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Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. Six years ago, before podcasting was even a twinkle in my eye, I wrote a screenplay for a TV series. It was called Druid Hills, my first and only screenplay. I spent a year on it. In the opening scene, a battered Honda pulls up to a house on a long, leafy street.
Angela Nation, 31, is behind the wheel. Jeans, afro, sunglasses. She's beautiful, though trying not to be. The car looks like a family's been living in the backseat. She pulls up to an immaculate Victorian. A petite, very proper African-American woman comes out the front door. Ingrid James, 63. She gets in.
Let's be clear. Nothing happened with Druid Hills. I got as far as pitching it to a Hollywood studio. I shouldn't say who. Well, okay, it was Fox. Imagine a room full of TV executives around a table. I talked about the big themes, the theories, race, conscience, conspiracies, corruption, blah, blah, blah. I waved my hands in the air for a good hour. The room was hushed. And when I was done, the executive in charge said, We love it, but do you think you could work in a car chase?
Things went downhill from there. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part one of what will be two bonus episodes for the holiday season.
I'm going to answer your listener questions, riff on things revisionist, history-ish, and tell random stories, including in part two, one about my dad, another about a famous rapper, and beginning in an act of shameless self-promotion with the story of my failed screenplay. We brought it to life with the help of the Pushkin theatrical players. I promise the point of all this will be clear in a moment. Andrew looks over at Ingrid.
Oh, Ingrid. A hawk's cap? Wait, you made Wyatt take you to a game? My one indulgence. Do you have one of those big foam number one hands? I most certainly do not. Will you make Wyatt buy you big things of popcorn? Ingrid shudders involuntarily.
Then, with a mischievous glint, although I did once try out for the Hawks cheerleading team. What? It was the 70s. She makes a dismissive move with her hand, as if that explains everything. I thought they were dancers. I did ballet, you know. I didn't realize it would be so vulgar. The men play a beautiful game. The women shake their bosoms.
Angela instinctively does up the lower of the two open buttons on her blouse. They had a player named John Drew. Oh my. Ingrid gazes out the window. It's nice to be reminded of those days. My screenplay was set in Atlanta. Now why did I write a screenplay set in Atlanta? Because I'm obsessed with Atlanta.
Ask anyone who knows me. I'm always threatening to move there. You know how people always say, such and such is the future of America. Texas is the future of America. Florida is the future of America. No, no, no. Best case scenario for all of us is if Atlanta is the future of America.
Because Atlanta is the most wonderful mashup of all the most wonderful bits and pieces of this country. Birthplace of the civil rights movement. Janelle Monáe in Wonderland and Gucci Mane and Migos in basically half the entire hip-hop world. CNN, Jimmy Carter, Stacey Abrams. The best Indian food in the U.S. outside of Queens. The Running Oval at Piedmont Park. Little Tart Bake Shop.
I could go on. I was once in my favorite coffee shop in Atlanta and realized that around me were a rock band writing lyrics, a couple of folks having a Bible study, someone from the mayor's office, and a handful of moms with kids, all representing, by my count, at least six different ethnicities and an age range of maybe 70 years. How beautiful is that?
I love Atlanta. And I thought that if I set a TV series in Atlanta and somehow magically it got made, then I'd have an excuse to go there all the time. How have you been? I'm recovering. Getting there. I've spent seven years buried away, day and night. Then one day, it's over. It's almost like I got a divorce. I'll tell you the whole story someday. I already know. Jesus. I will always watch out for you, my dear.
Remember that. By the way, to break in here, this is an allusion to the dark mystery at the heart of the story. She reaches over and grasps Angela's hand. Briefly. Ingrid is not one for prolonged displays of emotion. The two of them sit in companionable silence. From Grant Park, the grittiness of the old fourth ward, finally, regal Druid Hills, leafy streets, turn-of-the-century mansions.
Ingrid is now back to her church lady routine, adjusting her hair in the visor mirror. Subject closed. We see a big sign. Emery University Hospital. Angela heads toward the main entrance. Ingrid shakes her head. Angela keeps driving around to the loading docks at the back. Ingrid smiles at Angela, touches her arm affectionately as she exits the car. There's something so ostentatious about the front door, don't you think?
Our hero, Angela Nation, and her mysterious sidekick, Ingrid James, are brilliant scientists on the faculty of the Medical Center at Emory University. Hence the title, Druid Hills. That's the neighborhood in Atlanta where Emory is. Now, you may have noticed that Emory University is the sponsor of this bonus episode of Revisionist History. Emory came to us and asked if they could talk about some of the work they've been doing during the pandemic.
And it's super interesting, as you'll hear in a moment. But the offer made me happy for more selfish reasons as well. The first time I went to Atlanta, nearly 30 years ago, was to visit Emory. I was a science reporter back then for the Washington Post. And if you write about American medicine, you eventually make the pilgrimage to Emory. Emory is how I got obsessed with Atlanta.
My disaster of a screenplay was a medical mystery set at Emory. I mean, what are the odds? How often does life come together so beautifully and serendipitously under the sacred umbrella of the 404 area code? So here we are. Revisionist History, bonus holiday Atlanta edition, part one.
All right, before we go any further, I want to explain why Emory is such a magical place for people interested in medicine. Healthcare has been part of Emory since the campus moved from a small town east of Atlanta to Atlanta in about 1915. And at that point, the Atlanta Medical College became part of Emory University as a school of medicine. This is Greg Fenves, the university's president.
A decade or so after that, one of the most important benefactors for Emory University, Robert W. Woodruff. He's the Coca-Cola guy, right? He is the legendary CEO of Coca-Cola. But Mr. Woodruff, as we call him here at Emory, loved the rural areas in his ranch in South Georgia. Malaria was a huge problem.
And so Georgia as a state was one of the leaders in developing treatments for malaria in the early part of the 20th century. Years later, after World War II, Mr. Woodruff was very good friends with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Malaria had been a big problem in World War II that Eisenhower had had to deal with.
And so the federal government wanted to establish a research center to solve malaria, treat malaria, prevent malaria. And Mr. Woodruff, through his friendship with President Eisenhower, had it located on Emory property, which became the Center for Disease Control and Prevention that is now not only across the street, it's actually on the Emory campus. And so that relationship between Emory,
It's School of Medicine and focus on infectious diseases and the CDC has been very, very close since World War II.
One of the heroes of the AIDS epidemic was Jim Curran, head of the CDC in the 1980s. He's now the dean of the public health school at Emory. Emory was where one of the most important drugs against HIV, Emtriva, was discovered. When the American medical workers who had fallen ill with Ebola in Africa a few years ago came home to be treated, where did they go? Emory. Because Emory was one of the few places set up in this country to treat them.
Tucked away in Druid Hills is a really remarkable place that has played a key role in our understanding of infectious diseases for 75 years, which is something to be grateful for, especially now. My favorite part of Emory is the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, one of the oldest and biggest non-human research centers in the country. 3,000 non-human primates and 8,000 rodents. 8,000!
Do you know what the plot of my screenplay was? Our hero Angela was testing an experimental drug for Huntington's disease on a specially engineered strain of mice created by her boss, Rajan, at the Yerky Center. The whole story was about mice. And this... Angela opens an adjoining door. ...is where Rajan keeps his mice. In metal cages, we see mouse after mouse, dozens of them.
moving like old men. Rajan's Huntington's Mice. The air is filled with the sound of feeble squeaks. Rajan is much better with mice than people. If there's anyone out there in movie land who is interested in a screenplay about two black women from Atlanta trying to cure a deadly disease, co-starring a room full of specially engineered lab mice at the Yerky Center, call me. Let's make this happen. Okay, time for the listener mailbag.
Ryan M. asks, if you could have dinner with any three people from history, who would they be and why? I think it would be my great-grandmothers. I only met one of them, Martha Nation, a very regal Jamaican lady who, when she died in her late 90s, had just a few strands of gray hair. She was the embodiment of Black Don't Crack. But I never met the other three. How great would that be? Here's a comment from a listener on iTunes, DC Commute.
You know I read the comments, right? DC Commute says, I think you should revisit the Obscure Virus Club season four, episode 10. The recent success of vaccine development stands on the shoulders of giants. This is actually a great point and it deserves a long answer.
Obscure Virus Club, if you haven't listened to it, was about a small group of virologists who spent years and years in a scientific wilderness, studying a group of weird animal viruses that no one else thought were even remotely meaningful. They were ridiculed, ostracized. Then one day, all those naysayers woke up and realized, oh, they're not really the same.
The work these people were doing off in the shadows is going to save the world. And if you want to know how the Obscure Virus Club saved the world, you'll have to listen to the episode, because I don't want to give away the ending. The point of the episode was, that's how science works. Everything important and beautiful begins years and years earlier with someone's quixotic obsession. And so thanks for your comment, DC Commute. This is absolutely the case with COVID vaccines as well.
There are countless examples, but since we're telling Emory stories, let me pick one from one of their scientists, a guy named Rama Amara, who is so obscure virus-gloved. In his case, his obsession was with something called the MVA vaccine. This is a vaccine made from the pox virus family. A version of it has been used as a vaccine against smallpox. It's been tweaked so that it can't cause disease anymore, but because it still resembles something menacing,
The immune system goes on high alert the minute it comes across it. And the theory that scientists like Amara had was that if you tinkered with MVA and customized it, you could produce an immune response against other deadly infectious diseases. I was working on tuberculosis vaccines, and I used to go to TB sanatoria to collect samples from TB patients.
That's when I started seeing HIV infection. That's Amara. So then I developed interest in also developing a HIV vaccine. That's how I came to Emory. To work on that problem, he moves to Atlanta, to Emory. And just to put this in perspective, he moves to Atlanta in the year 2000.
So for 20 years, his lab works on the problem, learning everything they can about how this particular vaccine, Emory MVA, interacts with the body's immune system. You've been working on this vaccine for this model for 20 years.
as yet nothing had reached the market, did you get discouraged? Did you wonder whether this research was ever going to bear fruit? Personally, I was not. But I have heard a lot of times from my friends that, you know, this is going to be a long road. Maybe you should start working on other vaccines as well so that there is, you know, some result at the end.
So I was never going to leave the HIV vaccine effort. But I did think about branching into other vaccines as well. So I was...
We started actually working on vaccines for TB. So that's where I started. It's, again, a hard target. So you picked two of the toughest targets out there. Yes. You're a glutton for punishment. That's true. But I wanted to tackle something really challenging.
And then what happens? COVID. And we had a meeting in the center at the Erkis Primate Center and all of our colleagues got together and we were talking about what we should be doing. I think that was towards the end of February or beginning of March, I think. Then at that point, you know, I came back to my lab from the meeting. Then I was discussing with my people about
It would be good to make a vaccine, but do you think we have the bandwidth right now? And then they all said, no, no, no, we really want to do it. And they were all so excited. Everybody wanted to do it. So that gave me a lot of push. And then I decided that we should do one. We should make one. And the idea was that if you'd made such progress against HIV, and HIV is a much harder target,
The notion was, well, we should be able to make really good inroads against COVID. Was that the thinking? Yes, that's the thinking. HIV is hard to make a vaccine against because it mutates like crazy. So you have to design a vaccine that can handle all these constant changes. And HIV integrates into your body's DNA. It literally becomes part of you. HIV is Mount Everest.
Then COVID comes along and it doesn't mutate as much, doesn't hide in your DNA. And Amara realizes, I can make my vaccine climb that mountain. Had you not done those two decades of preparatory work, you would not have been in a position to jump on. You wouldn't know whether MVA was a safe and effective vehicle for COVID if you hadn't done all of that preparatory work with HIV. No, I would not have any clue.
Now, will the Emory MVA vaccine turn out to be effective against COVID? We don't know yet. It's still being tested. At best, it's a second-generation vaccine, after the first wave of vaccines that were created in record time. But if the Emory vaccine works, it will be a crucial addition. The first wave vaccines are all super specific. They work against COVID-19, this COVID. The Emory MVA vaccine would be different.
because it triggers a much broader immune response. It could work against new strains of COVID. It could conceivably be used as a booster to extend your initial vaccine immunity. Here's my point.
The lone success story in the pandemic thus far has been medical science. We have vaccines available just over a year after the pandemic started. That's bananas. But we shouldn't draw the lesson from this that science is fast. Science only looks fast. It's actually really slow. The quote-unquote sudden development usually has 20 years of work behind it.
And you can't order up progress because sometimes the magic happens only at the end of a wandering serendipitous journey that may have looked like folly before it became a success.
And what all this means is that progress doesn't come from ideas. It comes from places where smart people have the time and freedom to wander around and make mistakes and pursue interesting ideas that one day may end up saving your life. Well, thank you so much and good luck. Thank you so much. We're all cheering for you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
We're back with more of your insightful listener questions. Mariana Misik at Mariana Misik writes, do you actually watch Friends? This is actually a question related to my book Talking to Strangers, which had an entire chapter on Friends. And in answer to the question, of course I do.
And while we're on the subject of friends, let me tell you the following true story. Now, you need to know something about me before I start. I'm not good with faces. I usually identify people by the way they walk or how they dress. So this is years ago. I'm in a coffee shop in Miami, working away. Woman sits down next to me, leans over and says, super friendly, hey, what's that you're eating? Is that good? And I'm working. So I kind of grunt and ignore her.
Five minutes pass and I think, you know, she was really attractive. Five more minutes pass and I think, you know, she looked really familiar. Five more minutes pass and I'm like, oh my God, Jennifer Aniston. By that time, she was gone. My big chance at tabloid immortality and I blew it. Next, Courtney Miller at COA Miller asks, is Canada better than America?
Is that even a question? I actually thought of this a lot this past summer during all the George Floyd protests. You know how police departments all have slogans? In Los Angeles, the LAPD motto is to protect and to serve. In New York City, it's fidelis ad mortem, faithful unto death. You know what it is in my hometown in Ontario? People helping people.
Now, I don't want to read too much into the meaning of mottos, but if you live in a society struggling with persistent problems of police violence, would you be happier with a police department that thinks of itself as a quasi-military force engaged in life-or-death struggles, or one that chooses to self-identify as people helping people? I don't know.
Mitch at Papa Mitchie asks, who's smarter, you or Michael Lewis? Michael is. It's not even close. Let's put it this way. If you said to me, would I trade Michael's literary output for my own, would I do it? And the answer is in a heartbeat. I actually think that The Blind Side is a perfect book. I would have retired after writing that. And his podcast Against the Rules, which he does for Pushkin, I might add, is so good. ♪
This is actually a great time for me to give you my grand unified theory of Michael Lewis. Ready? It's that virtually every one of his books is a biblical allegory. It's why they strike such a chord. So, Liar's Poker, his book about being a young, naive college grad in the heart of a hostile Wall Street bank. That's Daniel in the Lion's Den. The blind side is easy. A couple rescues a young boy literally as he is walking, alone and neglected, by the side of the road.
That's the Good Samaritan. Flash Boys, his book about a group of people trying to clean up crooked trading on Wall Street? That's Jesus and the Money Changers. My Father's Temple is a house of prayer. You have turned it into a nest of thieves. Moneyball, which is about a group of baseball executives finding value in a group of players others have overlooked? I mean, come on! That's Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the prostitute and the outcast he drafts onto his team.
Just so you know, I once ran this theory by Michael Lewis, and he looked at me like I was crazy. This next one is actually more of a comment than a question. From RyanXJ900 on iTunes. Boring. Two stars. I tried. It just didn't interest me. Scroll through the episode titles and see for yourself. It's kind of random and nothing all too interesting. Meh. Wait, isn't it's kind of random a compliment?
I live for kind of random. Ryan, dude, lighten up. Okay, final question from Twitter, from NormalGuy1. What show idea that didn't make the cut was most surprising? Also, what idea ended up being different than expected? Well, it was this. Wait, Casey, can you play that song for us? Or is it going to be two? Let's see. Okay. Okay, well, we'll see if this happens. ♪
I went to Nashville when I was reporting the final episode of season three, which may be my favorite ever. Analysis, Parapraxis, Elvis. It's about the one song Elvis couldn't sing.
And I arranged for a session musician to do a version of Elvis' song for me. Very straightforward. So this musician, Casey Bowles, shows up. We start talking. And eventually, I persuaded her to sing one of her own songs. And it's one of the most magical moments, I think, in all of Revisionist history. Dreamin' she'd see Hollywood someday She knew some distant Friday night With a cigarette to hold just right
Fate would come and carry her As far as she could see from there I never thought when I started this podcast that it would be a way of making friends, but it has. Anyway, I've stayed in touch with Casey, and she's made some new music, including a song for kids called Dare to Be Me, which is really, really lovely. Dare to be, dare, dare to be
Stay tuned to this feed for another bonus episode because I can't quit you, Atlanta. But for now, this is what I'd like to leave you with. Casey Bowles, Dare to Be Me. Happy holidays, everyone. One of a kind. Zigzag a backward dancer outside the lines.
Revisionist History is produced by Mia Lobel and Lee Mengistu with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton, Coby Guilford, and Anna Nye.
Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Flan Williams. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew. Hedda Fane, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Jason Gambrell, Emily Rostec, and of course, El Jefe.
Jacob Weisberg. And special thanks to our actors. Angela Nation was played by Miriam Victoria Simmons. Ingrid James and the narrator were all played by Antu Jakob, who actually has a short film out called Love and Submission, which you should look up. And finally, extra special thanks to Emory University. Greg Fenves, Rama Amara, Robert Goddard, and my mysterious behind-the-scenes friend Dan, who made this happen. Oh, and thank you to our cast.
And will someone please buy my screenplay? Please? I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Interior. Doctor's office. Emory University Hospital. Day. An elderly African-American woman sits alone.
Nurse, can you tell me when the doctor gets here? Angela stops. She turns to face Eden and for a long, tense moment, their eyes lock.
They break into peals of laughter. You must get that a lot. Not as much as you did. Eden nods her head slowly. How is Mac? He drove to the supermarket last week and turned left out the driveway instead of right. He's made that turn for 40 years. It's time to take away his keys. He's 84. He's 84. Angela says nothing. She waits for Eden to speak again.
Why did you want me to come in by myself? Dr. Bennett always had us come in together. I know what Dr. Coe did, but you're stuck with me now. If Mike comes here, the ophthalmologist will get all worked up about his glaucoma. Give him drops which will irritate his eyes even though he's ten years before that becomes a problem. The cardiologist will tell him to change his diet and eat things that he's hated his entire life. And I'll diagnose him with early stage Alzheimer's, which will turn him from a human being into a patient. He's 84.
Eden is becoming emotional and trying her best to hide it. Angela waits, lets her regain her composure. "Are the two of you happy?" Eden nods. "How are the grandkids? Good?" Eden nods. "You don't need me, not yet." She escorts Eden to the door, sits back down at her desk, takes out an enormous ham sandwich and a bag of potato chips, and painstakingly places the contents of the bag
Chip by chip between the two slices. Then she takes out her cell phone, takes a picture of the fortified sandwich and posts it to her Instagram. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor.
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On August 29th, Sauron has returned. Prime Video invites you to return to Middle-earth for the epic new season. Sauron will fall. You can't kill me. War is coming to Middle-earth.
I will not stop until he is destroyed. Every soul is in peril. Shall we begin? The Lord of the Rings. The Rings of Power. New season, August 29th. Only on Prime Video.