Abstract
Renowned author Malcolm Gladwell, who penned The Tipping Point (2000), Outliers (2008), and other accessible works of nonfiction, offers sociologists another trove for their perusing pleasure and pedagogical practice. His podcast, Revisionist History, explores “things overlooked and misunderstood.” It tastefully extends Gladwell’s journalistic career through informative, even humorous, narratives that engage with grand theories, historic events, microlevel interactions, and structural problems. Each episode features bits of stimulating music as well as clips of primary source audio material and interviews with key informants and experts, all interlaced with Gladwell’s narration.
Now in its fifth season, each episode starts with an enticing soliloquy from Gladwell or some dialogue with an informant. In the first several seasons, a minute-long advertisement interrupts the podcast once, usually around the 15-minute mark. Longer advertisements are plopped intermittently in the episodes of season 5. Each episode offers a story that dabbles in offshoots that listeners may first regard as digressions, despite Gladwell’s assurances to the contrary. He delivers. The narrative consistently returns to its original framing and explicitly addresses the question posed at the beginning of the episode.
A sociologist would be hard-pressed to come away empty-handed after searching for something of interest in this podcast. Versatility is its strength. It offers instructors opportunities to supplement assigned literature with an episode or two in nearly any undergraduate course, from Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and Sociological Criminology (“State v Johnson” and “Mr. Hollowell Didn’t Like That,” season 2, episodes 7 and 8), to Political Sociology (“The Satire Paradox,” season 1, episode 10) and Sociology of Food (“McDonald’s Broke My Heart,” season 2, episode 9), to Social Psychology (“Free Brian Williams,” season 3, episode 4), Sociology of Art (“Hedwig’s Lost Van Gogh,” season 5, episode 2), Social Movements (“Generous Orthodoxy,” season 1, episode 9), and Economic Sociology (“Dragon Psychology 101,” season 5, episode 1).
Introductory courses could also assign Revisionist History. For sociologists who emphasize power and inequality when introducing the discipline, I suggest using “A Good Walk Spoiled.” This first episode of season 2 touches on themes that students often thoroughly engage within Social Class and Inequality, Environmental Sociology, Urban Sociology, and Political Sociology courses. With concision and thick description of the lush grassy fields at the center of this story, “A Good Walk Spoiled” illuminates the problem of too many private golf courses and too few public green spaces in and around Los Angeles, California.
Instructors can create a debate-style activity for the class meeting after students listened. If a traditional two-sided debate is desired, then the members who leisure within country clubs are on one side and the employees who labor within them are on the other. The latter, echoing sentiments of working-class folk across the county, need a place to safely recreate, while the wealthy formulate arguments to reproduce rules for persistent exclusion. Instructors could pose questions like (1) How does each side construct their claims to possess land rights, especially given the extreme undervaluation of the property in local land taxation? and (2) What are the key assumptions each side makes regarding the tension between public and private resources? After the debate, instructors should consider returning to core questions of structure as well as potential for social change. Ask students how public policy shapes unequal access to green space and how public policy could shift to remedy this inequality to complete the activity.
Most of the episodes are one-off pieces lasting 30 to 40 minutes. Others are multipart. For example, the first two episodes of season 4 examine the U.S. law school admission system. Gladwell and his intern, Camille Baptista, actually sat for the LSAT—the law school entrance exam—to start the series. The “absurdity of meritocracy” is laid bare within these two episodes, which would resonate most if assigned together. If needed, the instructor may opt to assign only the second part, “The Tortoise and the Hare” (season 4, episode 2), as it clarifies how the time limitation of standardized tests produces a system that boosts the performance of quicker thinkers while dampening the scores of slower thinkers. It is an intriguing case that eyes the underbelly of meritocracy because it highlights why slower thinkers and their ability to deeply mull over a court case—and all the related precedents—are an invaluable group to the practice of law, particularly at the highest court in the land.
Sociologists of education have several episodes at their disposal, ranging from K–12 to tertiary and postgraduate schooling. There are a few gems in the first season, such as “Food Fight” (season 1, episode 5). Gladwell juxtaposes on-campus dining options at elite private colleges with their need-based scholarship programs. The imbalance is egregious and rampant since colleges use food to entice admitted students to enroll, instead of more robustly funding low-income student tuition to enable their enrollment. Instructors can assign this episode with Tressie McMillan Cottom’s (2018) thorough examination of for-profit colleges in Lower Ed or specifically assign chapter 5, which considers the case of small liberal arts colleges.
Another particularly useful episode from season 1 is “Carlos Doesn’t Remember” (season 1, episode 4). This episode develops a story about the persistent struggle to identify, develop, and support kids with innate talents when they live impoverished and attend poorly resourced public schools. I suggest pairing this episode with Alanna Gillis’ (2018b) class activity about school choice, as related to charter schools. Or, use the episode to foreground and humanize tracking, the controversial school practice of assigning students based on some assessment of their academic ability, and combine it with an in-class debate activity and a short video (Gillis 2018a; Teaching Tolerance 2010).
For teaching tracking and racial inequalities in education, instructors should also consider assigning “Miss Buchanan’s Period of Adjustment” (season 2, episode 3). This episode considers an often-ignored consequence of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board, which ruled racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional: the displacement of Black educators. In this episode, Gladwell questions the consequences for Black educators, who arguably should have been integrated into white schools before any students were shuffled around. Incorporating this story, set in and around Topeka, Kansas, is ideal for complicating a whitewashed narrative about the successes following the Brown decision. Sociologist Hilton Kelly’s (2010) oral history study of Black teachers during the Jim Crow era is an ideal accompaniment to this episode, applying an asset-based framework to understand the success of Black educators in mobilizing resources for their students despite operating within a highly constrained opportunity structure.
I recommend bringing these materials into the classroom with an imagination exercise that begins with a think-pair-share activity. How would schools have been different if Black educators were maintained in their role post-Brown? After students share their ideas with a partner, I suggest directing them to write their ideas on the board for all to see. The instructor should then read each idea aloud and have the class collectively code the responses. Look for themes about economic well-being (like employment continuation) for Black educators and the communities in which they live, cognitive changes around ideas about authority and the ability to evaluate student abilities, opportunity differences in terms of how Black and Brown students would be better treated in the schools and less likely to be tracked into lower-tiered academic programs, and teachers’ union compositions, which would be more racially diverse and perhaps more willing to consider community needs from an asset-oriented mindset that does not pit teachers against parents. Pose questions like, Can integrating more Black teachers make a difference today—nearly seven decades after Brown and almost two decades after the 1991 McDowell v. Oklahoma City U.S. Supreme Court decision that effectively dismantled federal mandates to desegregate public schools? What are arguments for and against diversifying the teacher workforce? Who are the key stakeholders in this debate? How do all people, across race, stand to gain from such a shift in the teaching profession?
Not all Revisionist History episodes address race or power so explicitly. But many do offer insights into such sociological domains. For example, season 4 features a three-part series about casuistry, a Jesuit method of thinking. St. Ignatius of Loyola’s approach emphasizes the pertinence of the specifics of a given case in order to more justly treat the actors involved, rather than applying long-established and generally accepted ways of understanding that tend to focus on the broadest strokes of an event while overlooking its particulars. The first part, “The Standard Case” (season 4, episode 5), could be incorporated into Sociology of Sports and Medical Sociology courses. It provides an in-depth discussion of professional athletes’ use of performance-enhancing drugs. The class should consider how physiological ailments and related medical interventions differ from desires to embellish one’s athletic ability.
Part 2 of this series, “Dr. Rock’s Taxonomy” (season 4, episode 6), would be especially useful in Sociology of Gender and Religion courses. John Rock stands at the center of this episode. He created the birth control pill. As a Catholic, Rock labored to make sense of his medical invention that changed family planning and women’s agency in determining their own fertility trajectory in ways that did not disrupt anticonception religious doctrine. In-class discussion about this episode could consider questions of how medical technology is framed in relation to religious concerns and feminist pursuits. For example, ask students to contrast the birth control pill that communicates pregnancy to the body, thus preventing conception, and the current medical endeavors to produce a drug that pauses menstruation, thus pushing conception into the future—even deep into an ovulating person’s middle age.
The third installment, “Descend into the Particular” (season 4, episode 7), would be especially useful for Sociology of Crime and Law courses as well as Social Psychology. In this episode, police brutality becomes a case to practice casuistry, where the investigator must “assume that the specifics—the details of the case—matter.” The episode examines the death of Angel Navarro, a Latino man, who was killed by police in New Mexico on Interstate 25 in 2016. Audio of this macabre event is incorporated into the episode. The “suicide by cop” phenomenon rises to the fore. But race remains largely omitted from the analysis, despite its salience. The discussion of Michael Brown’s death and the subsequent demonstrations needed a thoughtful engagement with the topic of persistent systemic racism, including state-sanctioned violence against Black people in the United States. Chalking up thousands of deaths to human factors without discussing implicit bias, criminalization of Black status, militarization of the police, and other related factors that undergird the police’s anti-Black racial violence is unacceptable. Assign this episode before completing a class activity about racial bias in policing (Hipes 2017). Alternatively, instructors can use this episode prior to having students complete an assignment about racial bias in media coverage of police violence (Grether and Bodenhamer 2019).
All told, Revisionist History offers sociology instructors engaging nonacademic items to supplement their course content. Students will likely appreciate Gladwell’s clarity and his colorful applications of social theory.