Gladwell: Steven Brill on how health-care reform went wrong.
Near-history, the journalistic reconstruction of contemporary events, has come to be dominated by two schools. The first is represented by Michael Lewis. Lewis wrote about the 1996 Presidential election through the story of a Republican candidate no one had ever heard of, the eccentric millionaire Morry Taylor. “The Big Short” was an account of the financial crisis told through the eyes of four obscure short-sellers. Lewis’s interest is psychological and moral. His books have won him many admirers (including me) because they offer deceptively simple narratives in the service of a grand canonical theme. “Liar’s Poker,” which recounts the young Lewis’s stint in the Wall Street of the nineteen-eighties, is Daniel in the lion’s den. “Money Ball,” about the strategies of small-market baseball teams, is David and Goliath. “The Blind Side” is the Good Samaritan. “The Big Short” is Noah’s Ark, and “Flash Boys” is Jesus casting the money changers out of the temple.
The second school is associated with the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. Woodwardian history is kaleidoscopic. The reporter makes many telephone calls and office visits, and reads many documents. All key players are represented and events detailed. The approach is sociological: the great theme of the Woodward school is the interaction of institutions and vested interests.
.. Names may be irrelevant; titles tell you what you need to know. That is what makes Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men” a masterpiece: its great achievement was to show how the institutional power of the White House led to the President’s personal corruption.