What do Elizabeth Thompson Butler, an English 19th-century painter, and former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard have in common? Both were token women in a male world – one in the Royal Academy of the 1870s, the other in 21st-century politics. And both were outsiders who were accepted, only to have the door promptly slammed shut on them again.
It’s the kind of subject Malcolm Gladwell excels at. The best-selling author’s new project, Revisionist History, will “go back and reinterpret something from the past: an event, a person, an idea”. But this time, he is doing it in podcast form – because why not? If Lena Dunham and Alec Baldwin can have hits in audio, it seems appropriate for the king of nonfiction to give it a go. Unsurprisingly, the podcast, which will run as a 10-week series, has gone straight in at number one in the US iTunes charts and number two in the UK after murder-mystery Untold (dubbed the “British Serial”).
The first episode, The Lady Vanishes, begins with Gladwell heading inside St James’s Palace and meeting eccentric art experts to learn about a painting named The Roll Call, which took England by storm in the 19th century – “the only contemporary equivalent I can think of is people camping out in line for two days to buy Beyoncé tickets, or the kind of frenzy the Beatles faced when they first came to America,” explains Gladwell. It was painted by unknown female artist Elizabeth Thompson Butler, whose breakthrough in an exclusively male world eventually led her to be all-but-forgotten by history.
The episode spans more than a century of “moral licensing” – the idea that when a door opens for an outsider, it usually just “gives the status quo justification to close the door again”. It happened in Gillard’s case, says Gladwell, when her election as the first female PM of Australia was followed by an unbelievable and unstoppable display of blatant misogyny. It happened in the case of the Nazis’ love of poet Berthold Auerbach, he explains, “because they think they’ve demonstrated their open-mindedness by loving this one Jew, they feel free to act in the most despicable way to other Jews.” And it happened after Barack Obama’s US presidential election, where for many, having elected a black president gave free rein for racism.
In short, Gladwell is tackling the million-dollar question: “when does doing good lead to doing bad, and when does doing good lead to doing more good?” It all feels very Gladwell – but his intimate presenting style has the undeniable authority you want in someone who is teaching you to rethink how you see the world. In the coming weeks, listeners can expect to learn more about a secret Pentagon project in Saigon, and the poverty gap in higher education in the US.
In his books from David and Goliath to Blink and The Tipping Point, Gladwell has mastered the art of telling eye-opening stories about the “slightly dumb, obvious questions” in life – why certain people like The Beatles or Bill Gates have massive success, how we make decisions, how probable it is for improbable events to happen, how stereotypes form. “What I’m interested in turns out by happy circumstance to be what lots of people are interested in,” he has said in a Guardian interview. That seems to be key to his appeal – despite mixed reviews from scientists, he remains a man whose book advances are in the seven figures.
According to Bloomberg, when Slate (which hopes this will be a big hit) first approached Gladwell to collaborate on a podcast, he was skeptical. “But then I got into it,” he has said. To him, the project is a lark. It would probably be more lucrative to bind up the podcast scripts and sell millions of them in bookshops, but that’s not much of a challenge any more. In a recent interview with Recode, Gladwell said he has had a revelation about podcasts, that he can “finally make people cry ... because it’s audio, you can do this magnificent thing that you can’t do on the page: you can move people emotionally.”
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