Malcolm Gladwell on School Shooters and Police Bias

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Most people when they're writing

New Yorker pieces or magazine pieces,

or even non-fiction books,

character is at the center,

narrative is at the center.

For you it's theory and it's not theory

of the academics sort where writers are

generally experience rich and theory poor.

What does that mean and how does that apply

to the work?

Well, I think of this, my favorite

New Yorker article maybe ever

is one I did a couple of years ago

on a school shooter.

Actually, he was not a school shooter,

he was a kid in Minnesota who was caught

just before he said he was going to shoot up

the school and they found a big storage locker

full of explosives.

They caught him in his storage locker.

And then he gives this extraordinary

three hour confession.

It goes on for 15,000 words long.

And it's just him describing chapter and verse

of his obsessions and you could have written

a story just about that.

It was just rich with detail.

It was the first time I think

that we've ever had a case of a school shooter

explain chapter and verse of what they were thinking,

how they were approaching their...

But I realized that if you were just going to

reproduce his confession,

first of all, you're no better than a stenographer.

You might as well be linking to it.

It's too lazy just to do that.

And you're just trafficking in the sensational

aspect of the case.

You have an obligation to do more with it.

So I thought well I'd been thinking

for some time about this famous paper by

Mark Granovetter about how riots start.

Granovetter wrote this paper in 1973.

He wasn't thinking about school shootings didn't

exist in '73 but this theory was waiting for

school shootings.

And what's the theory and how does it link up?

It was this very simple elegant theory

that says that riots happen in stages.

It's a contagious phenomenon that begins with someone with,

in his mathematical model

the first person in is the person

who doesn't need anyone else around him

to encourage him.

He will throw the rock through the window.

The second person in needs to have one person

to throw a rock through a window before they'll join in.

The third person needs two people,

and by the time the riot reaches its height,

you have people who would never in a million years

have ever rioted except that their threshold was

a hundred people throwing rocks through windows

and there is a hundred people throwing a rock

through a window so they're like,

they'll join in.

The simple way I explain this is

my mother, the sweetest kindest person on earth,

there is a condition under which my mother

will throw a rock through a window.

I've met your mother. There's no condition ...

There is! If her sister and her

you know, and everyone in her family

and all people at her church and

everyone was throwing rocks through a window,

my mother would reluctantly throw a rock.

That's Granovetter's argument that we all have

a point where we'll join in.

So Malcolm, this is the heart of what you do.

You take a sociological theory

that has to do with riots,

and then you start thinking about this horrendous

subject, which is what one can only call

an epidemic peculiarly American

epidemic of school shootings and in a sense,

you overlay it and you do it in the spirit of

speculative spirit.

In other words, I always get the sense

reading from you that you are not

insisting on it.

You're asking us to consider it.

Yeah, but the real stealth thing in that piece

which I don't know that anyone ever picked up on it,

is I wrote an entire piece about school shooters

and never mentioned guns.

There is nothing about guns in there.

It's not that I don't think that the

availability of guns contributes to the epidemic

of school shootings,

but I was going to say

look you cannot boil down a complex pernicious,

apparently deeply rooted...

To what then?

social phenomenon in America

to one variable.

There's more here going on.

We've had guns for 200 years in this country and

teenagers did not walk into their high-schools

and slaughter their classmates.

But do you think a thought experiment like that

detracts from the basic political argument about guns,

or it adds to the, or thickens the argument?

No, I think it just says I'm opposed to

simplistic readings of complicated social phenomenon.

And I thought I could make my case

much more cleanly if I just stepped away

from the gun part of it and focused

on the social dynamics.

Being wrong is foreboden.

That's why we have 18 fact checkers working all the time.

If you're in the business of speculative thinking.

Reporting but also using other theories or

having you're own theory,

you're going to be wrong.

Is there harm in being wrong?

Do you regret any of them particularly?

I've been wrong a lot.

I was very early on the whole broken windows idea ...

Right.

[Gladwell] ... in policing and I wince

when I read those pieces now.

It wasn't that...

Because you think it led to things like

the policing tactics in black neighborhoods, for example.

I don't think I was responsible for that,

but that idea I've since written

a lot more about crime and now,

in fact in the book I'm writing now,

return to some of these issues,

but I'm just much more,

I know more.

I think I have a much more sophisticated

understanding.

That was a very simplistic reading

of a complicated notion,

which I don't think is wrong,

but I think that the broken windows idea

served as justification for a lot of stuff

that was not good,

and I participated in that phenomenon

and I regret it.

Meaning the stop and frisk and incarceration rates.

[Gladwell] Stop and frisk is something

that I could talk about for several hours,

because been immersed in this now

for my new book.

But yes...

And the book you're writing now is...

It's half done it's hard to describe,

it's about dealing with strangers.

And what happens when you confront someone

that you neither know nor trust

and what are the mistakes we make

in that encounter?

And the answer is that we make

a lot of mistakes.

So I try to identify what those are,

and figure out what to do about them.

It's a super interesting subject.

I have a whole chapter on police shootings.

What is a cop supposed to do when

he or she pulls over a motorist?

They don't know the motorist.

So they make a series of inferences

about that motorist.

Are those inferences good?

What sorts of inferences are useful,

and which are not?

I could go on.

That leads you to a whole discussion

about what does crime look like?

Spatially and geographically?

We've had a whole journalist industry

about police shootings in the last two years.

How does Malcolm Gladwell go about it as opposed to

the more typical reporter who flies to the various places,

and interviews the police captain,

and then the bereaved family,

and the civil libertarian and all the rest.

How do you do it?

Well, I have the advantage of coming to it...

You wait.

Late.

You know this, there's two waves in any

journalistic enterprise.

There's the first wave,

the first wave has the advantage

that it's fresh in people's minds,

people's memories are fresh.

The second wave has the advantage that

the system doesn't work that fast,

so much of what is gonna happen institutionally

in response to an incident does not surface

for six months, a year, a year and a half,

two years.

So, I like to be part of the second

I'm a second wave guy.

I've never been a first wave guy.

I want to ask you about podcasting.

You began with newspaper writing.

You had a very brief stint in the conservative

opinion magazine world.

You came to the New Yorker.

You've written books and,

lecturing is a form you've mastered.

Now you're in this new thing,

a, makes me crazy that you are because

it means you're writing less for The New Yorker,

but I'm going to hold my fury on that,

or sadness.

But it's an amazing podcast,

and it's incredibly inventive.

Why does it appeal to you?

It does appeal to me I suppose.

It was more a case of I felt I should try it

because I...

Were you listening to them?

I was listening to Bill Simmons' podcast,

and just that idea that there's a certain person

who, that's the only way you're going to reach them.

Because I do a lot of speaking I meet

way more of my readers than most writers do.

Most writers actually rarely meet their readers.

So, you go give a talk and there's a typical

Malcolm reader is a 45-year-old guy

with three kids who's an engineer at

some company outside of Atlanta,

and he's read two of my books and

he's listened to four of my podcasts.

And I say, oh...

He listens to the audio book on the way to work,

he listens to the podcast in the car with his kids.

Now, if I don't participate in the world of podcasting

I don't reach him between in all the years

between books he's lost to me.

And he's like he'd like to hear me,

but he doesn't have time to meet The New Yorker,

or read...

'Cause h e's too exhausted at home from his three kids

or whatever the demands of his life?

Actually, I once sat next to on a plane

a guy who I thought was my UR reader,

and he broke it down for me,

he was a guy who worked for Trader Joe's,

and he was an advanced manager for Trader Joe's,

so he would go to the city where Trader Joe's

was going to open a store and he would do

all the stuff to set up the store.

He lived in the suburbs of Charlotte.

He had three kids.

He was in his early 40's and,

he told me I have time to read three books a year.

Because I only have time to read three

I take it very seriously,

and then I have this kind of time to listen

to something podcast to my ears.

It's like this time in the car,

but now we're on an airplane,

and he had to work on the airplane,

he couldn't listen,

and so he broke it down for me.

He's got...

I've got three kids all in little league,

I spend this much time,

I got church on Sunday, I got this...

I was insanely honored that I made the cut.

And I was like, I gotta

I can't give up on that guy.

I can't.

I've gotta reach him somehow,

and the podcast is how you reach that person.

And how is the art,

what is the art of podcasting?

How does it translate to you?

What are it's advantages and disadvantages?

Well it's advantage,

which is the greatest advantage of all,

is that it's new.

So, books...

been around for ever,

so a book comes out and there's a whole world

out there that pounces on it and tells you why it's bad.

Podcasts, there's no critical infrastructure.

None.

Right.

Zero, no one ever tells you not to listen to it.

And not only that,

there's no expectation about what a podcast

is supposed to be.

If you violate the expectation of what

a book is supposed to be,

people get really pissy.

Right?

Are you reacting to a negative...

No. I'm reacting to...

A negative reaction to your own books?

Not my own work.

To a general culture of negativity in the

literary world which I think has contributed

in the perverse way that only people

who are not wholly self-aware can do.

The literary world is committing suicide.

They have essentially created a critical infrastructure

whose function it is to warn people off reading.

I would disagree.

I would say that a lot of it is about critical thinking,

and saying this is really great.

Make sure you pay attention to that.

Every bit as much as this over here

is not so hot.

Like what with podcasts nobody does that.

And no one says this is what a podcast is

supposed to be.

Malcolm, thanks so much.

It was wonderful to see you.

Pleasure.

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