Revenge of "A Good Walk Spoiled"
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How did Malcolm introduce his decade-old critique of private golf clubs?
Pushkin. Every writer lives in fear of one thing, that what they say won't matter. You toil away in obscurity, you scrub your prose until it's shiny and perfect, you put your work out for the world to see, and in the back of your mind is always the thought that all that effort will sink quietly into the sea like a corpse weighted down with concrete shoes. Have I had this fear? Oh, yes. Worse, I've seen it happen to me again and again. There was a time in my life when I was obsessed with the relative age effect. Wrote about it. Did episodes about it on this very podcast. You look at a room full of third graders or fifth graders and you say, Tommy is a poor student. Alice is a good one. But what if Alice was born in January and Tommy was born in December?
And what looks like superior ability on Alice's part is actually just the fact that she's a year older than Tommy. And a year's extra maturity at the age of eight is a really, really big deal. I made this argument until I was hoarse. And what did I want? I wanted elementary and middle schools to divide up their students by birth month. So the oldest kids would be in one class and those born in the middle months would be in another class. And the youngest kids would be in a class by themselves. And the playing field could be leveled. Did any school superintendent ever call me up and say, I love your idea. I've reorganized my kids by birth month. No. Never. My own daughter is going to kindergarten this fall, and some part of me wanted to ask her principal, can she be in a class with all the other kids born at the same time as her?
But I didn't. And you know why? Because I'm demoralized. Because this fixation of mine, this beautiful, radical, provocative idea that I put out into the world, sank quietly into the sea like a weighted corpse. I had all but given up until, like an angel descending from heaven, came Audre Nazarian, Los Angeles City Council member and revisionist history listener. Thank you for doing this.
Thank you for inviting me.
No, no. So I was delighted to hear that you are the author, the instigator of a proposal. To be put before the voters of Los Angeles.
Well, you were the instigate.
Well, I was the provocateur. I just raise issues. Others have to make them actually happen. So can you tell me the story? How did you come across my podcast?
So one of my staff members brought this to my attention and said, you got to hear this.
Council member, you got to hear this. And did he hear this? Oh, yes, he did. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. Later this week, we're going to be dropping the first of our epic five-episode blockbuster, The Staten Island Problem. But before we do, as a little amuse-bouche, we're going to revisit one of my all-time favorite episodes in the revisionist history canon from 10 years ago, A Good Walk Spoiled. I'm going to play it for you now in case you need a little refresher. And then I'm going to come back at the end and tell you how, finally, a decade into revisionist history, somebody listened. I have a friend who lives in Brentwood, on the west side of Los Angeles, between Beverly Hills and Santa Monica.
He has a little pool house in his backyard, and I stay there whenever I come to L.A. Kind of like Cato Kaelin, if your memory for O.J. Simpson's Esoterica goes back that far. Anyway, my friend's street dead ends on San Vicente Boulevard, one of the central east-west corridors in L.A. And on the other side of San Vicente is this absolutely gorgeous golf course, one of the many private country clubs that L.A. is famous for. If you drive down Wilshire Boulevard into Beverly Hills, 10 minutes east of Brentwood, you go right past Los Angeles Country Club, which costs maybe a quarter of a million dollars just to join. That is, if they'll even consider your application. There's Bel Air Country Club just north of UCLA, which might be the most beautiful golf course in the country.
Hillcrest off Pico. Wilshire Country Club in Hancock Park.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
6 identified
Malcolm Gladwell 31 min
Mark Cohen (philosopher) - Unknown 3 min
Adrin (Adrian) Nazarian (Councilmember) - Identified as Adrin Nazarian 2 min
Lee Biggerstaff (economist) - Unknown 1 min
Brian Donnelly (LA County Tax Assessor representative) - Unknown 1 min
Dai Zok (landscape architect) - Unknown 1 min