Journalist, author, and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell joins Tyler for a conversation on Joyce Gladwell, Caribbean identity, satire as a weapon, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, Harvard’s under-theorized endowment, why early childhood intervention is overrated, long-distance running, and Malcolm’s happy risk-averse career going from one “fur-lined rat hole to the next.”
This argument enraged various sports pundits when Gladwell made it in The New Yorker, where he’s been a fixture since 1996. But it will presumably only enrage them more to learn that he doesn’t fully believe it himself. “When you write about sports, you’re allowed to engage in mischief,” he says. “Nothing is at stake. It’s a bicycle race!”
.. he’s “totally anti-doping … But what I’m trying to say is, look, we have to come up with better reasons. Our reasons suck! And when the majority has taken a position that’s ill thought-through, it’s appropriate to make trouble.” His expression settles into a characteristic half-smile that makes clear he’d relish it if you disagreed.
.. Gladwell has always excelled in this role as intellectual provocateur. At their best, which is often, his articles and books force you to reappraise assumptions so deeply held that you didn’t realise you held them, and millions have found the experience intoxicating. What if the most successful entrepreneurs aren’t the risk-takers, but the risk-averse?
.. The point isn’t necessarily to accept his conclusions, but to be jolted – even if via the improbable medium of ketchup – into seeing the whole world afresh. This galls some critics, who’d prefer it if Gladwell made smaller, more cautious, less dazzling claims.
.. He’s also responsible more than anyone else for the birth of the modern pop-ideas genre, in publishing and beyond. “Without Gladwell,” Ian Leslie wrote recently at Medium.com, “no Daniel Pink, no Steven Johnson … no Brainpicker, no TED. I exaggerate, but only slightly.”
.. He’s also responsible more than anyone else for the birth of the modern pop-ideas genre, in publishing and beyond. “Without Gladwell,” Ian Leslie wrote recently at Medium.com, “no Daniel Pink, no Steven Johnson … no Brainpicker, no TED. I exaggerate, but only slightly.”
.. The outcome of the original David-and-Goliath clash wasn’t a miracle, he argues: it’s just what happens when the weak refuse to play by rules laid down by the strong.
.. this one is a very Canadian sort of book,” says Gladwell, who was born in Fareham, in Hampshire, but grew up in Ontario. “It’s Canadian in its suspicion of bigness and wealth and power. Someone told me – did you know that there’s never been a luxury brand to come from Canada? That’s never happened. That’s such a great fact to have about your home country.”
.. Conversely, having power can backfire, not least because it tricks the powerful into thinking they don’t need the consent of those over whom they wield it. In a compelling account of the Troubles, Gladwell argues that the British were plagued by a simple error: the belief that their superior resources meant “it did not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them”. More isn’t always more.
.. He is routinely accused of oversimplifying his material, or attacking straw men: does anyone really believe that success is solely a matter of individual talent, the position that Outliers sets out to unseat? Or that the strong always vanquish the weak? “You’re of necessity simplifying,” says Gladwell. “If you’re in the business of translating ideas in the academic realm to a general audience, you have to simplify … If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn’t read them: you’re not the audience!”
.. To some critics, usually those schooled in the methods of the natural sciences, it’s flatly unacceptable to proceed by concocting hypotheses then amassing anecdotes to illustrate them. “In his pages, the underdogs win … of course they do,” the author Tina Rosenberg wrote, in an early review of David and Goliath. “That’s why Gladwell includes their stories.
.. You make your case, you illustrate it with statistics and storytelling, and you refrain from claiming that it’s the absolute, objective truth. Gladwell calls his articles and books “conversation starters”
.. I’m puzzled by how much vitriol was directed at him. If I was going to be psychoanalytic about it, I’d say it has to do with anxiety within the world of journalism, about its loss of authority
.. King’s organiser in Birmingham, Wyatt Walker, used cunning to turn the movement’s weaknesses into strengths. By delaying street protests until late afternoon, when Birmingham’s black residents were walking home from work, he led authorities to believe that onlookers were actually protestors. (“They cannot distinguish even between Negro demonstrators and negro spectators,” Walker later recalled. “All they know is negroes.”) By luring police into arresting hundreds of children, they overwhelmed Birmingham’s jails, turning police commissioner Bull Connor’s eagerness to arrest black people against him. Perhaps it wasn’t “right”, by some definition of that word, to send children for arrest
.. Perhaps it wasn’t “right”, by some definition of that word, to send children for arrest, or to engineer confrontations between passers-by and police dogs – but Gladwell argues: “We need to remember that our definitions of what is right are, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those at the bottom of the pile.” Underdogs have to use whatever they’ve got. And in the end, “much of what is valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts … the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.”
No one is disputing that segregation was a heinous policy with far-reaching ramifications; the question is where do you locate the harm of segregation? And the court chose to locate the harm squarely inside the hearts and psyches of black children, whereas I would locate the harm in the world. I would say that the harm is located in the structure of laws and institutions that have the effect of systematically inhibiting and disempowering African Americans.
That may sound like a minor distinction. It is not. It’s a fundamental distinction. And particularly when you understand that it is the deliberate strategy of Southern whites to try and shift the racial conversation from institutions and political structures to hearts and minds. They’re trying to do that because they understand that if we can locate the argument entirely inside black people’s psyches, then we can leave institutional structures in place that systematically disenfranchise African Americans.
.. It’s because they’re locating the problem inside the hearts and minds of black kids that they can’t focus on teachers.*
.. it seems like they made a choice to pursue an argument that would convince the court. It didn’t seem obvious to me that they could have won making a structural argument, since that would involve taking power from people who would stand in their way.
.. Many African-American intellectuals have looked back on that and said, “You know what, we would’ve been better off if they had not overturned Plessy v. Ferguson,” and, “You want to play separate and equal? Let’s really do separate and equal,” and call them on their bluff.
.. Like I said, many black intellectuals have subsequently said, “Look maybe what the court should’ve done in Brown in 1954 is say, ‘Alright, let’s actually do separate and equal—prove to me they’re equal before we go any further. Let’s start by equalizing funding. Let’s go down the list. If you want to have a separate law school for white people in the state of Texas then you have to prove to me that every element in the black law school is the equivalent of the white law school.’” That strikes me as being both a radical and a doable argument, at least in the short term. And then when you have equality—real equality—then you take the next step, and remove [segregation]. I’m not entirely convinced that would’ve been the right way to go—but I think that is an argument worth hearing.
.. I wouldn’t focus on the damage done to a person’s psyche, the way the Brown lawyers did for legal reasons, but rather on the burden of existing within a context that treats you as inferior. Other people’s beliefs, especially when they determine your outcomes, matter a great deal.
.. Maintaining separate school systems for blacks and whites in the south was very expensive, and they were able to maintain those systems only if they impoverished the black half. That’s what made it economically palatable to taxpayers in rural and urban southern school districts. They’re running two systems. It’s not cheap. And they get away with it by not giving any money to the black half. If you came along and said, “You have to fund the black half the same as you fund the white half,” you effectively force integration. But you force them to integrate themselves, as opposed to doing it from above
.. You’ve got to decide, what am I trying to do here? Am I trying to win a political battle, as expeditiously and expediently as possible, or am I trying to make a larger moral argument about race and society?
.. When they have a black teacher, black students are much less likely to be suspended and are more likely to get into the gifted program. But we don’t yet know what’s happening psychologically. Do the black teachers open doors, or do they motivate or inspire students?
.. In a sense, economists are much better suited for dealing with these big data sets. It’s incumbent on psychologists to figure out how to do that or collaborate with economists. But economists don’t necessarily care about the mechanisms, as long as there’s a difference. The problem then becomes, where’s that difference coming from? Is it about having someone that cares about you, regardless of race? Or is it about seeing someone like me in a position of authority, or seeing that person-like-me be successful?
.. The economists can look at the data set and describe the phenomenon with real precision. The psychologist can look at that same data and give us possible mechanisms—why is it happening? And then there is a role here for the sociologist, or even the anthropologist, to go in and, in a fine-grained way, to describe the experience of the participants.
.. there were enormous numbers of oral histories done over the last 30 to 40 years, and I drew on some of them. Interviews done in the 60s and 70s with black teachers, talking about the experience of being a teacher moving from an all-black school to a white school. That stuff—very anecdotal, very individual, placed alongside psychological accounts of mechanism and economic accounts of exactly what happened—that stuff is really powerful. Those three things in combination, I think, can tell you something really important.