of poor but gifted students like him, shows no empathy for Carlos\u2019s mother.<\/p>\n

While focusing on Carlos the individual, and Carlos the exceptional student, Gladwell obscures larger stories about class, poverty, and gender.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t address the systemic inequities that created places like Lennox and the oppressive conditions of Carlos\u2019s life in the first place.\u00a0 That Carlos is so exceptional, so clearly brilliant, is what Gladwell seems to find heartbreaking about his story.\u00a0 Gladwell makes a point of recognizing that there are countless students like Carlos who will never have the opportunities he has been afforded.\u00a0 But the listener could be forgiven for thinking that Gladwell\u2019s larger point is that what ails our educational and economic systems could be solved by more rich lawyers who pluck more exceptional students from their surroundings and place them in elite schools.\u00a0 And of course, such philanthropic work changes real people\u2019s real lives, and deserves recognition.\u00a0 But in a nation with the world\u2019s highest incarceration rate, in which women are significantly more likely to live in poverty than men, the story of Carlos\u2019s mom seems at least worth acknowledging.\u00a0 As a listener, I\u2019ve used my imagination, as Gladwell suggests, and I imagine a desperate, poor, single mother, and I imagine that our society failed her just as much as it did Carlos.\u00a0 But we don\u2019t find out.<\/p>\n

Despite his problematic style of storytelling, Gladwell does raise important social issues throughout the various episodes of Revisionist History’s<\/i>\u00a0first season, <\/i>nearly any of which could be employed in an undergraduate classroom to stimulate lively discussions.\u00a0 The first episode of the series, \u201cThe Lady Vanishes,\u201d examines both nineteenth and twenty-first century examples of sexism through the lens of \u201cmoral licensing,\u201d and is well worth a listen.\u00a0\u00a0 And in a rhetoric or writing course, or perhaps an introductory social science or journalism course, even Gladwell\u2019s spirited but often questionable style of argument could serve important pedagogical purposes and generate debate.\u00a0 In the third episode, \u201cThe Big Man Can\u2019t Shoot,\u201d Gladwell entertainingly tells the stories of former NBA stars Wilt Chamberlain and Rick Barry and their contrasting approaches to shooting free-throws, drawing some dubious conclusions along the way.\u00a0\u00a0 An assignment asking students to listen to the episode with a careful ear, to evaluate Gladwell\u2019s conclusions, and to examine his evidence and arguments critically could help them develop important media literacy skills.<\/p>\n

One could even argue that Gladwell\u2019s misleading discussion of Vassar and Bowdoin has at least sparked conversation about liberal arts colleges and the perpetuation of privilege, which is a positive achievement.\u00a0 While often frustrating, Gladwell\u2019s podcast isn\u2019t exactly lightweight; each episode offers thought-provoking discussions of interesting and socially relevant topics. But what is disappointing and unsatisfying about season 1 of\u00a0Revisionist History<\/i> is that for someone who so clearly loves sociology and economics, Gladwell leaves out a lot of both.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/h5>\n

Gladwell, Malcolm. Revisionist History<\/i>. The Slate Group, 2016, http:\/\/revisionisthistory.com\/<\/a>.\u00a0 Accessed 1 April 2017.<\/p>\n

Leonhardt, David. \u201cTop Colleges Doing the Most for Low-Income Students–College Access Index.\u201d The New York Times<\/i>, 16 September 2015, https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2015\/09\/17\/upshot\/top-colleges-doing-the-most-for-low-income-students.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Malcolm Gladwell. Produced by The Slate Group. 2016. Reviewed by John W. Mackey, Boston University \u201cWelcome to Revisionist History,\u201d host Malcolm Gladwell greets the listener, \u201cwhere every week we reexamine something from the past that\u2019s been forgotten or misunderstood.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a good title, and a promising description, but both are curiously at odds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9762,"featured_media":0,"parent":1303,"menu_order":8,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1465"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9762"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1465"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1521,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1465\/revisions\/1521"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}