“A podcast is such a more emotionally immediate form,” Gladwell tells EW.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: First off, I just want to ask, why the long gap between books?
MALCOLM GLADWELL:The podcast takes, at minimum, six months out of every year.
Credit: Edd Westmacott/Photoshot/Getty Images; Little, Brown and Company
So instead of working full-time on the book, I was working half-time on the book.
So it just took longer.
And this book, I didn’t really figure out what I wanted to say until Sandra Bland.
Is that where the book started, with Sandra Bland?
It was really that case and [those] two long summers of those police violence cases.
I found myself, like many people, so drawn to and angered by those cases.
Then it started to make me think that maybe this is something I could write about in the book.
And how did it grow out of that?
Well, I simultaneously discoveredTim Levine’s work, which is a huge part of the book.
They were about these fundamental misunderstandings that occur between strangers.
Well, I wanted this book to be topical.
Amanda Knox is a version of this.
Then you start going down the list.
Jerry Sandusky is a super complicated version of this.
They’re not identical, but they’re all circling around this central problem.
Not a book that could have been written at any point.
How has working onRevisionist Historyimpacted your writing?
Well, the podcast medium is so emotional, right?
It’s so intimate and emotional.
And if you’ve been spending your life writing prose, you’re not used to that.
You’re used to being something with a little more distant, analytical perspective.
That, for me, was a pretty powerful lesson.
And it got me interested in new ways of telling stories.
What sort of reaction are you expecting?
You know, there’s [a few] levels of reaction.
And that reaction is, of course, meaningless.
But nonetheless, it can be quite loud.
And then there’s the reaction of people who are just unwilling to change their mind or rethink things.
And that’s not terribly useful either.
Your critics tend to accuse you of generalizing and over-simplifying complicated issues and concepts.
How do you respond to those criticisms?
Well, usually by asking for examples.
I find a lot of these criticisms along those lines are incredibly vague.
I’m slightly baffled by that.
But I don’t think I do it.
That’s what journalists do.
Can you talk more about that process, of translating these ideas into something understandable for a wider audience?
The finest piece of journalism in the world is of no use if no one reads it.
And getting people to read it requires compromises and sacrifices and all kinds of things.
It is very hard to get it perfectly right.
And I clearly explain where I got some of these ideas so people can go to the literature themselves.
If you want more, it’s possible for you to find it.
The internet has in some way made this whole problem a lot easier.
Whereas, you know, a generation before they would’ve had to go to an academic library.
Google is a silent companion to all these kinds of books.
It allows readers to reach their own level of complexity.
So if this book is read substantially, what do you hope its impact will be?
I think it’s fine to say that we don’t fully understand someone.
It’s fine to be wrong about people.
It’s fine to take your time in coming to a conclusion about someone.
You know, I think we should be more forgiving.
