The Tipping Point Revisited: Live with David Remnick

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Hello, hello, Revisionist History listeners.

This is Revenge of the Tipping Point Month at Revisionist History, where we bring you stories and snippets and tantalizing tales from a new book, now available everywhere.

And in this episode, we're bringing you the very first stop on my book tour.

a conversation I had about my life and career with my old friend and former boss, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

We did this at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, my home away from home.

I first met David almost 40 years ago when he was a star at the Washington Post and I was a cub reporter who'd never written a newspaper story before.

He's one of the people in the world who I admire the most, and our conversation was hilarious and fun.

I hope you enjoy.

It's been a while.

Has, yes.

Malcolm, I have to tell you that the title of this book is so brilliant because it's like Revenge of King Kong.

It's fantastic.

Pink Panther.

It's a Pink Panther shout out.

Yeah.

And I have to say that one of my fondest memories at The New Yorker, and we'll go back even earlier in a moment, but at The New Yorker, You're telling me, you know, I've written two pieces now, Cool Hunters and the Tipping Point.

I have this idea for a book.

You got an agent, the redoubtable Tina Bennett, and you thought, you know, if I could make just a small amount of money, I could help out my family.

And let's just say by the end of the day,

things went well.

And now, 23 million books later, things have gone really well.

But what interests me most is not success,

material success, however deeply jealous I am.

What interests me is how you invented yourself and what you do, because we have a not dissimilar background.

We were both at the Washington Post, we were both at the New Yorker, and I couldn't have,

in many ways, a more conventional approach to journalism.

I wonder when you look back and you look,

you were at the spectator,

you were at the Post, and then you came to The New Yorker, but something happened at a certain point that

a more conventional story was left behind.

And even a humorous story, like the one at the Washington Post, where you did, you had a dog on death row and you treated...

Oh, that was my finest work.

It really was.

There was a dog in Bergen County.

Well,

should I back up and tell a story?

Sure.

I became the New York correspondent for the Washington Post, and I...

They were uninterested in stories about New York at that point.

I don't know why.

And then I decided to make my life more interesting and maybe increase increase my profile in Washington.

I would only write stories from Bergen County.

My county.

Yeah.

Because I decided that Bergen County was more interesting.

I still believe this than New York City.

So I just every day I would read the Bergen County record.

Record.

That's right.

And I saw a little tiny mention one day of a dog, an Akita named Taro, who had been confined to Doggy Death Row.

Now, Doggy Death Row in Bergen County is in Hackensack.

Where I was born.

Were you born in Hackensack?

You bet.

There is, you know,

you think I'm joking when I say there's Doggy Death Row.

No, it is actually Doggy Death Row.

It's a, you can't get there.

There's like a ravine.

And if you want to, you're on the other side of the ravine, and then you see a long string of cages.

And there's all these dogs who are there pending, there's all kinds of appeals, obviously.

And if they lose their appeals, then they are euthanized.

And they're there for biting people.

And Taro, what had happened was he had been asleep and a child, the nephew of his owner, had stumbled across him in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom.

And Taro had swiped the kid.

This is, now all of these claims I'm making were subject to a great amount of litigation.

And had cut the lip.

So stipulated.

So stipulated.

Had cut the kid's lip.

And the result was like there were like seven different lawsuits.

And I became convinced that Taro was wrongfully convicted.

And I wrote for the Washington Post, I mean, it was thousands.

Thousands.

It was impressively long.

And the editor of the Washington Post, the next day after it ran, came up to me and said, That was a very good piece on Taro.

It was, however, four times too long.

Which is the greatest thing anyone's ever said to me.

And they were t-shirts.

The owner printed up t-shirts.

Free Taro.

And they were distributed.

And the story made

the front page of the New York Post.

That's the goal.

The New York Post picked up my story.

That's the heaven.

Yeah, that's the heaven.

So my whole strategy of conceiving of Bergen County as being a kind of more fertile ground for

this was the beginning of the Gladwellian rebellion against the conventional, which is that New York, as I believe, is

not only the most interesting place, but on certain days, the only interesting place.

I'm a patriot.

So, but when did when at what point, as we know what a Malcolm Gladwell story is, the kind of sense of surprise, playing with ideas, exploring ideas, reading

social science, when did that begin to click in?

I think it starts at the post because the problem

You know, whenever I would take a job, take a job, you have to kind of conceive of what is the problem that you're trying to solve in this job.

And the problem that I had when I got to the Post was that I was 23 and I had never written a newspaper story in my life.

I had no idea how to do it.

And I was surrounded by people who were the greatest, like yourself.

Yeah, yeah.

No, for those of you who don't know,

David in his day was

an absolutely legendary, one of the great newspaper reporters of his generation.

Thank you.

And they were, they were like, Woodward,

Bob Woodward was, when I got to the West Post, I was in the business section.

Woodward was there.

And I would watch, and like Steve Call, do you remember Steve Call, who

went on to become, I mean, he's still around, but he ran the Columbia Journalism School.

Call when he, I think you told me, you pointed this out to me, when he, you know, when we had the push-button phones?

Yes.

He would, you know, when I dialed, it would be like, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot.

Call was like, that's too slow.

And he'd be like,

it was like a concert pianist.

He could play a chord.

Yeah, like a con.

He'd get the White House.

It would take him like five seconds.

I'm like, that was all right.

And I had Mike, the legendary Mike Isakoff was next to me.

Anyway, my point is, I'm surrounded by all these people who are just better at daily journalism than I am.

And so the problem was: how do you succeed in an environment?

And you succeed in that environment by being the thing that they are not.

Everyone else was fast and fluid, so I decided I would be

slow and weird, right?

And in fairness, the Washington Post

did not prize weirdness.

No.

It did not.

Although,

the key was,

the key was, I mean, the problem to be solved was how do you stand up in an environment where everyone around you is a total pro.

And so to stand up, you have to do what everyone else is not doing.

So people around me were not writing 5,000 words stories on death or dogs.

No, no.

And I remember the first time I wrote a story for the New Yorker, I was still at the Washington Post, and I was writing the Talk of the Towns before they were signed, so that way I could freelance without them knowing.

So I was writing these Talk of the Towns, and I went to see Chip McGrath.

He was Tina Brown's deputy editor.

And Chip said, I'd written this little Talk of the Towns, and he had some problem.

He said, this is, I want you to fix this problem.

He said, why?

And so I said, I took it from him.

I said, okay, and I just wrote in the margins my fix.

And I remember looking at him, and he was astonished.

Vulgarian.

It was vulgar.

It was vulgar.

He expected me to go home and come back in a week with the fix.

I was like, no, I'll just move this here, do that.

And I realized that's, at the New Yorker, you had to be that.

Otherwise, you, if you wanted to be slow and thoughtful and weird, then you were competing with everyone else.

Right.

Right?

So I had to, I got there and I had to completely change.

I had to work hard.

I had to do all these things that I wasn't doing at the Washington Post.

We'll be right back with more from my conversation with David Remnick.

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Which piece would you say

set you off?

You're now at this retrospective moment in your literary journalistic life where you're writing a piece that echoes your first book and

you're no longer 23 years old.

Yeah.

There must be some sense of self-examination about this.

It was probably

a piece called The Cool Hunt.

Remember The Cool Hunt?

I do.

Where I,

I don't know how I found her, a woman who's still a very good friend of mine, Didi Gordon, who was a, who went around, whose business was going around America telling corporations what was cool.

T-shirts and the like.

T-shirts.

And she was, and still is, absolutely hilarious.

Anyway, she, I wrote a piece about her, about this idea that she would just go around and she would declare something cool and she would tell you what was...

Companies would hire her as a hire her but the the whole point of that piece was the title the kulhan

once you had the title it's like it's like and there was you know someone wanted to make a movie out of it of course never nothing ever came of it but it was the first time i realized like like

that was you know that kind of it was something else there was something fun about taking

being interested in pop culture for

the new yorker and

did the new yorker never have that kind of thing before now Now this kind of story comes up.

Yeah.

But was that an absence that you were feeling?

A evacuation?

No, I didn't know anyone else of the New Yorker.

It was the same thing about trying to be different.

So I didn't know of anyone else who was writing about.

Dee Dee Gordon was not the typical subject of a New Yorker profile.

No.

I mean, she, you know, she was this kind of strange, hilarious.

She had this crazy crush on Keanu Reeves.

She was obsessed with Keanu Reeves.

But I just thought, like,

this is different in a way,

this will stand out.

You just need it to stand out.

And then you did the tipping point, which

is now associated

with you.

But as you've said repeatedly, what you were doing is taking an idea that was very much in the air

in sociological terms,

in terms of crime and much else.

So what was the idea for the book?

You had these two pieces.

And how did you cast out what the book,

what it would be, what shape it would take, what voice it would have?

Well, I didn't.

My agent came, Tina, who I knew socially, and then she became an agent.

She was like a, she worked in the admissions department of some.

She'd been a graduate student in

history.

Yeah.

But I just knew she was friends of friends.

And then she became an agent.

She said, could I be your agent?

And I was like, I guess, sure.

And then she's now like the powerhouse of powerhouses, but I knew her.

And she said, you should write a book on this.

And I, but what is this?

The article, the tipping point.

Yeah.

Because people got really interested in it.

And I started like,

someone in California flew me out to speak to their group about it.

I remember thinking that was really weird that a piece in New Yorker could, so I thought, oh, maybe people are kind of into this.

And Tina's like, yeah, you should do a book.

So I, I knew the article in the New Yorker was a chapter, literally a chapter, a part of a chapter, and then I had to kind of improvise.

I'd never written a book before.

I had to kind of improvise.

But before we get to the way you reconsider the idea, because it's a very interesting bridge, I want to know,

it probably is not in the stack of cards here.

I want to know how you invented yourself as a voice and how naturally or not that came to me.

Because I can read a paragraph of yours or a page of yours, and I know it right away that's you.

There's a certain cadence, there's a certain way that chapters end.

There are moves that are as distinctive as somebody's,

you know, a piano player or an athlete.

You watch enough athletes, you listen to enough music.

There's a Gladwell cadence, there's a Gladwell sense of humor.

It's very, very distinctive.

How self-aware are you of it?

How did it become itself?

Well,

it's hard to say.

You know,

so I spent 10 years at the Post,

and there's something, I think that's crucial because what happens at the Post is you learn how to write, meaning you learn how to write without

fear and self-consciousness.

You're forced to.

And I remember by the end of my time with the Washington Post, I remember when I was at

One of the last stories I wrote before I left for the New Yorker, there was a shooting on the LIRR,

and it happened at like 4:30 in the afternoon.

And back then, the deadline was like 6.30.

So I get on the LIR and I go out to the scene.

I get there at like 5.30, and it's clearly a front-page story, and they're like, we need the story.

And there's a shooting on the Long Island Railroad is a front-page story in the Washington Post?

It was a big shooting.

It was like serious.

Well, I mean, my assumption was I was telling them, of course, it's a front page shooting.

That's the way it works.

This is huge.

It's never happened before.

Someone got shot in New York City.

Hold the front page.

It's above the fold.

You know, like the whole manual.

You know this.

You did this drill yourself many, many times.

Oh, my God, yeah.

Yeah.

And you could do it from Moscow and you could just, they all get nervous.

Michael Spector used to, his,

colleague of ours was so good at this.

He would do a kind of salami slicing where he'd take a story and do 10 stories out of it and each one would get on the front page because he would be like, It's changed.

I said, there's another wrinkle.

And they'd be like, oh my God.

And they put the first wrinkle on the front page.

The second wrinkle.

Then there's

day three.

Oh, my God.

I go out there.

I'm on the LAR.

And I remember this is like, this is when I was at the peak of my powers.

So I interviewed all these people.

I don't have time to, I don't,

there's no laptops back then.

There's no like,

and I did the thing which I had heard, you know, hard-bitten newspaper reporters.

Dictated.

I picked up the phone and I called it in.

I remember that feeling of like, I dictated a 1,500-word

story into the phone to someone typing on the other end straight through.

And I was so pleased with myself.

But I realized at that moment, I got nothing else to learn here.

I have,

they have, but that's what you learn.

Like, and that, you never lose that fluidity.

So in other words, every bit,

every bad habit you have as a writer gets beaten out of you at a newspaper because it's just discipline.

It's like, boom, you know, tell the story, tell it in a way that's compelling.

If something happens to your prose, and I won't linger on this too long, but if I read

Anthony Lane, for example, I can read him, and I know that, obviously Anthony is an incredibly erudite reader and writer, but I know that he did not get through life without reading P.G.

Woodhouse over and over again.

That

informs the texture of

this tapestry.

Who was that for you?

Or was it just the newspaper business?

Well, no, no, no.

So then I get to, I don't think, I think I have a little bit of that at the post, but it's, but it gets, my point is, you get, you get pared down, you get rid of all your bad habits, and then you have,

it's like, you know, in playing a musical instrument, you spend the first 10 years mastering the fundamentals, and then you're free to develop some kind of study.

But you have to do the compulsory, you know, work to get, and that's what the post is.

It just, you get reduced to the simplest essence of how to tell a story.

And now you have the freedom.

And you come to the, a lot of it was Adam Gopnik.

So I was reading Gopnik long before I joined The New Yorker.

And Gopnik has an exceedingly distinctive voice, right?

And

a beautiful way of expressing himself.

And

there's little kind of beautiful little frills.

I mean,

his prose sings, his little choruses and frills.

And it's just like, and reading that, you know, he's,

I'm half a generation.

But his move is, he has many, but what is the pop culture

or boomer pop culture, as he and I have discussed, but reference when discussing something like, you know, Nietzsche or the French.

That's crucial.

So this reminds me of something.

When I was very, when I was in middle school, I met

my lab partner was a guy named Terry Martin, who I you know of Terry Martin, now a Soviet scholar.

But he, by happenstance, in our little town in Canada, he was my lab partner.

And Terry was an absolutely brilliant guy.

And

we were in biology together and we would do these experiments.

And he would always refuse to do the experiment the way we were supposed to do it.

Like as a matter of principle.

And I remember at first utterly horrified because we would never, we couldn't finish anything, nothing was ever handed in, we would always get terrible grades.

And then about like

by kind of November of seventh seventh grade, I realized it's genius.

Because what he taught me was that you have the freedom.

I mean,

he wasn't being destructive or nihilistic.

He was like saying, okay, so they're all going to do it this way, but we don't have to do it that way.

We can.

There's another way to learn what's going on here.

He was deeply interested in the...

This is what so interests me.

So play is what.

You use the word, and

I think it even causes some people alarm, or they're offended intellectually or otherwise, or they're jealous, or whatever it is.

You use the phrase, playing with ideas, as if this is to them somehow irresponsible.

What does playing with ideas mean?

It begins with Terry in seventh grade.

Because Terry and I, then we developed this deep friendship, and we would play

endless games of monopoly, and we then deregulated monopoly.

And his whole idea was,

this is, our idea was the rules, at that point we were like, well, the rules make no sense.

Like, the game, it's a brilliant game, but for example, why do you start with $1,500?

That is, by the way, if you're interested, this is the great flaw with Monopoly.

Because the point of Monopoly is, when you're playing it, it should be a question of what can I afford.

It should be a difficult question.

I land on Marvin Gardens.

Do I want to buy Marvin Gardens should be a question that you have to entertain and come up with a serious answer to.

If you give each player $1,500 to start and you land on Marvin Gardens, you just buy it.

How is that interesting?

That's absurd.

So it's a little bit like inherited wealth.

Yes, exactly.

So we started with $1.

What could you buy with $1?

You can't even get a slice of pizza.

Much less Marvin Gardens.

So the first 10 minutes is just speed circling the board, accumulating capital.

And then

we have to come up with all kinds of ways to basically create systems for creating leverage.

Did you have too much time on your hands?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

We've played so much Monopoly.

So what I realize now is that we would sell derivatives.

So

I would say

like if I landed on your property, you had improved, you know, the blue property, you know, Vermont and Oriental and whatever.

we and I owe you 500 bucks we'd never pay the 500

that was silly why would you pay the 500 it instead it should be an invitation to a negotiation about there are clearly I owe you 500 bucks all right so how can I be useful to you in some other way right

so it's goods and services yeah yeah I have you land on you land on on Vermont you owe me 500 bucks I have Broadway I need Park Place so I say okay, pay me $100, but if you land on Park Place, I have the right of first refusal to buy that property from you, right?

Now that's a simple example.

We constructed these insanely elaborate, massive derivatives, and we would play...

Did they have no drugs in Canada?

We would play with Terry's cousin, Fred,

and we would play like three or four games an afternoon, and we would play hundreds of games a summer.

We would get together every morning, just play this game.

But it was the same thing.

It was like,

and each over the course of the summer, we would create ever more elaborate structures around, but that's the origin of play.

Because Terry's assumption, this is what Terry taught me.

He was like, What does Parker Brothers know about Monopoly?

That was, and the self-confidence of that was

fair enough.

But

when you're dealing with

auto safety,

medical tests, all the many subjects, in other words, at what point

do you feel

grimly responsible toward the set of ideas and the facts?

And how does that interact with playing?

What's the difference between what you're doing

and what an academic feels obliged to do?

Because

I mean, I remember having a piece of yours, and there was a piece, and it was so mean to Ralph Nader,

who I was brought up to think was just an incredible hero for all the, okay, he lost the election at one point, but another mind.

I can tell you where that came from.

So this goes to you.

And then you blamed poor Ralph Nader for what, like...

Oh, it's so genius.

So on the sense of play,

the first layer of play is understanding other people who want to play.

Right?

So I got, I like cars, and I thought it'd be fun to write about automobile safety for the New Yorker, because nobody was writing about auto books.

And if they were writing about it, they were writing about it in this kind of really kind of rote-boring way.

Right, right, right.

So find someone who has an interesting take on auto safety.

Now, where would that person reside?

Well, not in academia.

They would work for a car company, right?

Turns out it's a Scottish guy called Leonard Evans who ran the safety department at General Motors.

And Leonard wrote a book called Traffic Safety in America, which is so genius.

And I read Traffic Safety.

I was like, oh my god, Leonard, you're a genius.

So I call up Leonard.

And he's got this whole Scottish brogue accent.

And he's been waiting for you all.

He has been waiting for him for me his entire life.

No journalist has ever called Leonard.

Of course not.

And Leonard's sitting in his office in like Dearborn, wherever the hell he is.

And he doesn't even bother to clear it with General Motors Public Relations because he's never had a journalist call him before.

He's just on the phone with me.

And Leonard does something.

The first story Leonard gives me, he goes, in his Scottish accent, which I can't do, he says, you realize, we're talking about airbags.

And one of, this is in the

mid-90s,

late 90s.

And one of Leonard's points was

airbags were suddenly a big deal.

Everyone was in love with airbags.

And his point was, the airbag, if you're not wearing your seat belt, the airbag

can kill you, particularly if you're very young or very old or very small.

And Leonard said, the reason we don't realize this is that, the reason we have airbags is because of Ralph Nader.

And Ralph Nader didn't understand this fact and he was promoting the airbag without, he thought it was an alternative to the seatbelt as opposed to an accompaniment to the seatbelt.

And then Leonard said, and I never wrote about this, he said, what you should do is you should file a Freedom of Information Act request with the whatever the automobile, whatever the

transit automobile

bureaucracy is, and ask for all the cases of people who died because they weren't wearing a seatbelt and the airbag went off.

And that's the blood that's on Ralph Nader's hands.

And I was like, oh my God.

So

I file the FOIA request, and like two months later, like seven

huge boxes show up at the Washington Post, and it's all the case files.

What did I do with that story?

Nothing.

And then, so I remember this, and I remember Leonard, and I get to the New Yorker, and I'm filled with shame that I never wrote the story.

I would have won the Pullet Surprise.

I would have won the, Leonard gave me a Pulitzer Surprise.

It was all there in the boxes.

It was like hundreds of people.

I mean, it's sad.

But, like.

He did say it was sad.

Hashtag sad.

Sad.

And Leonard is not happy with me for not doing a story about this.

So then I say, okay, Leonard, I'll do the Ralph Nader story.

Just, I can't, I'm not

sure the ship is sailed, but we'll do the Ralph Nader story.

And then I go,

so then

for some reason, I go to Detroit, but I don't hang out with Leonard.

I hang out with his competitor at Ford.

And I think he got very

concerned about that.

He was unhappy.

But the guy at Ford had this whole thing about three-point belts, and we crashed all these cars.

It was so much fun.

And then I came back.

But the point, it all starts with Leonard.

Like, Leonard was a guy who wanted to play.

He was an iconoclast,

ignored, sitting in his office in Dearborn, and nobody was listening to him, and he was writing these books that were read by seven people,

and he was just great.

He was just like, and when you uncover someone like that, and he was just so thrilled with the idea that...

I think another thing that thrilled you is that all the rest of us slobs who are writing about politics or show business or sports

are obsessed with access, right?

You want to write a profile of LeBron James.

You want to write a profile of Kamala Harris or whatever.

And you have to go through these tentacles and seaweed

of handlers

and no and no.

And can we have quote approval and photo approval?

And the answer is no.

Okay, we're not, blah, blah, blah.

It's terrible.

It's terrible.

And I think part of it, tell me if I'm wrong, was your antipathy to that.

Yeah.

I mean, the closest I think you might have done to a true celebrity profile, one of my favorite pieces, was the guy who was the Ronco, what was it called, the Ronco jar and bottle cutter?

Oh, that's one of my favorite pieces that I ever did.

On the guy who did the Showtime Rotisserie.

But that's really, right, the rotisserie chicken guy.

Yay!

And, but what I glean from that also, you had a very early interest, and here we're going back a little bit, before you were in journalism, you were in advertising.

What was your interest?

I wanted to be be in advertising.

I think they couldn't get a job.

You couldn't get a job?

Why did you want to be in advertising?

Well, because I liked the idea that someone can tell a story in 30 seconds.

I just thought that was fantastic.

And I was in awe of,

I thought the greatest achievement was

a well-told 30-second story was the hardest thing in the world.

And the idea that they can make you laugh or cry in 30 seconds while they're selling you something is just,

the degree of difficulty on that is just off the charts.

Hence, what was his name?

The Ronco Giardibal.

So, Ron Papille.

Ron Poppel.

He did the, remember, he did the, he used to do the late-night infomercials.

He was the infomercial king.

Right.

And he did, he made a number of things, but his showpiece product was the Showtime Rotisserie Oven, which was, I claim, dollar for dollar the finest kitchen appliance ever made.

And I still believe that to be the case.

And I went out to LA and I hung out with Ron, and it was, I decided to go deep on Ron.

And it turns out he's from

like

Asbury Park or somewhere in.

His people were all

tumblers.

They were sales.

On the boardwalk, New Jersey.

They all sold knives and stuff on the boardwalk.

And Ron was the, you know, another guy, Ed McMahon, was part of that circle.

And a guy named Kidders Morris, who was Ron Popil's grandfather, was a legendary guy from the old country who came over and was selling kitchen gadgets on the boardwalk.

And they would do the spiel

and you know the chop chop chop they'd have the they'd have the all the vegetables and they'd be sitting on the boardwalk and they would show you the knife and they'd go chop chop chop chop chop and the whole thing was the turn

this is a crucial thing that he learns back then which is so the crowd gathers around you and you've got the ginsu knife and you're chopping the vegetables and then at a certain first of all you can't

you have a

he taught me this he's like you got the carrots and the potatoes and you got the pineapple you can't ever chop the pineapple.

Why?

Because it's so expensive.

It's just there.

It's the thought that he might somehow one day chop the pineapple that keeps the people coming.

But no, no, you chop the carrots.

The carrots are like five cents a carrot.

But the key thing is to turn.

So the people come close, they gather around you.

You're going chop, chop, chop, chop.

And you got to sell them

the knife.

And they got to get out of there because the news one, new people have to come in.

That's the key.

So anybody could do the thing chop chop chop chop chop people gather around

but it's turning that crowd and bringing in a new one in a seamless fashion that's the and Ron was battle-tested on the board he was the greatest of all the boardwalk and then he goes to LA and he takes it up a notch and he starts doing late-night infomercials and he was so good and I hung out with him and he from I was out there for like two weeks mostly goofing around but um hang and I talked with the guy he collaborated with on the Showtime oven.

I actually got a shit.

I used to, for years I used to cook my chickens on the Showtime.

It was amazing.

No more?

I don't know what happened.

It got really squeaky in like year six.

You had a squeaky rotisserie.

I had a squeaky one.

And Ron told me that I had to fix it and I.

You threw it out.

But his big thing was...

You threw out the oven.

I did.

His big thing that, you know, a lot of the, back then in the old days, the rotisseries,

they went like

this is the spit.

They were vertical.

And Ron's like, why do you do it vertical?

It makes no sense.

The juices flow to the bottom.

Crazy.

It's got to be horizontal.

He's the guy who starts the horizontal rotisserie.

And he was so, it was so, and getting into the family history, and at one point he takes me to the grave site.

in New Jersey where all the whole, there's three generations of these legendary pitchmen who work the boardwalk, and they're all buried in this thing.

And he starts to cry and it was just like

unbelievable.

But the move there, and this, my editor, your dear friend Henry Finder,

he was another very formative figure in this.

He's like,

everyone, the standard move is to make fun of Ron Papil.

Do not make fun of Ron Papille.

You have to genuinely, he's a hero.

You have, and if the reader thinks for a moment you're mocking the man, you've failed.

And I that is the single

time with Henry on that.

100%.

And to this day, people make this error, journalists do.

They think at some point they have to demonstrate their superiority to the subject.

No.

The subject is the hero.

And you have to find your job.

There's 10 ways to write that out.

Ron Papill had a very complicated.

Except in political reporting, but okay.

Yeah.

But Ron had a a, there's ten ways to write the Ron Papill profile.

Nine of those ways you make fun of him.

Thank you.

And one way you reckon you look for what is

what was fantastic about this guy, which is

he devoted his life and his people for three generations devoted his life to making

working in the kitchen a happier, healthier, easier, more efficient.

That's a fantastic.

He cared about whether the chicken was vertical or horizontal.

We'll be right back.

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Hey there, Malcolm Glabo here.

I was just in London, and I spent most of my time doing what I love most there, walking, miles and miles.

Through Clerkenwell and Covent Garden and Shoreditch, stopping for Espresso, thinking, writing, hanging out out in proof rock coffee, my favorite coffee shop in the city.

Then I had dinner at my favorite restaurant in Clerkenwell.

It's been open for about 150 years.

You can feel the history in the floorboards.

That's what I love about traveling.

It slows you down and gets you out of your usual rhythm.

And if you're looking to switch up your everyday routine, consider hosting your home on Airbnb while you're away.

It's an easy way to earn a little extra and offer someone else a meaningful stay.

Your home might be worth more than you think.

Find out how much at airbnb.com/slash host.

We're back at the 92nd Street Y with David Remnick.

You are

no longer 23 and you've just had a couple of kids.

They're how old now?

I got a toddler and a baby.

I'm forbidden.

I'm forbidden to give you the real living.

60?

Are you like 10?

You look like you're 14.

First of all, good luck.

Second of all,

famously, and you once told me, you know how

you did one of your moves about college admissions.

I love that.

It's crazy.

They're getting in and then 92nd Street.

Why kindergarten and Ivy League this and da da da.

In Canada, we just filled out an application the night before and I, da da da.

Okay.

All right.

No, no, no,

not even the night before.

Well, you, the morning.

Day of.

Day of.

David, my parents weren't even involved.

My father asked me, Where are you applying to college?

I was like, Well, I'm just doing the form now.

And what did you put on it?

Monopoly?

No, you just

send the form in.

It's like a page.

You just send it in.

All right.

So, your kids are going to not stay toddler and baby for very long.

I promise you that.

This is one area where I know more.

How are you going to feel about college admissions when they get to be 16, 17, 18?

Because

your rant about Ivy League.

Which I've been doing for years.

Which is one of the most perfected rants of all time.

I got a new rant, by the way.

I got two episodes of my podcast.

It is, so I've been working on this rant, you're right.

15 years.

I have perfect.

I got two episodes of my podcast coming out, I think next week.

It's called The Georgetown Massacre.

It is,

when I say this is,

this is like,

it is my Beethoven's Fifth.

It is my,

it is my white album.

It is my, everything else I have done.

This is what's going on.

It is just like chump change compared.

This is two parts.

Two parts on one case involving

a tennis player who goes to Georgetown.

And every single, everything I've done as a writer has been

building towards,

it's so genius.

And it like, by the end, it's just like, and it has twists and turns and it's just,

it's.

Would you like to preview it?

No, I don't want to give it away.

You got to listen to it.

So I'm not giving it away.

So good.

This is why I have to work for a living.

No, I know what you're saying.

Am I going to be a hypocrite?

Yeah, of course.

The one thing I will not do, though.

Yeah, what?

There was one place where I believe.

Where are you going to draw the line?

SAT prep?

No,

I'm not making the call.

Oh, okay.

You mean the call to the

mocker call?

You call in.

I know the guy who knows the guy who knows the guy who's on the board.

Not doing that.

Okay.

I say.

We talked about voice before, and one of the reasons I think that your podcast

is so successful and so seductive, and I don't miss them, is that

it has a real human voice.

It doesn't feel red, even though I know damn well that you've worked on them really hard.

Similar to your prose.

It feels, your written prose feels spoken, and vice versa,

which I mean is high praise.

Podcasting is a relatively new form.

Why did you gravitate toward it in such a complete way?

This is not some avocation.

In fact, at a certain point,

you know, you've done work where the book is an extension of the podcast,

as with the bomber book.

So tell me about that and your attraction to it.

Well, there's certain kinds of stories.

So, for example, the story I was just telling you about, the Georgetown Massacre.

You could write it, but it's not not nearly as fun in written form.

So there's a certain kind of story which lends itself beautifully to audio, where audio permits you, you could be more playful, you can get away with stuff.

What does that mean?

Get away with stuff.

Yeah.

There's no critical infrastructure.

So there's like, no one's going to.

I don't understand.

You could be more full of shit.

No, no, you could be like.

You have to be, you're careful.

I mean, I am, no, no, we're not making stuff up.

What I'm saying is people are more accepting of a kind of playful outlandishness.

So, part of the Georgetown Massacre episodes,

the tongue is in the cheek, right?

Even as I'm making a substantive point.

And you feel you can do that more than in Caslon type in a certain magazine.

You would not let me write that for the New Yorker.

You take it out.

Because I would feel what?

It wouldn't work.

It's like i don't it's hard to explain because a lot of what's playful about audio is stuff you're doing with your voice right so you're you know you

i can i can adopt a tone of voice that says

we're

we're

we're having a fun right we're playing with ideas yeah like there's a character in the georgetown massacre uh there's it's part of it was a turn And we meet the guy who's

charged in a case, and he takes as his lawyers the two legendary, two greatest defense lawyers in the country, Roy Black and Howard Schrebnik, these two guys in Miami.

And we meet Roy and Howard.

Now,

the first crucial thing is,

if I'm writing a print version, you'll meet Roy and Howard.

I describe them.

You got to hear, when you hear them, it's just so much better.

And you realize, like, and then when you're describing them, I can describe them in a much more colorful way when when I know you're going to hear their voice.

Right?

I can't explain it better than that, but there is something about,

I can, like, Howard has got long hair and rides a motorcycle in the early morning hours and

looks like a movie star and

does this,

in this trial, he does a

He does a direct examination of the defendant's daughter that is just so

masterful.

I mean, it's just, it's like, and I was reading, you know, you read the transcript and you come to this thing and you're like, is someone, because people like you and I,

you know, our business fundamentally is not about, we're not in the writing business, we're in the interviewing business, right?

We only write because we've interviewed somebody.

It's really interviewing.

You think of it that way.

Oh, yeah.

Really?

Oh, yeah.

The whole game is interviewing.

It's not.

Okay.

Writing is, I would never write something without it.

The idea of writing something just without having sat down first to talk to someone is unthinkable to me.

So when you, a defense lawyer is.

So just to stipulate, that's the fun part for you?

That's the juice of it, above all?

Well, I don't find the writing part hard.

I find the

writing part is just

a matter of sitting down.

Wow.

Don't tell any writers that.

No, but that's the gift of being at the Washington Post for 10 years.

It used to be hard, and it wasn't.

By the time I was done there, I was on the phone dictating the the story.

Like, they solved that problem.

The hard part is: can I sit down with somebody and can I

understand who they are and what they're trying to say and represent that in a way that's meaningful

and powerful?

And all of that is stuff you get from the interview.

You don't, you can't make it up after the fact.

So you have to, like, I was doing this summer, I spent

like 20 hours, maybe I've forgotten how many hours, 10, 15, 20 hours with this woman

who's a psychologist.

And it was incredible.

Like, she agreed, thank God, to sit with me for that long.

Who's this?

Telling you.

Steal it.

You're like the competition, for goodness sake.

That hurts me very much.

Yeah, not telling you.

I'm not telling you.

And it was the same thing with the Paul Simon thing that we did.

Yeah, I've heard of him.

Where he, you know, he sat for 40 hours, and the whole thing, the trick, not the trick,

what's interesting, what's hard about that was not writing it up afterwards.

All those problems were solved in the interview.

The trick was when we were talking to him.

And I, if I'm sorry to interrupt, which is the worst thing you can do in an interview, but I've interviewed Paul Simon.

He's not immediately easy.

No, he's not easy.

And you had him for, you know, on and on and on, and it got richer and richer and richer and he something you did something about you

your patience your interest your silence whatever whatever it was drew out a guy that i i think it's fair to say is not immediately um thrilled with being the process of being interviewed he was i don't understand why he was so

he was he kept on i kept on saying i'm done and then he would he would say no let's when are we meeting again and we would me and bruce my friend bruce did it together.

And Bruce and I would look at each other like.

Bruce Hedlam.

Yeah.

Bruce and I would look at each other like, he really wants to do it again?

And he would always do it again.

And then.

I couldn't believe it.

And I think that,

you know, if I was kind of reconstructing why he was so kind of generous with his time, that would be part of it.

Part of it was, I think,

we were uninterested in the parts of his life that he felt had been picked over.

So we're not interested in your marriage to so-and-so.

In relationship with Art Garfa.

But we were really interested in his dad.

And I remember there was one moment we were...

Who was a musician?

Who was a musician?

I remember there was one time where Bruce and I asked him some question, and I asked him some question about his dad, and

he went,

he talked straight for like half an hour, got incredibly emotional, and then he said, I have to stop.

And he got up and walked outside.

It was like,

wow.

deep and the idea it's so interesting and it's

that thing that moment in when you're interviewing somebody first of all it never gets old when you tap into something so we had tapped into something that was real about him that his relationship to his father he's a man in his 70s his father's been dead for 30 years he eclipsed his father in every conventional way by a million miles and yet

And he was still, you realize he was still writing about his father.

He was still dreaming about his father.

His father was still

with him.

It was just such a kind of like, but that,

when you get there, and that was, that took a long time for us to get there, when you get there with somebody, that, like I said, the writing is not hard when you get that kind of moment on the.

How did your parents affect

the way you look?

You're now at this some, you're moving forward, but slightly retrospective, you have kids, your life has changed.

You look back on it,

how did your parents inform

who you are in your work?

Well, my dad was

a, he was a mischief maker.

He was someone who had no interest whatsoever in

any authority, in any

he did not,

the psychological term that best describes him was

disagreeable, not

Psychologists when they use the term, they don't mean obnoxious.

He was the furthest thing from obnoxious, incredibly gracious man.

In psychological terms, disagreeable means you are uninterested in

the approval of others.

No, could care less.

Just the idea of standing out and being different was just second nature for him.

It wasn't that he relished

that being different.

It's just he didn't care.

He just did what he was doing.

How was he different?

He taught math.

Taught math.

He was a kind of,

I've told this story many times, but we moved to Canada.

We're living in rural Canada in kind of Mennonite country.

It was all these old older Mennonites, people who are like the Amish.

They're in driving buggies.

And a barn would burn down and they would do a barn raising.

They'd all gather the next day and they would raise the barn in one day.

Hundreds of Mennonites would come in their horses and buggies from miles around and they would, you know,

have huge spread of food and they would just, it was incredible to watch actually if you go to a barn raising, hundreds of them putting up a barn.

And my father decided to join.

And he see, so there's one car, a kind of, you know, his Volvo,

with like a hundred horses and buggies.

And he's like an English guy.

They're all like clean shaven, wearing black pants and like these, you know, and hats, straw hats, and he's like got a big beard and a tie and he looks like a mathematician, an English mathematician and he drives up in his bulba with his kids in the in tow and not an ounce of self-consciousness not even for did it even occur to him to ask permission to show up he shows up and says you know basically put me to work and they're like okay and they he doesn't know what they're doing so he's doing the most manual labor no one

None of the hundred people at this barn raising had more than a sixth grade education.

He has a PhD in advanced mathematics and he's the happiest man there.

That's so my dad.

He was just like, like, and like went home and then never spoke about it again.

Or my other favorite story about my dad, a story he told me when he was

in his 70s.

I don't know why he never told me this before.

He's married my mom.

My mom is Jamaican.

They're in Jamaica.

He's teaching at the University of West Indies, where one of his students is Kamala Harris's Harris's dad, Kamala Harris's dad.

And he decides he wants to write, he's writing some paper, and back then, if you needed a book,

the book he needed was not in the University of West Indies Library.

And he figures out it's at the Georgia Tech Library.

And so he's going to go to Georgia Tech.

So he writes a letter to the professor, a friend he knows at Georgia Tech.

My name is Graham Blabel.

I'm a professor at the University of West Indies.

I would like to come to Georgia Tech to read your, to use your library.

Guy says yes.

And he's preparing to go.

And he learns later that it kicks off a panic at Georgia Tech because it's 1960.

Georgia Tech is segregated.

And they don't know whether he's white or black.

They just know he's a professor from the University of West Indies.

God knows he could be a black guy coming to our camp.

We just invited a black guy to the campus.

Holy shit.

And like, they go nuts.

And finally, there's no tele, there's no, there's telephones, but there's no direct line.

They try and find out.

Finally, they reach him on the phone before he's about to come and you know he's called to the switchboard whatever you know professor gladwell yes this is so-and-so from Georgia Tech yes

are you white he goes

yes they go oh thank god so then but this is the story's not over

so then

now they're gonna roll out the red carpet right

but so he gets on the boat sails from Jamaica to Miami, gets on the bus.

That's how you did it back then.

Takes the bus from Miami to Atlanta.

Goes, they have a welcome dinner.

They're all sitting down, all like these white men.

And halfway through the meal, he pulls out a large 8x10 photo of my mom.

Says, yes, my wife, I was going to bring her, but I say it again.

Hands it around the room.

Like, no,

to him, that was a fantastic moment.

Like, show these guys.

Never mentioned a word about that story for

40 somewhat, 40.

And then

he's like, oh, I went to Georgia Tech and I had interviewed some guy there who was the head of the political science department, who was a black guy from Atlanta.

And I told it to my dad, I'm going to go, oh, that's so funny.

It wasn't always that way.

And then he told the story.

But

that was so him.

It's just like, he just, it was like he just loved nothing more than like poking the bear.

But he didn't,

you know, he didn't make a big deal about it.

He just wanted to go around poking the bear.

Before I ask about your mom, you mentioned that your dad was taught Kamala Harris's father.

Yeah.

Donald Harris was a student of his.

Or he knew him somehow.

Donald Harris told me this, not my dad, because my dad obviously had passed by the time Kamala became a big deal.

But.

Yeah, they were,

Donald Harris, my mom knows, Donald Harris is from Brownstown, which is where my mom went to school.

She knows, she went to school, she went to church at his father's church, and like they did, they clearly must have seen each other across a pew at the age of the degree of excitement in, well, all Jamaica, I mean, first of all, what's hilarious is

there's one group that says Kamala Harris is black, then there's another group that says she's Indian, and then there's the Jamaicans who are like, she's Jamaican.

Right.

And And so the level of excitement among the Jamaicans over her is, my mother, like literally,

she's 93.

There is zero chance she will exit this world between now and the election.

It's just zero.

It's just, it is not happening.

Like,

the degree to which, and her defense, I call her up, she just, the first 10 minutes, just defending Kamala against un

attacking her for, her big thing is, they're attacking her for not revealing her positions she's just started how can how can she have positions before she's started my mother's whole thing is this should unfold over the passage of time is I remember I had the privilege of meeting her a few times particularly in Washington and she she struck me as a very proper

she's my mother is a very very

yes she is a a very refined dignified Jamaican lady yeah you don't nobody messes with.

She loved also confronting authority and did it endlessly and to great effect in our little town.

They had never met.

How did she navigate rural Ontario?

She just sailed right in.

She met all the kind of power brokers in town, charmed them.

got on all the right committees.

And I mean, it was Mennonites.

So the Mennonites are, there's no, they're not they're the opposite end of the they they're not racist it's no racist it was no racist

you know it was nothing and also it's a very different now that I understand this it's a very different story when you're the only black person in town what do you mean

we'll actually talk about this in my book

an outsider is not threatening at those in those numbers right particularly an outsider who is as And she was, this is a deeply Christian town, and my mother is a very devout woman.

And so she read very, she seemed very familiar to them, even if she was, at the same time, in some sense, exotic.

But she's very,

she would never register, even if something untoward was done to her, she would never register that in the moment.

You know, she would hold it back, and she would tell you about it maybe later.

But it was in a...

And also, there's a...

A lot of us will tell you this.

It's very different to come from a culture where you're in the majority.

You know, a story actually I told it in Outliers.

When my mom was in,

she was a scholarship student at a boarding school in Jamaica, and all of the scholarship students were black, right?

They would be.

And they were all there because they were really good students.

And so she's like 11 years old, and she reads in the Encyclopedia Britannica that black people are genetically inferior to white people when it comes to intelligence.

And no, she can't comprehend this because in her world, all the smart people are the.

This is in the Britannica.

Yeah, this is like from 1900s.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's there, it's still in Jamaica in 1930, whatever.

But in her world, all the smart people are black, and the dumb ones are the,

you know, the plantation owners' daughters.

You know, these white kids from, you know, one generation.

They're like, what are they doing here?

You know, and so it's like,

if that's your mindset, when all you, in her, so she has a, so you come to Canada and you have no comprehension of the basis.

You think of racism, you think of racist tropes as absurd as opposed to being

malignant.

Malcolm,

I want to

thank you deeply for your work and your friendship.

I miss you.

You live in like God knows where in upstate New York.

I wish I saw you

much more often.

Your idea of upstate New York is like awesening.

That's about as far as you go.

You're like, we're

thinking

weekend.

Where are you going?

Yonkers.

Yonkers.

We're going to Yonkers.

What was your theory?

What was the

mountain Jews?

I'm not a mountain Jew.

You're not a mountain Jew.

No, I'm really not.

No, no, no, no.

You know, I'm an environmentalist because I want there to be a wonderful and healthy environment for you.

Are you?

No, you're an environmentalist.

Because

you've been told there is an environment out there.

I check in with Betsy Colbert and Bill McKibben

and others.

Yes.

And I'm told, like the other day, I was walking into my building and I heard this racket.

And I said, what is that?

And the door guy said, those are birds.

Evidently, this is a bad attitude.

I want to close by asking you a very crucial question.

You have an ambivalent relationship with sports, with sports.

You once said, and I know you're a huge sports fan, Buffalo Bills, running, you're a terrific runner, but you've also said that sports are a moral abomination.

Did I say that?

You did.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I remember.

In what era?

I think

your annoyance with professional sports are you.

Well, I do, you know.

So here's my, in a nutshell, my current thinking on this.

I was a

very good high school runner, and then I quit and did run for 30 years, and then started again and became a kind of

slightly better than mediocre.

Better than that.

But not.

Yeah.

When I was at 16, I was up here.

When I was 50, I was down here.

And I had way, way, way more fun

when I was at 50 and mediocre than I did when I was 15 and a national champion.

And it has made me realize that you actually, you want to be mediocre.

You don't want to be.

You don't want to be good.

Aside from the very, very small group of people who genuinely, if you're LeBron or you're Usain Bolt, fine.

But

the idea that the rest of us should be pursuing that kind of athletic excellence is a mistake.

And what's happened,

there is, I think, in the audience a woman named Linda Flanagan who wrote this book I adore called Taking Back the Game, which is this critique of what's gone wrong with youth sports.

And this is, I think, one of her

central arguments in this wonderful book, which really changed the way I think about it, which is that we've destroyed the very thing that made sports fun.

Play.

Play.

Right.

By By this kind of professionalizing of youth sports.

And I realized that was my problem when I was 15.

I was caught up in a fantasy about that I was going to go to the Olympics and I was, and it ruined running for me.

And I didn't run for 30 years.

And that's heartbreaking because I love running more than almost anything else.

And

I recovered my joy of running only when I was coming in 28th in my local 5K.

And so that's what I mean by like this, we shouldn't be telling,

we shouldn't be,

Linda would tell you, why are you taking a 13-year-old and putting them through the

torture and getting in a car and driving for three hours for like a soccer match?

Why?

The drive should never be longer than the match.

That should be a rule, right?

Malcolm Gladwell, thank you.

It's been a pleasure.

Thanks for listening to that conversation with David Remnick at the 92nd Street Y.

You can find Revenge at the Tipping Point wherever you get your audiobooks.

Next time on Revisionist History, an update on Broken Windows Theory.

Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan with Ben Nadaf Haffrey and Nina Bird Lawrence.

Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by Echo Mountain, engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, production support from Luc Lamond.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Special thanks to Sarah Nix, and as always, El Jefe, Greta Cone.

I'm Malcolm Glapo.

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