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They Don’t Teach You (Like) This In School
On bad airport books, good podcasts, and why Black people should watch ‘Seinfeld’
Far too many episodes of If Books Could Kill (IBCK) have sped through my ears in the last two weeks alone to be able to tell you in which episode a certain joke or observation appears; that is, if the observation, joke, or critique is not directed at a specific book but on one of the general falls of the self-help industry.
One of the marketing tools often employed by gurus and grifters is the “they don’t teach this in schools” rhetoric, which, to be fair, is not wrong in all contexts. Still, mostly it is used by people spreading ‘fake news’ or overachieving exaggerations, giving the facts an aura of speciality, of top secret information, and implying that the reader is now a special holder of such knowledge, that of course, should have just been taught at school.
If Books Could Kill is as bingeable as a series can be, at least for me.
Michael Hobbes (journalist) and Peter Shamshiri (attorney) have put together a really special thing. In IBCK, they analyse and break apart a series of infamous books that have shaped our culture from the high viewing point of an airport newsagency bookshelf.
