Revisionist History

Lessons from the world’s most perfect memorial.Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A billionaire turned recluse befriends a minor novelist. Together they seize the public’s imagination. Kind of. The true story behind the greatest autobiography you’ve never read.Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm.Credits:BBC Motion Gallery / Getty ImagesFootage supplied by CBS News The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The delicate science of hiring nihilism, examined in five deeply-personal case studies.Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How do we remember one of the deadliest nights in human history? We don't. Part four.Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The arguments, accidents, cold-blooded logic and sheer serendipity that led to the longest night of the Second World War. Part three.Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Basement laboratories. Mad scientists. Sticky gels, and a bake-off in the desert. The strange story behind Curtis LeMay’s weapon of choice. Part two. Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the eve of the Second World War, a band of visionaries at Maxwell Air Force Base tried to reimagine modern warfare. They failed. Part one on the extraordinary life of the Air Force General Curtis LeMay. Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Bolivia, a political activist radically reforms the voting process for... student council elections. Who else does he convince? Revisionist History. And maybe a fancy private school in New Jersey. Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

An escape from war-torn Germany. Lavish dinners with Hollywood royalty. A Swedish baron and a dime-store heiress: we explore the long journey of a Van Gogh still life — and what it says about the real value of the things we treasure.Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dragons hoard treasure, deep in their lairs. They don’t show it off to their neighbors. Revisionist History applies dragon psychology to the strange world of art museums, with help from Andy Warhol, J.R.R. Tolkien, a handful of accountants and the world’s leading hoarding expert. Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andy Warhol. War. Smaug the Dragon. And, as always, digressions of great importance.Launching June 18 from Pushkin Industries. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Malcolm has been writing about race and policing for a very long time, going back to the killing of Amadou Diallo in 1999. Sometimes, it is useful to take a step back and consider policing in a broader context. Here we present a chapter from Malcolm's book David and Goliath, which includes an analysis of a riot in Northern Ireland in 1970. Many miles and many years away. About divisions of religion and class and not divisions of race. But the core questions to be asked in 1970 and 1999 and today are the same: if you have power, what does it mean to use it, and use it wisely? And what are the consequences if you don't?David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants was published in 2013 by Little, Brown and Company. Audiobook production by Hachette Audio. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On February 24, 1996, Cuban fighter jets shot down two small planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, an organization in Florida that tried to spot refugees fleeing Cuba in boats. A strange chain of events preceded the shoot-down, and people in the intelligence business turned to a rising star in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Ana Montes. Montes was known around Washington as the “Queen of Cuba” for her insights into the Castro regime. But what Montes’ colleagues eventually found out about her shook their sense of trust to the core. (In this excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s forthcoming audiobook Talking to Strangers, we hear why spy mysteries do not unfold in real life like they do in the movies.)To preorder a copy of Talking to Strangers and check out Malcolm Gladwell's book tour, visit www.gladwellbooks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Throughout the 1960s, a biologist named Howard Temin became convinced that something wasn’t right in science’s understanding of viruses. His colleagues dismissed him as a heretic. He turned out to be right — and you're alive today as a result.  Season Four ends with a bedtime story about how we should be freed by our doubts, not imprisoned by them. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You thought that there was only one kind of chutzpah. Wrong. There’s two. Revisionist History tells the story of the Mafia’s showdown with a legendary Hollywood producer, in a battle of competing chutzpahs. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two seasons after its investigation of the decline of McDonalds french fries, Revisionist History returns to fast-food’s high-tech test kitchens. This time the subject is cultural appropriation. The case study is Taco Bell. Oh, and Pat Boone is involved. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

An unarmed man is shot to death by police. How does the Jesuitical idea of “disordered attachments” help us make sense of what happened? Part three of three. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

John Rock was the co-inventor of the birth control pill — and a committed Catholic. He wanted his church to approve of his invention. What happens when a layman takes on the Vatican? Part two of three. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Revisionist History tries to make sense of the conundrum of PED use in baseball, using the 500-year-old philosophical techniques of St. Ignatius. Part one of a three-part series on the moral reasoning of the Jesuit order. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you disagree with someone — if you find what they think appalling — is there any value in talking to them? In the early 1970s, the talk show host Dick Cavett, the governor of Georgia Lester Maddox, and the singer Randy Newman tried to answer this question. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.