Malcolm Gladwell

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“It’s Been Said That Satire Sometimes Reaffirms Power”

March 16, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Malcolm Gladwell has a great many talents, but analyzing comedy and satire is apparently not among them. Unfortunately, he held forth on these topics in a recent conversation with economist Tyler Cowen.

The writer once derided satire for not being significant enough to prevent the rise of Nazism, failing to acknowledge that diplomacy, protest, church and media also failed to thwart this mass tragedy. All those institutions and activities have great value, even if they were depressingly unable to avert this particular horror.

Speaking to Cowen, Gladwell forwards the bizarre theory that Tine Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin was great for the comedian’s career but made the politician “more acceptable and likable.” This is an absurd contention. If Katie Couric’s interview with Palin was a mortal wound, Fey’s imitation was the coup de grâce.

Gladwell’s judgment that the impersonation stemmed from Fey’s self-interest is peculiar. Certainly he writes his articles and books to improve his career, and he also does corporate speaking engagements, a very dicey move for a journalist, which I don’t believe Fey does. (Perhaps Gladwell donates all this money to charity, but it remains a potential conflict of interest.)

In the direct aftermath of the Presidential election, when New Yorker EIC David Remnick appeared on TV to warn against the normalization of Trump, he commented that although he believed Hillary Clinton would have been a great President, he thought it was wrong that she accepted huge fees for speaking engagements from investment banks. He probably should hold his staff to the same standard.

Gladwell’s criticism of Alec Baldwin is almost is as wrong-minded. SNL certainly deserves brickbats for allowing the Simon Cowell-ish strongman to host the show during his disgracefully racist campaign, but Baldwin’s characterization isn’t a superficial performance Gladwell describes. Well, at least it’s clear to him that Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer impersonation is greatness.

As for Cowen’s question to Gladwell about Baldwin’s Trump–Is it not sufficiently negative?–he should be asking himself that same query in response to his tepid comments about Peter Thiel, a former interview subject who aggressively enabled a sociopath into the White House. This Administration isn’t merely “flawed” as the economist labeled it in a recent Ask Me Anything. It’s utterly shameful and highly dangerous.

An excerpt:

On Tina Fey, Melisa McCarthy, and good satire

COWEN: It’s been said that satire sometimes reaffirms power, while poetry affirms only its own power. You have a podcast where you express a worry that Tina Fey, by mimicking and satirizing Sarah Palin, actually made her more acceptable and more likeable in doing so. So fast-forward to the current moment: we have Saturday Night Live.

[laughter]

COWEN: Alec Baldwin and Donald Trump. Is that useful satire? Is it not sufficiently negative? Should we be deploying poetry or is that the effective medium for social commentary?

GLADWELL: Well, I don’t like the Alec Baldwin Donald Trump, I don’t think, actually, if you compare it to the Sean Spicer . . .

[laughter]

GLADWELL: It’s not as good, and it’s not as good because the truly effective satirical impersonation is one that finds something essential about the character and magnifies it, something buried that you wouldn’t ordinarily have seen or have glimpsed in that person.

With the Spicer impersonation, why that’s so brilliant is, it draws out his anger. He’s angry at being put in this impossible position. That is the essence of that character. So how does a person respond to this, it’s almost an absurd position he’s in. And he has this kind of — it’s not sublimated — it’s there, this rage. In every one of his utterances is, “I can’t fucking believe that I am in this . . .”

[laughter] 

GLADWELL: And so that Saturday Night Live impersonation gets beautifully at that thing, it satirizes that. I’ve forgotten the name of the woman who does it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Melissa McCarthy.

GLADWELL: Yes, when Melissa McCarthy, when she picks up the podium . . .

[laughter]

GLADWELL: That’s an absurd illustration of that fundamental point. But the Alec Baldwin Trump doesn’t get at something essential about Trump. It simply takes his mannerisms and exaggerates them slightly. But he hasn’t mined Trump. There are many directions you can go with Trump, the extraordinary insecurity of the man. Like I said, there are many things you could pluck out, but that for one, the idea of doing an impersonation where you really thought deeply about what it would mean in a comic way to represent this man’s almost tragic level of insecurity. Alec Baldwin is not . . . he’s a little too glib . . .

That’s the problem with Saturday Night Live, the larger problem — I was trying to get at it in that podcast episode on satire — the problem with doing satire through the vehicle of a show like Saturday Night Live is, they’re not incentivized to do that kind of deep thinking. The Melissa McCarthy thing is an exception; it’s not the rule.

Really what they’re incentivized to do is, for the actor — who is in many cases as famous or more famous than the person they are impersonating — the actor is using the character to further their own ends. Tina Fey is infinitely more popular, more accomplished, more whatever than Sarah Palin will ever be. And so she’s using Sarah Palin to further her own ends. That’s backwards. She’s not inhabiting the character of Sarah Palin in order to make a point about Sarah Palin, she is inhabiting Sarah Palin in order to make a point about Tina Fey.

I feel, so long as satire is done by a television show which has such a lofty position in the cultural hierarchy, it’s always going to be the case that that’s what’s going to drive their impersonations. They’re always going to be sitting on their hands. Remember they’re making fun of Trump six months after they had him on the show, right? After they were complicit in his rise, and after Jimmy Fallon ruffled his hair on camera. Maybe that’s fine. My point is you can’t be an effective satirist if you are so deeply complicit in the object of your satire.•

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“I Have No Idea How To Get American ‘Back’ To The ‘Pre-Gun’ Condition”

October 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Malcolm Gladwell has written a powerful New Yorker piece about the new abnormal in America of mass violence perpetrated by teenage boys and young men, often at schools. While these acts are a small fraction of U.S. gun violence, they leave deep scars. Gladwell looks for answers at the intersection of developmental disorders, the easy access to weapons and a fatal type of “fan fiction” that has gone viral in the past two decades, with Columbine in 1999 being the shot heard ’round the world.

The article’s most important point, I think, is that there’s no pattern of history among the killers, who come from backgrounds good or bad. What they seem to share is a seemingly inexplicable attraction to spectacles of public violence that have preceded them and provided a modus operandi.

As a dedicated reader of newspapers from the 19th and early-20th century, I can assure you there were always very deeply troubled people in America, probably way more than there are now (per capita, anyhow). They just didn’t have such easy access to guns or at least the type of automatic weapons that exist today, nor were they easily connected to the violent delusions of others.

I don’t see much of a realistic answer for arms control in the long term. The laws should certainly be rewritten to address gun proliferation, but the country is already awash in weapons and with 3D printers coming our way, it will be a tricky battle to win, even without discussing the thorny politics. Similar frustrations are likely in trying to prevent copycat violence among teenage boys, perhaps ones on the autism spectrum, in the Internet Age. For all the good the democratization of media has encouraged, we’re also prone to its dark mirror.

Gladwell conducted a really good Reddit AMA about the subject. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

That was the toughest article I had to get through in a while but that is a testament to your writing style. What do you think are the ways we can fix this culture of violence? Do you think pop culture is to blame?

As a member of the media, what are the steps you can take to stop this kind of problem?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Pop culture is to blame, absolutely. But the issue is that pop culture today is not what it was thirty years ago. The internet has created a rabbit warren for the all sorts of twisted fantasies: the paradox of the internet is that the group who seem to use it the most (teenagers) are those least well-equipped to deal with its pathologies.

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Question:

Mass shootings (and even more so school shootings seem to be the very definition of outliers (1% or less). Why are we focusing on those instead of the 60% of gun deaths that are suicides or 30% that are non-mass homicides? It seems we have it all backwards.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Another very good question. Yes, you are quite right. The magnitude of gun violence in the U.S. is such that school shootings represent a very minor part of the problem. In a logical world, we would be talking way more about the other 99 percent. That said, I think the issue with this particular genre of violence is that it has the potential to spread: that was the point of my article. What began as a problem specific to teens were serious troubles and disorders has now engulfed teenagers who are, for all intents and purposes, normal. That’s scary, because we don’t know where the epidemic will lead.

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Question:

Are you concerned that your article’s focus on autism spectrum disorders as a correlate for schooling shooting behavior plays into the typical distraction of “mental health” we hear about after most mass shootings? America doesn’t have a monopoly on mental illness, but we seem to have one on school shootings.

Relatedly, do you worry that a story like this stigmatizes the mentally ill even further?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Very important question. First of all I was writing about a case in which the subject’s ASD was at the center of his entire legal experience. It was his diagnosis with mild ASD that led to him being put on probation–instead of behind bars. So I had to deal with it. The second half of the piece, which I gather you’ve read, is explicitly about trying to explain how we should NOT confuse John LaDue’s attitudes and condition for those of the classic school shooters, like Eric Harris. That’s why I have the long discussion of “counterfeit deviance”–the notion that we need to be very careful in assessing the criminality of people with ASD when it comes to certain kinds of behaviors: someone like John LaDue might be very innocently drawn into a troubling pattern of behavior. I was trying to fight the tendency to stigmatize those with ASD. I hope that came across.

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Question:

Do you believe that curbing this school attack trend is more a matter of understanding/addressing the psychological condition you describe in the article, or equally or more to do with gun control?

Malcolm Gladwell: 

I think that gun control is crucial for lowering the overall homicide rate: there’s no question in my mind that the easy availability of guns in the U.S. is a huge contributor to the fact that we have a homicide rate several times higher than other industrialized nations. But school schooters are a far more complicated issue: they are a subgenre of homicide that is about a specific fantasy that has taken hold of some teenaged boys. We could crack down on guns and still have a Columbine.

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Question:

A lot of people will put these shootings down to sheer ‘craziness’ and they consider them isolated incidents, but here in Ireland we too have ‘crazy’ people and people who aren’t stable, but they don’t have guns so they don’t end up killing people. So surely guns are the problem? Because if you don’t have a gun then you aren’t mobilised to shoot, so this idea of ‘copycats’ you have is really interesting to think about, I couldn’t agree with you more. Excellent article and I look forward to a response!

Malcolm Gladwell:

I couldn’t agree more. Except that I have no idea how to get American “back” to the “pre-gun” condition like Ireland or England or any other Western nation is in. Remember its not just guns that are the issue here. It is the existence of an accompanying powerful fantasy about how they ought to be used.•

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“I Think It Becomes Very Hard To Be A Good Person After A Certain Point”

April 21, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

I mentioned this before when writing of Al Michaels’ obliviousness about the dark side of the NFL, but when you haven’t had to worry about food or shelter in a long time, you have to be on constant guard against the development of moral blind spots. Michaels likely thinks of himself as a solid citizen, but your assessment may vary considering his opinions about the racist Washington franchise name and the preponderance of serious health issues suffered by the league’s players.

At the recent Festival of Books at USC, Malcolm Gladwell (who is not incognizant of the NFL’s concussion issue) spoke to this same point. From Taylor Goldstein at the Los Angeles Times:

“I think it becomes very hard to be a good person after a certain point. Or at least it’s not impossible, it’s just harder to work. Just as, in David and Goliath, I talk about what it means to be, how hard it is, weirdly, to be a wealthy parent, how much more difficult it is to raise a child if you are very wealthy as opposed to middle class.

“It’s not impossible, but it requires more of you. There’s that whole thing I have about the difference between “can’t” and “won’t.” That saying no to a child of the middle class is very easy because you just say, “We can’t.” “You want a pony? Look around you! Where would the pony go? Look in the bedroom; is there room for a stable?”

“Of course, if you’re a billionaire, you can’t use ‘can’t,’ you have to use ‘won’t,’ and ‘won’t’ is really hard. ‘Won’t’ requires you to give an explanation, right? And in the same way, when you get, when you’re living a kind of normal life, being empathetic comes naturally. When you’re successful, you have to work at it.”•

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“Football Is A Moral Abomination”

November 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Malcolm Gladwell thinks American football is a “moral abomination,” and it’s hard to argue, though I wonder about his self-termed “intuition” telling him that European football (or soccer) “can’t possibly compare” in terms of brain injuries. Anyone repeatedly heading a soccer ball that’s been kicked from 50 yards away would seem to me to be at great risk, and that’s not even considering the repetitive heading that all pro soccer players practice from when their small children. Perhaps Jeff Astle was, in Gladwellian terms, an outlier, but probably not. Worthing thinking about, at any rate. From a new Gladwell interview conducted by Bloomberg’s Emily Chang:

“In a wide-ranging interview with Emily Chang, best-selling author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell continued his long-standing crusade against football with a harsh indictment. ‘Football is a moral abomination,’ he said and predicted that the sport — currently far and away the most popular and lucrative in America — would eventually ‘wither on the vine.’

The NFL recently revealed that nearly a third of retired players develop long-term cognitive issues much earlier than the general population. ‘We’re not just talking about people limping at the age of 50. We’re talking about brain injuries that are causing horrible, protracted, premature death,’ Gladwell told Chang, picking up a theme he first explored in a 2009 article for The New Yorker which likened football to dogfighting. ‘This…is appalling. Can you point to another industry in America which, in the course of doing business, maims a third of its employees?'”

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“Most Of The Greatest Ideas Are Usually Denounced By Most Of Us As Crazy In The Beginning”

June 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I don’t always agree with Malcolm Gladwell, but I always enjoy reading him for his ideas and because he’s a miraculously lucid writer. He just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

____________________________

Question:

What was your experience on Glenn Beck’s program like?

Malcolm Gladwell:

A lot of people wondered why I went on Glenn Beck’s show. I don’t agree with a lot of what he says. But i was curious to meet him. And my basic position in the world is that the most interesting thing you can do is to talk to someone who you think is different from you and try and find common ground. And what happened! We did. We actually had a great conversation. Unlike most of the people who interviewed me for David and Goliath, he had read the whole book and thought about it a lot. My lesson from the experience: If you never leave the small comfortable ideological circle that you belong to, you’ll never develop as a human being.

____________________________

Question:

What do you think is the most bat-shit crazy common human characteristic?

Malcolm Gladwell:

There are so many to choose from! How’s this. I do not understand the impulse that many people have of looking first for what they DISAGREE with in another person or idea, instead of looking first for what they might learn from. My second is that I don’t understand why we are so scared of changing our minds. What’s wrong with contradicting yourself? Why is it a bad thing to amend your previous opinions, when new facts are available? If a politician hasn’t flip-flopped at some point in his career, doesn’t that mean he’s brain dead?

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Question:

You write about Steve Jobs a lot and overall I would sum up your opinion of Jobs as rather quite negative. Is this wholly true and what sort of response have you received from people over this?

Malcolm Gladwell:

I have complicated thoughts about Steve Jobs. He fits very clearly into the idea I write about in David and Goliath about how entrepreneurs need to be “disagreeable”–that is, that in order to make something new and innovative in the world you need to be the kind of person who doesn’t care about what your peers think. Why? Because most of the greatest ideas are usually denounced by most of us as crazy in the beginning. Steve Jobs was a classic disagreeable entrepreneur. That makes him a difficult human being to be around. But were he not difficult, he would never have accomplished an iota of what he did!

____________________________

Question:

Your books have a really interesting critical thinking aspect to them. Do you have any idea what your next book/piece will be about?

Malcolm Gladwell:

I’m writing a bunch of pieces for the New Yorker right now. One is about crime–which has been a recurring theme in many of my books. It asks the question: is crime a means of economic mobility? That is–is it a way for outsiders to join the middle class? It clearly was once. The children and grandchildren of Mafia dons ended up going to law school and becoming doctors. But is that still the case? It’s kind of weird question, but it gets at something that we rarely consider, which is that there might be a downside to cracking down too successfully on organized criminal activity. The New Yorker is a great place to explore complicated questions like this. Plus, when my ideas are simply crazy, the editors there are smart enough to step in and save me from embarrassing myself!

____________________________

Question:

Sorry, I haven’t yet read your new book so you may already cover this, but I do have a question about college choice. Thirty years ago, I went to a snooty liberal arts college, paid lot of money, and in those 30 years, literally no one has cared about or even really asked where I went to college. Seems like I wasted my parents money and should have gone to the University of Minnesota for a lot less. Am I wrong?

Malcolm Gladwell:

You aren’t wrong. I have an entire chapter on college choice in David and Goliath. My point in that chapter is that prestige schools have costs: that the greater competition at a “better” school causes many capable people to think they aren’t good at what they love. But your point is equally valid. People going to college and in college vastly over-estimate the brand value of their educational institution. When I hire assistants, I don’t even ask them where they went to school. Who cares? By the time you’re twenty-five or thirty, does it matter anymore?

____________________________

Question:

There’s a lot of discussion here about college choices based off your book. What’s your opinion on the Thiel Fellowship over at MIT where Peter Thiel is giving away $200K to a student to leave school and start their own start-up? Do you think it’s wise for these students to take an investment in their future at the cost of a potentially valuable education?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Thiel’s idea is really interesting. But let’s be clear. He’s not saying that it is a good idea for MOST people not to go to college. He’s saying that if you are really really driven and ambitious and smart and already have a great business idea at the age of 18 or 19, college probably isn’t going to do you much good. And he’s right! But that really only applies to those students in the 99th percentile. This fits into one of my pet peeves, by the way. We spent an awful lot of time as a society fretting over the quality of educational opportunity at the top: gifted programs, elite universities. People actually freely give money to Harvard, which has an endowment of 50 billion! But surely if you are smart enough to get into Harvard, you are the person least in need of the benefits of a 50 billion dollar endowment. We need to spend a lot more attention on the 50 percentile. That’s where money can make a real difference.

____________________________

Question:

Has anyone ever told you that you remind them of Sideshow Bob?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Yes. I take it as a compliment!•

 

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“Countless Religious Innovators Over The Years Have Played The Game Of Establishing An Identity For Themselves By Accentuating Their Otherness”

March 26, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

As you probably realize if you read this blog with any regularity, I’m fascinated by religious and secular cults, groups of people who give themselves over to an idea, a hoped-for utopia, outside the mainstream, often threatening the mainstream. These offshoots can bring about death or disappointment, and sometimes they’re driven by genuine madness, though occasionally the mistrust is misplaced. I suppose what makes me so interested in them is that I’m a really individualistic person who can’t even fathom trusting so wholly in a culture, let alone a subculture. I’d like to know how that process works. What’s the trigger?

In his just-published New Yorker piece about The Journey to Waco, a sect member’s memoir that revisits the FBI’s disastrous 1993 siege of the compound, Malcolm Gladwell points out that negotiating with the devoted is different than making deals with those devoted solely to profit. A passage that compares Branch Davidians with early Mormons:

“The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy. But the Cornell historian R. Laurence Moore, in his classic book Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, points out that the moral hysteria over the Mormons was misplaced. The Mormons were quintessential Americans. ‘Like the Puritans before them, the Mormons linked disciplined labor with religious duty,’ Moore writes. ‘Mormon culture promoted all the virtues usually associated with the formation of middle-class consciousness—thrift, the denial of immediate gratification, and strict control over one’s passions.’ Polygamy, the practice that so excited popular passions, was of little importance to the Church: ‘First, the vast majority of nineteenth century Mormons did not practice polygamy, and many of them found it distasteful, at least as a way of conducting their own lives. Second, those who did practice plural marriage scarcely exhibited the lascivious behavior made familiar in anti-Mormon literature. Plural wives were commonly the widowed or unmarried sisters of the original wife.’

So why were nineteenth-century Americans so upset with the Mormons? Moore’s answer is that Americans thought the Mormons were different from them because the Mormons themselves ‘said they were different and because their claims, frequently advanced in the most obnoxious way possible, prompted others to agree and to treat them as such.’ In order to give his followers a sense of identity and resilience, Joseph Smith ‘required them to maintain certain fictions of cultural apartness.’ Moore describes this as a very American pattern. Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness. Koresh faced the same problem, and he, too, made his claims, at least in the eyes of the outside world, ‘in the most obnoxious way possible.’

The risks of such a strategy are obvious. Mainstream American society finds it easiest to be tolerant when the outsider chooses to minimize the differences that separate him from the majority. The country club opens its doors to Jews. The university welcomes African-Americans. Heterosexuals extend the privilege of marriage to the gay community. Whenever these liberal feats are accomplished, we congratulate ourselves. But it is not exactly a major moral accomplishment for Waspy golfers to accept Jews who have decided that they, too, wish to play golf. It is a much harder form of tolerance to accept an outsider group that chooses to maximize its differences from the broader culture.”

______________________________

“Was there no plan?”

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“So What Is Football? Is It Dogfighting Or Is It Stock-Car Racing?”

February 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Linking yesterday to Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Coolhunt” piece made me think about his 2009 New Yorker article “Offensive Play,” which was bold for connecting the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal to NFL play and spectatorship. Because of the work of the Sports Legacy Institute and Dr. Bennet Omalu and Ann McKee, among others, there had been some media noise about the game and brain damage, but I don’t recall any mainstream attention on such a meaningful level until Gladwell’s inconvenient truth. And since then there’s been an avalanche of it. Sure, there are some key differences between dogfighting and American football (e.g., lack of free will vs. free will), but there are many uncomfortable similarities. I think it’s one of his best-ever pieces for the publication. An excerpt:

“At the core of the C.T.E. research is a critical question: is the kind of injury being uncovered by McKee and Omalu incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.

In 2000 and 2001, four drivers in Nascar’s élite Sprint Cup Series were killed in crashes, including the legendary Dale Earnhardt. In response, Nascar mandated stronger seats, better seat belts and harnesses, and ignition kill switches, and completed the installation of expensive new barriers on the walls of its racetracks, which can absorb the force of a crash much better than concrete. The result is that, in the past eight years, no one has died in Nascar’s three national racing series. Stock-car fans are sometimes caricatured as bloodthirsty, eagerly awaiting the next spectacular crash. But there is little blood these days in Nascar crashes. Last year, at Texas Motor Speedway, Michael McDowell hit an oil slick, slammed head first into the wall at a hundred and eighty miles per hour, flipped over and over, leaving much of his car in pieces on the track, and, when the vehicle finally came to a stop, crawled out of the wreckage and walked away. He raced again the next day. So what is football? Is it dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?”

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“The Average Level Of Celebrity Behavior Must Have Been Much Worse 50 Years Ago”

December 19, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

One more thing from the recent email exchange between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell. (I posted here about my agreement with Gladwell’s remarks about PEDs.) The host and guest discuss celebrity early in the conversation and make some good points. There is one thing, however, I disagree with. In discussing an anecdote from Johnny Carson, the new book by Henry “Bombastic” Bushkin, the late talk show host’s longtime lawyer, Gladwell asserts that celebrity behavior must have been far worse 50 years ago because there wasn’t so much press attention. This is conventional, but I think incorrect, wisdom. 

Celebrity behavior was horrible decades ago, and it was covered up. That’s true. Every now and then something would explode into public view, like the cases with Errol Flynn and Fatty Arbuckle. But I believe the same thing happens now, even with the tabloid culture. Paparazzi aren’t muckrakers duty-bound to serve the public good but entrepreneurs who sell salacious details, even uncovered information about criminality, to the highest bidder. Plenty gets covered up. It’s a marketplace in which silence is bought with money or favors. Let’s assume that tween performers don’r grow up to be so dysfunctional without cause and that action stars don’t always behave well while filming abroad. Every now and then something will explode into the public view, like the cases of O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson. But despite the surfeit of information everywhere, most misbehavior is still kept quiet.

From Simmons and Gladwell:

“Bill Simmons:

It’s weird to think of Johnny Carson involved in a conspiracy, though.

Malcolm Gladwell:

And it just not plausible today, is it? There are 4 million Americans with top secret security clearances. How can you make a legitimate cultural argument for the presence of some shadowy secret government when 4 million people are in on the shadowy secret government? But in 1970, the Mafia throws the biggest star on television down the stairs and then puts a contract on him, causing him to lock himself in his apartment for three days and for millions of Americans to be forced to watch live coverage of the Italian American unity rally, and none of that became public. This is tabloid malpractice.

Bill Simmons:

Wait, it seems like you were inordinately mesmerized by this Carson book. Was it because you didn’t realize that he was such a flawed human being? Or were you blown away by how different celebrity culture was in the 1960s and 1970s compared to now?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Well, it made me think that the average level of celebrity behavior must have been much worse 50 years ago than today.”

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“There’s No Way Tommy John Pitches So Well Into His Early Forties Without His Bionic Elbow”

December 16, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

I don’t agree with Malcolm Gladwell’s logic in diminishing the importance of satire, but I’m on board with him in this Grantland exchange with Bill Simmons about the hypocrisies in the discussion of performance-enhancing drugs:

“Malcolm Gladwell:

As you know, I’ve had mixed feelings for years about doping. It’s not that I’m in favor of it. It’s just that I’ve never found the standard arguments against doping to be particularly compelling. So professional cyclists take EPO because they can rebuild their red blood cell count, in order to step up their training. I’m against ‘cheating’ when it permits people to take shortcuts. But remind me why I would be against something someone takes because they want to train harder?

Bill Simmons:

Or why blood doping is any different from ‘loading your body with tons of Toradol’ or ‘getting an especially strong cortisone shot’? I don’t know.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Exactly! Or take the so-called ‘treatment/enhancement’ distinction. The idea here is that there is a big difference between the drug that ‘treats’ some kind of illness or medical disorder and one, on the other hand, that ‘enhances’ some preexisting trait. There is a huge amount of literature on treatment/enhancement among scholars, and with good reason. Your health insurance company relies on this distinction, for example, when it decides what to cover. Open heart surgery is treatment. A nose job, which you pay for yourself, is enhancement. This principle is also at the heart of most anti-doping policies. Treatment is OK. Enhancement is illegal. That’s why Tommy John surgery is supposed to be OK. It’s treatment: You blow out your ulnar collateral ligament so you get it fixed.

But wait a minute! The tendons we import into a pitcher’s elbow through Tommy John surgery are way stronger than the ligaments that were there originally. There’s no way Tommy John pitches so well into his early forties without his bionic elbow. Isn’t that enhancement?”

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2 Things About The Debate About Satire & Snark

December 16, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

No one outside of NYC literary circles may care about this, but over the last couple of weeks there’s been a debate in that world about the value of satire and its pesky little sibling, snark. It started with Tom Scocca’s Gawker essay “On Smarm” which argues that those opposed to impolite humor are really just trying to protect an unfair status quo that profits them. A few days later, Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker blog post “Being Nice Isn’t Really So Awful,” retorted that satire actually aids the powerful even if it’s aimed at them. Two quick thoughts starting in reverse order with Gladwell’s piece. 

1) There’s a gigantic pothole in Gladwell’s reasoning that satire is ineffectual and that more serious criticism is preferable. He quotes a famous Peter Cook line (via a Jonathan Coe essay) about “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.” Um, no, stage satire didn’t stop the Nazis, but you know what else didn’t prevent that horror? Serious criticism, op-eds and solemn political speeches. German resistance groups were likewise unable to stop Hitler’s ascent. Does that mean that serious criticism and protest are meaningless? Of course not. They just sadly didn’t work in this case. But they are good and useful things that have helped open eyes, hearts and minds in many other moments and so has humor.

Satire isn’t the main action but a call to action. It’s the weather report that tells us it’s pouring outside before most of us have yet taken notice of a cloud in the sky. (Though, no, it won’t unfold your umbrella for you.) It’s the first salvo, not the coup de grâce. It’s written about the present with an eye toward the future. And it doesn’t need to deflate dissent unless it’s written that way, and the best of it is not. There’s no measurement to quantify how much satire has helped accomplish, but it seems a trusty tool in the long march toward progress.

Ultimately, I think Gladwell is trying to knock down what he feels is a false narrative with a false one of his own.

2) That being said, I take an argument that there’s a dangerous effort to upend satire with the same seriousness as I take the so-called “War on Christmas.” Yes, there are some hypersensitive souls who confuse a punchline for an actual punch, but there has never been more satire or snark in the country than now, nor more channels, stages and outlets to practice this “dark” art. It’s under no threat and an argument that worries about it excessively seems hysterical. There is certainly no consensus against biting criticism. It, not smarm, is actually the hallmark of our times. I think that’s a reassuring thing.•

The opening of Scocca’s piece:

“Last month, Isaac Fitzgerald, the newly hired editor of BuzzFeed’s newly created books section, made a remarkable but not entirely surprising announcement: He was not interested in publishing negative book reviews. In place of ‘the scathing takedown rip,’ Fitzgerald said, he desired to promote a positive community experience.

A community, even one dedicated to positivity, needs an enemy to define itself against. BuzzFeed’s motto, the attitude that drives its success, is an explicit ‘No haters.’ The site is one of the leading voices of the moment, thriving in the online sharing economy, in which agreeability is popularity, and popularity is value. (Upworthy, the next iteration, has gone ahead and made its name out of the premise.)

There is more at work here than mere good feelings. ‘No haters’ is a sentiment older and more wide-reaching than BuzzFeed. There is a consensus, or something that has assumed the tone of a consensus, that we are living, to our disadvantage, in an age of snark—that the problem of our times is a thing called ‘snark.'”

From Gladwell:

“Earlier this year, in the London Review of Books, the English novelist Jonathan Coe published an essay titled ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea.’ It is a review of a book about the mayor of London, Boris Johnson. And in the course of evaluating Johnson’s career, Coe observes that the tradition of satire in English cultural life has turned out to be profoundly conservative. What began in an anti-establishment spirit, he writes, ends up dissipating into a ‘culture of facetious cynicism.’ Coe quotes the comedian Peter Cook—’Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea’—and continues:

The key word here is ‘giggling’ (or in some versions of the quotation, ‘sniggering’). Of the four Beyond the Fringe members, it’s always Peter Cook who is described as the comic genius, and like any genius he fully (if not always consciously) understood the limitations of his own medium. He understood laughter, in other words – and certainly understood that it is anything but a force for change. Famously, when opening his club, The Establishment, in Soho in 1961, Cook remarked that he was modelling it on ‘those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War’.

‘Laughter,’ Coe concludes, ‘is not just ineffectual as a form of protest … it actually replaces protest.’

Coe and Scocca are both interested in the same phenomenon: how modern cultural forms turn out to have unanticipated—and paradoxical—consequences. But they reach widely divergent conclusions. Scocca thinks that the conventions of civility and seriousness serve the interests of the privileged. Coe says the opposite. Privilege is supported by those who claim to subvert civility and seriousness. It’s not the respectful voice that props up the status quo; it is the mocking one.”

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“Having Power Can Backfire”

September 29, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Oliver Burkeman’s Guardian interview with Malcolm Gladwell, in anticipation of David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, his latest book of unconventional wisdom:

“The outcome of the original David-and-Goliath clash wasn’t a miracle, he argues: it’s just what happens when the weak refuse to play by rules laid down by the strong. (Sample sentence: ‘Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defence Force, recently did a series of calculations showing that a typical-sized stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of 35m would have hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of 34m per second – more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him dead or unconscious.’)

‘With each book that passes, I think my personal ideology becomes more explicit … and this one is a very Canadian sort of book,’ says Gladwell, who was born in Fareham, in Hampshire, but grew up in Ontario. ‘It’s Canadian in its suspicion of bigness and wealth and power. Someone told me – did you know that there’s never been a luxury brand to come from Canada? That’s never happened. That’s such a great fact to have about your home country.’

Difficulties and afflictions, the book shows, frequently foster creativity and resilience. Studies on ‘cognitive disfluency’ have shown that people do better at problem-solving tasks when they’re printed in a hard-to-read font: the extra challenge triggers more effortful engagement. We meet dyslexics whose reading problems forced them to find more efficient ways to master law and finance (one is now a celebrated trial lawyer, another the president of Goldman Sachs); we learn why losing a parent in childhood forges a resilience that frequently spurs achievement in later life, and why you shouldn’t necessarily attend the best university that will have you. (The answer is ‘relative deprivation’: the further you are from being the best at your institution, the more demotivating it is; middling talents perform better at middling establishments.) Conversely, having power can backfire, not least because it tricks the powerful into thinking they don’t need the consent of those over whom they wield it. In a compelling account of the Troubles, Gladwell argues that the British were plagued by a simple error: the belief that their superior resources meant ‘it did not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them.’ More isn’t always more.”

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“They Carry Genes That Put Them Far Ahead Of Ordinary Athletes”

September 3, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Here’s a question worth asking: Why do we get outraged over the unfairness of athletes using PEDs to become superior but have no problem with some competitors having ridiculous genetic advantages? We cheat and so does nature. It’s not something that exists only in racehorses but in people as well. Doesn’t this have something to do with the quaint notion of humans not upsetting God or else, I don’t know, lighting bolts will be thrown from the sky? The opening of “Man and Superman,” Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece which begins with an example from David Epstein’s book, The Sports Gene:

“Toward the end of The Sports Gene (Penguin/Current), David Epstein makes his way to a remote corner of Finland to visit a man named Eero Mäntyranta. Mäntyranta lives in a small house next to a lake, among the pine and spruce trees north of the Arctic Circle. He is in his seventies. There is a statue of him in the nearby village. ‘Everything about him has a certain width to it,’ Epstein writes. ‘The bulbous nose in the middle of a softly rounded face. His thick fingers, broad jaw, and a barrel chest covered by a red knit sweater with a stern-faced reindeer across the middle. He is a remarkable-looking man.’ What’s most remarkable is the color of his face. It is a ‘shade of cardinal, mottled in places with purple,’ and evocative of ‘the hue of the red paint that comes from this region’s iron-rich soil.’

Mäntyranta carries a rare genetic mutation. His DNA has an anomaly that causes his bone marrow to overproduce red blood cells. That accounts for the color of his skin, and also for his extraordinary career as a competitive cross-country skier. In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles—a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles. Mäntyranta, by virtue of his unique physiology, had something like sixty-five per cent more red blood cells than the normal adult male. In the 1960, 1964, and 1968 Winter Olympic Games, he won a total of seven medals—three golds, two silvers, and two bronzes—and in the same period he also won two world-championship victories in the thirty-kilometre race. In the 1964 Olympics, he beat his closest competitor in the fifteen-kilometre race by forty seconds, a margin of victory, Epstein says, ‘never equaled in that event at the Olympics before or since.’

In The Sports Gene, there are countless tales like this, examples of all the ways that the greatest athletes are different from the rest of us. They respond more effectively to training. The shape of their bodies is optimized for certain kinds of athletic activities. They carry genes that put them far ahead of ordinary athletes.”

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“That’s A Ghettoized Sport, Not A Mainstream American Sport”

September 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Boxing was once the champion of American sports, but when growing knowledge turned “punchy” into “brain damaged,” the talent pool dried up and the pastime became marginalized. Malcolm Gladwell has been predicting for a couple of years that the same downturn will befall football, a sport in which no amount of padding can stop concussions. He repeats those sentiments in the new documentary, The United States of Football. From Fox Sports:

“Author Malcolm Gladwell has been a voice in the concussion fray before, calling schools to ban college football and saying he wouldn’t be surprised if football at all levels fades from existence once people realize how damaging it can be long-term for players with head injuries.

But in a new documentary, Gladwell offers a less extreme — and possibly more likely — scenario for what will happen to the game. Gladwell says football will be a game that capitalizes on those poor or desperate enough to take the risk.

‘We will go to a middle position where we will disclose the risks and essentially dare people to play,’ Gladwell said in the film, which comes out Friday, as reported by CBSSports.com. ‘… That’s what the Army does. So we leave the Army for kids who have no other options, for whom the risks are acceptable. That’s what football is going to become. It’s going to become the Army. That’s a very, very different situation.

‘That’s a ghettoized sport, not a mainstream American sport.'”

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“The Inability Of Newspapers To Adapt To The Fluidity Of Modern Thinking–I Think That’s Their Problem”

August 9, 2013 in Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Really good new B.S. Report with Bill Simmons welcoming Nate Silver and Malcolm Gladwell to discuss newspapers in the age of the Internet and the Graham family selling the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos, among other topics. Some interesting moments:

  • Gladwell on the New Yorker in the Digital Age: “We’re one of the winners of this revolution.” He points out something that doesn’t get said very often: Because the print version of the magazine goes online at the same time all over the world, it’s opened more of a global market. Of course, the same is true of the Times, which hasn’t benefited as much. But the New Yorker has a smaller cast of talent to support and we live more in a niche, boutique age with bigger but fewer global blockbusters. Also: The New Yorker was never given away for free on any platform for any period of its existence.
  • I don’t know if I agree with Gladwell’s take (expressed in the headline) that newspapers need to have polymaths, free of specific beats, who are writing on any number of topics. In such a deadline-driven environment, that may lead to superficial knowledge and armchair journalism. (Gladwell, a proud polymath himself, has been accused of such things.) And does such a wide-ranging talent pool really exist? Could it supply hundreds of such reporters to the Times and the same amount to, say, a quartet of other national newspapers? He may be right in theory–news dissemination should resemble more closely the mash-up machinery that disseminates it–but I wonder if his idea could be applied in a practical sense.
  • My take on Silver’s feeling about the New York Times after listening to this podcast: He speaks of the place respectfully, but feels it isn’t nearly bold enough in reinventing itself, which was one of the main reasons he departed for ESPN, a company with oodles of money to invest in a dynamic online presence. He also questions the business acumen of the Times: “With all the traffic the New York Times is getting right now, I feel like it should be making a much higher profit.”

Listen here.

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“What Level Of Proof Do You Need About The Harmfulness Of Some Activity?”

February 20, 2013 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Malcolm Gladwell lecturing at the University of Pennsylvania about how much proof we need before we decide something is dangerous. He draws analogies between the historical incidence of black-lung disease and contemporary threats.

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“His Front Garden Is Planted Entirely With Vegetation From The Mesozoic Era”

June 17, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“This is where the dinosaurs will come to eat.” (Image by Gerhard Boeggemann.)

From “In the Air,”‘ Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 New Yorker assault on the Great Man Theory, a thumbnail portrait of Nathan Myhrvold, a legend at Microsoft, a company that didn’t exactly have original ideas:

“Myhrvold is of Nordic extraction, and he looks every bit the bearded, fair-haired Viking—not so much the tall, ferocious kind who raped and pillaged as the impish, roly-poly kind who stayed home by the fjords trying to turn lead into gold. He is gregarious, enthusiastic, and nerdy on an epic scale. He graduated from high school at fourteen. He started Microsoft’s research division, leaving, in 1999, with hundreds of millions. He is obsessed with aperiodic tile patterns. (Imagine a floor tiled in a pattern that never repeats.) When Myhrvold built his own house, on the shores of Lake Washington, outside Seattle—a vast, silvery hypermodernist structure described by his wife as the place in the sci-fi movie where the aliens live—he embedded some sixty aperiodic patterns in the walls, floors, and ceilings. His front garden is planted entirely with vegetation from the Mesozoic era. (‘If the Jurassic Park thing happens,’ he says, ‘this is where the dinosaurs will come to eat.’) One of the scholarly achievements he is proudest of is a paper he co-wrote proving that it was theoretically possible for sauropods—his favorite kind of dinosaur—to have snapped their tails back and forth faster than the speed of sound.”

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“He’s Really The First And Most Seminal Sports Figure In The Information Age”

June 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

I poked fun at Lebron James a couple years back after his ridiculous Decision program, when he announced on live television that he’d be “bringing his talents to South Beach,” but even a Knicks fan like myself can be awed by him. And I don’t just mean the way he plays the game. Here was a guy born with tremendous talent, yes, but born also into a place and situation where so many things could have gone wrong. Instead, despite being the American sports fan’s best frenemy, he’s turned out tremendously on and off the court.

At Grantland, Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell discuss, among many things, an astute comment that Shane Battier made offhandedly about James. That comment:

“He sneezes and it’s a trending topic on Twitter. He is a fascinating study because he’s really the first and most seminal sports figure in the information age, where everything he does is reported and dissected and second-guessed many times over and he handles everything with an amazing grace and patience that I don’t know if other superstars from other areas would have been able to handle.”

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“Of The Great Entrepreneurs Of This Era, People Will Have Forgotten Steve Jobs”

June 8, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Malcolm Gladwell recently discussing entrepreneurship in Toronto, reassessing tech titans Jobs and Gates. (Thanks Cnet.)

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“The Result Was A Revolutionary Storefront, With A Kind Of Mini-Arcade”

February 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"Victor Gruen was short, stout, and unstoppable."

From “The Terrazzo Jungle,” Malcolm Gladwell’s great 2004 New Yorker article about the birth of the mall, long before anyone could imagine many of them becoming ghosts or virtual:

“Victor Gruen was short, stout, and unstoppable, with a wild head of hair and eyebrows like unpruned hedgerows. According to a profile in Fortune (and people loved to profile Victor Gruen), he was a ‘torrential talker with eyes as bright as mica and a mind as fast as mercury.’ In the office, he was famous for keeping two or three secretaries working full time, as he moved from one to the next, dictating non-stop in his thick Viennese accent. He grew up in the well-to-do world of prewar Jewish Vienna, studying architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts—the same school that, a few years previously, had turned down a fledgling artist named Adolf Hitler. At night, he performed satirical cabaret theatre in smoke-filled cafés. He emigrated in 1938, the same week as Freud, when one of his theatre friends dressed up as a Nazi Storm Trooper and drove him and his wife to the airport. They took the first plane they could catch to Zurich, made their way to England, and then boarded the S.S. Statendam for New York, landing, as Gruen later remembered, ‘with an architect’s degree, eight dollars, and no English.’ On the voyage over, he was told by an American to set his sights high—’don’t try to wash dishes or be a waiter, we have millions of them’—but Gruen scarcely needed the advice. He got together with some other German émigrés and formed the Refugee Artists Group. George S.  Kaufman’s wife was their biggest fan. Richard Rodgers and Al Jolson gave them money. Irving Berlin helped them with their music. Gruen got on the train to Princeton and came back with a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein. By the summer of 1939, the group was on Broadway, playing eleven weeks at the Music Box. Then, as M.  Jeffrey Hartwick recounts in Mall Maker, his new biography of Gruen, one day he went for a walk in midtown and ran into an old friend from Vienna, Ludwig Lederer, who wanted to open a leather-goods boutique on Fifth Avenue. Victor agreed to design it, and the result was a revolutionary storefront, with a kind of mini-arcade in the entranceway, roughly seventeen by fifteen feet: six exquisite glass cases, spotlights, and faux marble, with green corrugated glass on the ceiling.  It was a ‘customer trap.’  This was a brand-new idea in American retail design, particularly on Fifth Avenue, where all the carriage-trade storefronts were flush with the street.  The critics raved. Gruen designed Ciro’s on Fifth Avenue, Steckler’s on Broadway, Paris Decorators on the Bronx Concourse, and eleven branches of the California clothing chain Grayson’s.  In the early fifties, he designed an outdoor shopping center called Northland outside Detroit for J.  L.  Hudson’s. It covered a hundred and sixty-three acres and had nearly ten thousand parking spaces. This was little more than a decade and a half since he stepped off the boat, and when Gruen watched the bulldozers break ground he turned to his partner and said, ‘My God but we’ve got a lot of nerve.'” (Thanks TETW.)

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Gruen commissioned this 1968 film about the revitalization of Fresno and the building of the Fulton Mall:

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“Expressions Were The Universal Products Of Evolution”

February 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m really bad at remembering faces but really good at reading them in the moment, which can be both advantageous and disconcerting. I don’t know that I’m happier for realizing that people are sometimes saying one thing while feeling another. I’m surprised when other people don’t seem to recognize the subtext contained in expressions and body language. Or perhaps they do and they’re just ignoring it. At any rate, it’s like having two very different conversations at the same time with a person, which is odd. From “The Naked Face,” Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent 2002 New Yorker article on the topic:

“All of us, a thousand times a day, read faces. When someone says ‘I love you,’ we look into that person’s eyes to judge his or her sincerity. When we meet someone new, we often pick up on subtle signals, so that, even though he or she may have talked in a normal and friendly manner, afterward we say, ‘I don’t think he liked me,’ or ‘I don’t think she’s very happy.’ We easily parse complex distinctions in facial expression. If you saw me grinning, for example, with my eyes twinkling, you’d say I was amused. But that’s not the only way we interpret a smile. If you saw me nod and smile exaggeratedly, with the corners of my lips tightened, you would take it that I had been teased and was responding sarcastically. If I made eye contact with someone, gave a small smile and then looked down and averted my gaze, you would think I was flirting. If I followed a remark with an abrupt smile and then nodded, or tilted my head sideways, you might conclude that I had just said something a little harsh, and wanted to take the edge off it. You wouldn’t need to hear anything I was saying in order to reach these conclusions. The face is such an extraordinarily efficient instrument of communication that there must be rules that govern the way we interpret facial expressions. But what are those rules? And are they the same for everyone?

In the nineteen-sixties, a young San Francisco psychologist named Paul Ekman began to study facial expression, and he discovered that no one knew the answers to those questions. Ekman went to see Margaret Mead, climbing the stairs to her tower office at the American Museum of Natural History. He had an idea. What if he travelled around the world to find out whether people from different cultures agreed on the meaning of different facial expressions? Mead, he recalls, ‘looked at me as if I were crazy.’ Like most social scientists of her day, she believed that expression was culturally determined– that we simply used our faces according to a set of learned social conventions. Charles Darwin had discussed the face in his later writings; in his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he argued that all mammals show emotion reliably in their faces. But in the nineteen-sixties academic psychologists were more interested in motivation and cognition than in emotion or its expression. Ekman was undaunted; he began travelling to places like Japan, Brazil, and Argentina, carrying photographs of men and women making a variety of distinctive faces. Everywhere he went, people agreed on what those expressions meant. But what if people in the developed world had all picked up the same cultural rules from watching the same movies and television shows? So Ekman set out again, this time making his way through the jungles of Papua New Guinea, to the most remote villages, and he found that the tribesmen there had no problem interpreting the expressions, either. This may not sound like much of a breakthrough. But in the scientific climate of the time it was a revelation. Ekman had established that expressions were the universal products of evolution. There were fundamental lessons to be learned from the face, if you knew where to look.” (Thanks TETW.)

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“European Washing Machines, Jobs Discovered, Used Less Detergent And Less Water Than Their American Counterparts”

November 7, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Steve Jobs wasn’t just a perfectionist about every last detail of the products Apple created, but also when making seemingly mundane household purchases. From Malcolm Gladwell’s new consideration of Jobs the creator in the New Yorker:

“It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, ‘We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.'”

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