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Comment by patwolf | Hacker News Reader

I enjoy Revisionist History, but I have learned to take everything he says with a grain of salt. He throws out much of the nuance of history in order to neatly meld it with his narrative. The Boston Tea Party episode, for example, tried to paint the revolution as a bunch of rich smugglers upset about losing business. That may have been a small part of it, but it definitely is not the whole story.

I'm afraid to ever mention anything I heard from him in casual conversation because someone more knowledgeable would probably call me out.

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I think Gladwell cares about history, and he cares about story, but if (as is often the case in history) he has to choose one at the expense of the other, it is going to be _story_ that he chooses every single time.

As an overly broad generalization, Gladwell is at heart a journalist, not a historian (even though he has a bachelor's in history). I enjoy listening to Revisionist history and reading some of his books, because some things in history are revealed by trying to form some kind of narrative (e.g., Historical Materialism), but he's not telling you history. He's forming a story from history. But I think his work is often an excellent stepping off point to real history texts, and it sometimes gets you to think about the second-order effect of things (his episode on Brown v. Board was extremely interesting).

Ironically the Boston Tea Party episode was also the one that broke me and made me bring a lot more grains of salt to my experience of his work. I think it's one of his worst episodes, and one where he tips his hand a little too far and breaks the illusion for anyone who has even casually read any serious works on the period. It's a _piece_ as you said, but it's an incredible oversimplification.

Most of history is a story written by the victors and what has survived. Unless there is primary evidence and even then most of that contains interpretation.

But I'm interested in what do you think the Boston Tea Party episode gets wrong?

The part where it was obvious then that picking a fight with England over taxes is not going to secure you a better economic outcome than either paying the taxes and grumbling or finding a new way to dodge them. If picking a war with a superpower makes you rich the Taliban should be rolling in the dough.

They wanted to give England the bird. The taxes were just the flimsy pretense. Pretty much all of them paid for it in opportunity cost at a bare minimum.

You're using an ambiguous pronoun reference. Who's picking the fight? I don't think it was so obvious that war would be the consequence.

If I'm a tea smuggler beating the competition by avoiding taxes and my competitor is granted an even better tax-avoidance method (an exemption), then I'm going to pick a fight. I still might find a different business, but I'd see how far I could push it, first.

This is the problem for journalism today as well - a desire to push a particular narrative over reporting of facts

That is the problem that most journalism has always had. There has never been a time when the most of the media wasn't pushing one narrative over another - usually in the interest of someone powerful.

One excellent example is Watergate. It was an extraordinarily well-reported story, and it remains to this an iconic story that everyone remembers as a major outrage. In the same era, there was the COINTELPRO leak, where a few people broke into an FBI building and found documents detailing extensive, egregious FBI Gestapo-style activities against the Civil rights movement (including trying to blackmail MLK into committing suicide, and working with the guy who assassinated Malcolm X, and many others). This was barely reported by a handful of papers, and even though it sparked actual legislative action, Senate committees, hearings etc, it has been all but forgotten. It never really fit the narratives deemed important by the kinds of people who write the news (who were largely against the Civil rights movement at the time).

This is not to say that extraordinary journalists haven't existed, to whom we owe great debts. It's not even to say that journalism hasn't degraded - there may well be fewer great journalists today than in other periods.

People live and breathe narratives. We are storytelling animals. We need to string those facts into a sort of coherent whole. We crave understanding, and we do it through stories. Facts don't matter, because they can be interpreted, weighted, viewed in such and such light, post hoc rationalized away...

"I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research... for ways of augmenting story-telling." --Malcolm Gladwell

The author of this article is operating on the wrong premise- in his own words Gladwell considers himself more a storyteller than an arbiter of truth.

The author of this article is writing for the casual reader of Gladwell's book who comes away thinking they have learned some history. That person may weigh their enjoyment of the story more or less strongly against whether it says something true about history, so may or may not appreciate Gladwell's emphasis. Either way, this article allows them to put the story better into the context of the history it purports to describe.

He clearly presents his stories in a manner that makes it easy to mistake them for the whole truth, though. I find this kind of excuse pretty thin coming from anyone more serious in tone than, like, Jon Stewart.

Ugh. I have enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's writing in the past, but this smacks of the Tucker Carlson defense.

that’s great and all but it’s irressponsible and he should be stopped. confessing that you’re a hack scam artist is not a defense.

You're right in general; Gladwell is often wrong, but that's actually a pretty good take on the Boston Tea Party.

I think that episode is one of the good ones. Because in it he's challenging the standard narrative of a well known piece of history.

You need to take it with a grain of salt (and I think it's fair criticism that he goes a bit ott on presenting alternative perspectives as dominant)

The first couple of seasons of Revisionist History were podcast gold. Lately though? I only listen if I'm desperate for content. It has taken a massive nosedive.

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