Podcast Prescriptions: Revisionist History
Few podcast hosts’ representations precedes them quite like Malcolm Gladwell. He’s a journalist, public speaker, and 5 time New York times best selling author. He’s such a big deal that on the cover art of his podcast, Revisionist History, his name is in a larger font than the title. The font discrepancy makes sense, as the podcast is more or less a continuation of his previous works. In his most popular book, “Outliers”, Malcolm Gladwell finds tiny aspects of successful people, and makes a convincing argument that the small details make all the difference. He doesn’t make a mountain out of a molehill, he shows you that it was always a mountain and you were just looking at it wrong.
Revisionist History continues this tradition, describing itself as a podcast that, “reinterprets something from the past: an event, a person, an idea. Something overlooked. Something misunderstood.” Throughout the show’s three seasons, Malcolm casts wide net of American society, ranging from the evolution of Mcdonald’s fries to Elvis’ freudian shortcomings. Unlike many other podcasts, he’s not using his experience as an investigative journalist to “expose the real America”. He knows that the best way to understand our own society is to look at it on its face. Whether that be 2009’s massive recalls of Toyota vehicles, or one specific semi-colon in the U.S. constitution, the stories of Revisionist History have never been obscured from public view. They were right in front of us all along. We just weren’t looking.
Or sometimes we just forgot. The recently completed Season 3 pays close attention to the fallibility of memory and the repercussions of our mental mistakes. Episode 4, tells the tale of famous news anchor Brian Williams, and how misremembering one story about Iraq landed him in months of hot water. Because his story was untruthful, everyone unsurprisingly accused him of lying, but none of his accusers accounted for what ended up being true. Brian simply remembered the story wrong. This “scandal” nearly ruined ruined Brian’s 40 year long career as NBC Nightly News Anchor. A mainstay in network television was almost obliterated by one mistake, and it only happened three years ago. I certainly didn’t remember this story, and it seems that I’m not the only one. Even in the era of rampant “fake news” accusations, this devastating blow to his credibility doesn’t get brought up anymore. In the end, Brian forgot his story, and we forgot his.
We’ve all been fed certain narratives in our lives: truth will prevail, schools are a meritocracy, and Mexican immigration has always been a problem. Brick by brick, these narratives build towards a singular world view. A zoomed out, big picture understanding of how the world used to work, how it still works, and how it will always work. What Malcolm Gladwell understands better than most is that society’s grand narratives are incomplete. Revisionist History attempts to fill in these gaps with small stories like Brian’s. Stories that aren’t as flashy as our traditional grand narratives, but are nonetheless fascinating dissections of American society. The show’s not interested in the big picture, but the whole picture. And sometimes to understand the full picture, you need to think small.
