Writer Malcolm Gladwell, author of such works as Blink, Outliers and The Tipping Point, is perhaps most cited for his The New Yorker article ‘The revolution will not be tweeted’, where he effectively dismissed social media as a force that could bring about lasting political change. Whether one agrees with Gladwell’s views or not, it’s hard to deny that his writing is always engaging and his arguments well researched — and it will take some work to challenge them.
In Revisionist History, a podcast from the Panoply network that offers “a second chance” to obscure, overlooked or misunderstood events, issues and people from the past, Gladwell plays with what he admits is his “fatal weakness for the big idea”. He jokes, in the trailer to Season 2, that his tombstone will read: “RIP. His one big idea was that there was one big idea to explain everything.” Much like the scientific obsession with the search for a unifying grand theory that will explain life, the universe and… yes, everything.
The premise of the show is better explained in the introduction to the first season launched in June 2016. “I think we’re bad historians,” he begins. “Something happens, we see it, watch it, remember it, file it away. Then if you look back… closely, you discover it’s all wrong.” This is of course the rationale that drives the academic discipline of history and prompts a continual revisiting of the past. Gladwell adds to his history degree the ability to weave in apt anecdotes and descriptions to successfully straddle the popular and the academic, building narratives that enhance our understanding of contemporary culture and social and political life. His attempt, in going back and looking closely at events from the past, is to find out what we got wrong, and “to correct the record”.
Framing an event
One “big idea” runs through each of the 10 episodes in a season, framing an event in a way that makes us question our initial understanding of it, often in light of new evidence or simply new ways of seeing the world. Season 1 reprises one of Gladwell’s favourite themes — outliers — and explores how we might understand anomalies; people who stand out, don’t fit in, speak out or do something unexpected and inexplicable. In Season 2, he takes on social justice issues, from race to poverty to colonialism, and in the spirit of the series, explores themes as divergent as rich people’s addiction to golf, school desegregation in the U.S., and the Bengal famine (which recent scholarship has recast as not a failure of production but a crime of misappropriation by the Churchill administration).
Explaining his process in the introduction to the second season, Gladwell says he spent hours talking to people, reading through books, camping out in the New York University library, “all in search of that little tingle, that moment when you realise that this is just weird enough, this is totally some history worth revising.”
On May 17 this year, Gladwell opened the third season of the podcast, where he says he gets “dead serious”. The big idea this time is mass delusion, an appropriate theme for our post-fact world.
The episodes that have dropped so far seem to be pretty U.S.-centric, but that doesn’t make them any less interesting, given that the particularities of each story relate to a universally relevant theme: What makes people lie? What level of proof do we need to believe something? How does memory play tricks on us?
Gladwell’s approach to popularisation has received its share of criticism. He brings little primary research to his stories, but he has a way of finding the right people and bringing in the right voices to make those stories work for an audience that wants big stories told in the simplest and most engaging ways. A profile in The New York Timesnoted that he has been charged with “encouraging lazy thinking”, quoting one reviewer who said that Blink was “a book written for people who don’t read books”.
One could argue that the podcast too is guilty of simplifying or making easily digestible complex issues that deserve more attention and time than each 35-45-minute capsule permits. And admittedly, while his explanations are compelling, they sometimes draw upon a fairly narrow range of scholarship. But Gladwell himself is quick to point out: “As always, with revisionist history, reasonable minds would probably disagree [with his explanations].”
In sum, Revisionist History is both entertaining and provocative, offering lessons not about what history is, but how, as collective memory, it needs to be constantly re-examined and dislodged from old habits of remembering.
(A fortnightly series on podcasts.)
The Hyderabad-based writer and academic is a neatnik fighting a losing battle with the clutter in her head.