September 15, 2022 • 44 mins
Did Malcolm Gladwell blow it in his bestselling book Outliers? What if all he did was write a primer for neurotic helicopter parents? To find out, Revisionist History descends on the University of Pennsylvania to run a roomful of eager students through a mysterious experiment, complete with Sharpies, huge white stickers, and a calculator. It does not end well.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. In the middle of our preparations for season seven
of This Your Favorite podcast, the Revisionist History team got
on a train to Philadelphia, four of us carrying props,
(00:37):
recording equipment, and extra microphones. Our destination the Gothic, ivy
covered Cathedral of Higher Learning that is the University Pennsylvania.
And why did we go? Because we had cooked up
a little experiment and we were curious to see how
it would fly. Thank you. We commandeered one of the
(01:06):
main lecture halls at the Wharton School in I did
seventy five or so students, all seniors, smart, focused, discipline,
future masters of the universe, and asked them to answer
ten simple questions, such as, how many years of your
K twelve education were a public school and how many
were a private school at the time of your graduation
(01:29):
from high school? How many continents had you visited at
any point during your middle school and high school years?
Did your parents provide you with a private tutor? I
looked out at rows and rows of eager students, hunched
over their deaths in anticipation, took a deep breath and began, So,
(01:55):
my name is Malcolm Gladwell. I am the host of
the podcast Revisionist History. The theme of this season of
Revision's History is experiments, and one of the experiments of
this season involves all of you. So, you guys are
guinea pigs. Yes, guinea pigs, because in the manner of
(02:17):
all guinea pigs, they were entirely in the dark about
what we had in store for them. And as you
probably guessed from some of the questions that you were given,
what I'm trying to do is I'm conducting at an
experimental investigation into the nature of the privilege of the
(02:39):
people in this room. The students quickly finished the questionnaires
and put their names and birthdates at the top. My producers,
Eloise and Harrison, are sitting at a big table at
the front of the room, in full view of all
the guinea pigs. They go through the completed questionnaires one
by one and use the answers to generate a number,
(02:59):
a score, which they write on a giant white sticker
with a big bat sharp beeat And now the real
experiment begins. I'm going to sign every one of you
a number. If they can figure out what their number means,
they will understand something essential about how broken the system was.
That propelled them to the IVY League, and how to
(03:21):
fix it. Just peel off the back and I would
like you to fix a sticker to your chest so
we can all see each other's numbers. You're going to
look around the room, see everyone else's numbers, see your number,
and hopefully that will aid you in your investigation of
what exactly the nature of this experiment is. I'll just
read the students sat there with their numbers stuck to
(03:44):
their chests, looking around in befuttlement, trying to make sense
of everyone's score. I tried to help them figure it out,
gave them hints nudges. First, think about this. I gave
you a series of questions. Some of those questions involved
a yes or no answer. So you saw two people,
(04:05):
Alloway's and Harrison, who quite quickly, in the space of
about five minutes ten minutes, went through seventy five or
so responses, and we're able to very quickly and easily
assign you a number. So think about this. Logically, it
wasn't a complex algorithm, right, there was no computer used.
It was how long would you say you were spending?
(04:26):
And Harrison, how long would you spending on each questionnaire?
Six seconds, five six seconds. Okay, that's a clue. Guys,
let's go come on. Hi. My name is Abe. They
might have just looked at the zip code, because that's
a pretty good predictor of privilege just in and of itself.
(04:46):
Abe has derived his hypothesis from question six, what is
the zip code your family lived in during your high
school years? Perhaps he speculates the number on his chest
with some kind of complex, mysterious derivative of his zip code.
I didn't see if you had a computer, but if
you did, there was no else was there a computer? Now?
(05:07):
I did ask you as a calculator quantity. Abraham, with
all due respect, are you suggesting that Eloise and Harrison
had memorized every zip code? It's plausible they're very smart.
Not that smart. I'm Zach. I think it really has
to do strictly with the private verse public education system
(05:29):
in the US. Nope, that's not what we were looking for. Hi,
my name is Joseph. A question that I thought was
already interesting on there was about if you have any
siblings and if so, how many. Nope, not that either. Hi.
I'm Kaylee. One that I don't think I've ever been
asked in relation to this, was if I drank when
I was in high school? What age that I get
(05:52):
drunk at? Kayley's referring to question number nine in high school?
Did you drink alcohol? And if yes, when did you
first get drunk? Could you come up with any reason
why I would have asked that question? Or do you
think that's just one of the ones that I'm is
blowing smoke on? I have my own hypothesis, but I can't. Oh,
(06:13):
come on, what if I'm wrong? This is all about
being wrong? Oh, this is all about being wrong. Once
upon a time, in two thousand and eight, I wrote
a book called Outliers, the first chapter of which was
(06:36):
devoted to a phenomenon discovered in the nineteen eighties by
the Canadian psychologist Roger Barnesley. Here's some of what I wrote.
The explanation for who gets to the top of the
hockey world is a lot more interesting and complicated than
it looks. Good, Lord, I do not sound like I'm
enjoying reading my own book listening to this part of
(06:59):
the Outliers audiobook. Now, I'll admit I have some regrets
about that chapter. We'll get to that, I promise Anyway,
it occurred to me, as I planned our trip to
Philly that I should talk to Barnsley again and go
over his discovery one more time, make sure I understood everything.
So I called him up and asked him to retell
(07:20):
the story of how in the early nineteen eighties he
and his wife Paula stumbled upon what has come to
be known as the relative age effect. We were living
in Lethbridge, Alberta, and we went to a Junior A
hockey team. It was the Lethbridge Broncos. At that time.
Barnesley's wife Paula started reading the game program, which had
(07:43):
the rosters of both teams listed in it. Paula said,
over to me, Roger, when do you think all these
hockey players were born? And I remember thinking to myself, well,
you know, that's kind of a silly question. So I
did a quick calculation. I said, you know, Paula, they're
average age eighteen. It's about nineteen eighty two, so they're
(08:05):
probably all born in around nineteen sixty four. And she said, no, no, no,
I'm not talking about the year. I'm talking about the month.
And I said, what are you talking about? And she
opened up the page of the program where they had
listed the roster of the team, and it just jumped
out at us, just jumped out that the majority of
(08:27):
these players were January, February, in March, and then you
seem to get the odd April in May, and very
few in the fall. And I said, my goodness, that's
just remarkable. He went home and expanded his search further.
Everywhere he looked in competitive hockey, same thing. For some reason,
(08:47):
most players were born in the first part of the year,
and that's when that famous forty thirty twenty ten by
the Coursers of the Year showed up. The famous twenty
ten phenomenon that he's talking about is what in Outliers
I referred to as the iron law of Canadian hockey. Quote,
(09:09):
in any elite group of hockey players, the very best
to the best, forty percent of the players will have
been born between January and March, thirty percent between April
and June, twenty percent between July and September, and ten
percent between October and December. Due Now, why is this.
(09:33):
It's because Canada is obsessed with hockey and coaches start
picking players for all star traveling squads at the age
of nine or ten. Since the eligibility cut off for
Canadian hockey is January first, that means the coaches are
choosing among nine year olds who are as much as
twelve months apart, and twelve months age difference at the
(09:54):
age of nine is a lot. The January kids are
bigger and stronger and more co ordinated than the December kids,
which means that the January kid is more likely to
be chosen by the coaches for the traveling squad, which
means in turn that they will practic two or three
times as often, play more games, have better coaches, better
competition than the kids left behind, and what began as
(10:17):
a completely arbitrary advantage based on a quirk of birthdays
turns over time into a real advantage. The same phenomenon
holds true in other sports, soccer, swimming, you name it.
You can find a relative age effect everywhere, and of
course it also applies to the classroom. Teachers aren't any
(10:41):
better than coaches at disentangling ability from maturity, so relatively
older kids in elementary and middle school end up getting
more encouragement, they tend to get better grades, and they're
more likely to be chosen for things like gifted and
Talented programs. Meanwhile, relatively younger kids are more likely to
be diagnosed with learning disorders or flagged for problem behavior.
(11:05):
I cannot tell you how many parents have come up
to me over the years and said, because I read
your book Outliers, I held my kid back from starting school,
and it was the best decision I ever made. Of
course it was. But parents holding their kids back doesn't
solve the problem. It just creates a relative age effect
arms race. There's a fancy private school near me where
(11:27):
so many parents of younger children have held their kids
back that now the parents of the formerly eldest children
have responded by holding their kids back, whereupon the first
out of parents are increasingly holding their kids back a
second time, meaning that there is at least the theoretical
possibility that in the most competitive corners of American private education,
(11:49):
some kids may never graduate from high school. Maybe I
should have seen on that coming when I wrote Outliers.
I should have made it clear that I was not
trying to teach neurotic, upper middle class helicopter parents how
to game the system. I just wanted schools and sports
leagues to stop behaving like idiots. So Barnsley's paper on
(12:14):
relative age effect came out in nineteen eighty five. Outliers,
which was I think the first time Barnsley's work got
wide publicity, was published in two thousand and eight. The
world has been alerted for decades to the fact that
all kinds of supposedly meritocratic systems have been hijacked. Has
(12:34):
anything changed? You're in front of your computer, are you?
I put the question to Roger Barnsley, the og of
relative age effector research. What have we learned? Can you
google the roster of the Canadian junior hockey team national
(12:55):
hockey team for twenty twenty one twenty two the current roster?
Thank you right now, And I want you to go
down the list of the forwards. Just use the forwards
for the sake of simplicity. And I want you to
just read the twenty one months of birth of the
(13:15):
forwards on the current Canadian junior national hockey team. Their
birthdays are just their names. I just want their birth months, okay,
you see? And then Barnsley repeated what his wife Paula
did decades ago at the Left Bridge Broncos hockey game.
He listed the birth months by number of the members
of the national junior hockey team. Listen for birth months
(13:39):
of seven or higher two ten, one one one two
eleven eight four, two ten, five, four five, two six
one three one one five three two four seven one.
It's the same thing, the same thing. They've learned nothing.
It's the same phenomenon. You saw it, You saw it
(14:01):
this forty years ago. The iron law of an Adian
hockey is still an iron law. Is that funny? It's depressing,
very depressing, very depressing. Here we are both Canadians, we
are we are citizens of a country that cares more
(14:24):
about hockey excellence than anything else. Must be clear, anything else,
and we are leaving an astonishing amount of talent on
the table exactly and refusing to learn. One of Canada's
own problem with academics forty years ago said to the
hockey establishment, what are you doing? That's right? And they didn't.
(14:45):
They haven't done anything. Canadian hockey hasn't done anything, but
maybe revisionist history can. The inspiration for the revisionist history
(15:05):
Warton School relative age effect experiment came to me when
I was talking to Adam Kelly, former footballer turned university professor.
Kelly is a disciple of Roger Barnsley. He works with
sports leagues to help them solve their age related problems,
like England's basketball Federation, which spent a small fortune setting
(15:26):
up regional centers to identify promising players. We looked at
the proportioned players who were selected into those talents centers
across at the nation, and that was at age. Groups
selected from thirteen to fifteen, both at male and female,
and those who are born in birth quarter one were
ten times more likely to be selected ten times. Birth
(15:50):
quarter one is the three months closest to the English
basketball eligibility cutoff date. Yeah, which absolutely crazy, isn't it?
Same old story. The talent spotters thought they were picking
the most promising players, but in fact they were just
picking the oldest kids, because the oldest kids were, of
course the tallest and most coordinated anyway. Kelly's also thought
(16:14):
a lot about education. Why is everyone taking now examine
exactly the same time. Surely we should all be taking
it at that same time within our lifespan. So if
you're born in August, you're taking your exam almost twelve
months earlier than someone who's born in September. So that
(16:34):
person's at twelve months more learning than you, which is
super obvious when you think about it. In New York State,
all the big elementary school math and English standardized tests
are in late March early April. We're talking third graders,
eight and nine year olds. At that age, kids get
smarter every week. Yet we're trying to assess kids by
(16:55):
their test scores. And some of the kids were judging
had been around as much as a year longer than
other kids. Why don't we have the January kids. I'll
take the test in January, and the February kids in February,
and on and on down the line. I have no idea,
honestly no idea. So I gathered the research arm of
(17:17):
Revisionist History with our props, recording equipment, and extra microphones,
and headed for the Gothic, ivy covered Cathedral of Higher
Learning that is the University of Pennsylvania to see if
a group of really, really smart young people can figure
out the importance of the month when they happen to
be born. Turn all your pieces of favor, put your
(17:42):
name of the ta, and once we are you're finished,
we will collect them, and then we will commence the
exercise so we give out our elaborate questionnaire, but secretly,
all we're interested in is people's birthdays. And then Eloise
and Harrison go through each questionnaire and use the birthdays
(18:02):
to do a simple calculation. Technically, the youngest you could
be as a college senior at the time of our
experiment was to be born in September two thousand and one,
So if you were born then you got a zero
zero birth privilege. If you were one month older, born
in August two thousand and one, you got a one.
(18:24):
July two thousand and one you got a two, and
so on. The higher the number on the sticker, the
older the student wearing it. We even had a contingency
for students who might have skipped a grade somewhere along
the way. You get a negative number if you were
younger than the expected age of a college senior. First
thing we found out there were no negative numbers in
(18:46):
the room. Back when I was in college, I knew
dozens of people who had skipped grades. Apparently that doesn't
happen much anymore. But it was worse than that. There's
no zeros. They win a one, two, twos, threes, fours, fives,
(19:08):
anyone less than ten. Stand up. One student finally stood
up in a back row, a college senior who was
a few months shy of her twenty second birthday. Oh
you're ten. Oh a ten in a back row or
another ten emergence. We've got the twelve, We've got these twelves.
We got some tens. Take a look. This is bananas.
(19:29):
This is as bad as the Canadian national junior hockey team.
In our sample of students from one of the world's
most selective universities, there were no young seniors. None, not
even close. There was no one at all who had
been born in two thousand and one, which is the
year you would expect most seniors to be born in.
At one point, a student started talking about her experience
(19:52):
in a gifted in talent to program. So I asked
for a show of hands. Do you mind me asking
how many of you guys were in gifted in talented programs? Wow?
Basically all of you, which makes sense right. These were
a group of relatively old students, and being re to
be older makes it more likely to get into a
gifted and talented program, And getting into a gifted and
(20:14):
talented program makes it more likely to get into a
school like Penn, which is why a group of seniors
that day at Wharton were all really old. What begins
as arbitrary advantage hardens into privilege, a simple fact about
their own success that our students still hadn't figured out.
(20:40):
I'm going to get another clue, guys, the particular dimension
or privilege we're interested in measuring, I'm going to say,
with a great deal of certainty, is in this room
the most significant form of privilege or lack of it
that you would have experienced as students. At this point,
(21:03):
I've pulled out all the stops trying to help them.
I've had people with the highest numbers stand up up.
At one point, I made everyone with a number over
twenty get up from their seats and line up against
the wall. They were still guessing, but it was like
they were throwing darts with a blindfold on. They were
pretty clear. Demographic similarities at the top end in spectrum
(21:27):
racially was the most obvious in my eyes. Yeah, but
also just in general that there were very few at
the low end of the spectrum yeah, was also noteworthy.
How do you feel about being in the higher number
of group as opposed to the lower number group? I mean,
it's just a fact like it is. It's an I
(21:50):
would say, I'm coming into I was. I'm aware of
my privilege as a as a white woman, but I
think it's about what you do with that privilege that's important.
And then, after forty minutes of floundering in the shallow
end of the revisionist history research pool, a group of
students in the front row put their heads together and
(22:12):
then raise their hands. We have a hypothesis. That's Adam.
Everyone in this front row group had the highest privilege
score we handed out twenty four plus. Of course they
figured it out first. They were the oldest students in
the class. Next to Adam was Joseph. He was wearing
(22:33):
a suit in a tie. Yeah. Yeah, we have a
hypothesis twenty four plus. Is that a significant factor? Here?
Is age? Our absolute age? Like how old are you girls?
We're all a bunch of old seniors over here, older
than usual. Eureka. Phase one of the experiment was over
(22:55):
now phase two because I intended to ask them if
they wanted to do something about their arbitrary privilege. In Australia,
they've invented something called maturity based corrective adjustment. Procedures matcaps
(23:22):
as it's known for provisional use in the sport of swimming.
I will confess that I am madly in love with
this idea. It turns out that if you take a
bunch of measurements of kids and plug them into an equation,
you can estimate their physical maturity quite accurately. So you
(23:42):
don't have to rely on chronological age to assess someone's
level of development. You can do one better and measure
maturity directly. So what these equations do is they fighture
in indices like height, wight, chronological age, and sitting height,
and they use those fighters to then estimate how far
(24:03):
away a particular individual is from that point of peak growth.
That's Stephen Cobley, a professor at the University of Sydney
who created maccapps along with his colleague Michael Roman. Here's
how it works. Imagine we have two fourteen year old
swimmers competing in a hundred meter freestyle, both with the
(24:23):
exact same birthday, Joey and Tim. So these academics would
first calculate the biological maturity status of each swimmer, that is,
how far each one is from their estimated point of
peak performance. So let's say, for example, Joey is actually
twelve months less biologically mature than Tim at this exact moment.
(24:46):
Then comes the cool part. Cobley then looks at thousands
of data points for fourteen year old swimming in one
hundred meter freestyle and calculates what is twelve months of
maturity worth on average in terms of swimming time for
kids competing in that age group. He enters the data
into the maturation based Corrective Adjustment Procedures algorithm, and presto,
(25:08):
the seger adjusts Joey's time to account for the fact
that at the moment he raised Tim, he was twelve
months behind developmentally. An adolescent swim meet in Cobley's ideal
universe has two sets of results, the raw results and
then the maturity adjusted results. What you're doing is your
(25:28):
effectively lowering the time of the folks who are slightly
behind in terms of their maturity status. Cobley did a
test run of the maccap's algorithm on a sample of
seven hundred Australian swimmers, all boys, competing in a hundred
meter freestyle. The first thing he discovers is similar to
what we found a pen among the top twenty five
(25:51):
percent of all adolescent swimmers. There were no late maturing boys, none, zero,
which is an astonishing fact. Australia is a country that
takes swimming as seriously of Canada takes hockey, and they
have basically decided to banish a big group of swimmers
from consideration just because their talent happens not to appear
(26:15):
soon enough. When you looked at these seven hundred swimmers,
in some sense, the damage has already been done. We've
already chased away the slow developers. They've quit, they've got discouraged.
They thought they were bad swimmers. They didn't realize they
were simply behind. Yeah, so what happens when you run
(26:36):
everyone's race times through the matcap's algorithm, adjusting for maturity,
the order of finish in every race changes. They're really
talented swimmers who just happened to be slower to mature
now have a chance. They used to be lost to
the system. Now you can tell who they are. Now
you can go up to young Joey and say, I
know you didn't make the final, but take a look
(26:58):
at your matcaps time. You might be the best swimmer
out there. What's the most somebody moved up, but we've
seen large percentage, We've siently seen big changes in ranks.
So if we've got cases for events where someone who
was outside let's say the top twenty, suddenly was in
the top three. I read your paper and the first
(27:21):
start I had was, Oh, wow, this belongs in the classroom.
Right when you identify who gets into special gifted and
talented programs, or when you decide who just isn't smart
n L. When you look at who you discourage and
who you encourage, you've got to be making the same mistake, right, Yeah,
(27:42):
I think so. I think the cautionary bit that we
have to remember is it's that old question of yeah,
but how far do we go? So if we're going
to factor, if we are going to factor relative age
in in education or biological development in education adjustments, shouldn't
we be factoring in other things that we know are influential? Absolutely?
Why wouldn't we, Well, exactly why wouldn't we If we've
(28:08):
developed a better way of identifying talent, why wouldn't we
want to use it everywhere? Back at Wharton, I climbed
up on my soapbox. I talked about how maccapps had
freed swimmers, and the tyranny of birthdays communicated my enthusiasm
for bringing the Australian Revolution to the shores of the
(28:30):
United States. So in Australia they started to do this.
Eleven year olds are all swimming the one hundred meter freestyle.
We've got twelve kids. We have, you know, an order
of finish. Then they run the times through an algorithm
and have a new order. Now, would you feel comfortable
with all of your if you go back to your
(28:51):
k through twelve experiences? Would you feel comfortable if they
ran all of your test scores through an age correction algorithm.
Around the room, I saw young people of promise, focused,
eager they would be my disciples. I was so full
of excitement. I put the question to a vote, yes
(29:11):
or no. I see to a short hand who likes
the idea. There was a great stirring and wrestling. My
heart leapt into my throat. I thought I had brought
the birthday rights revolution into the heart of the lion's den.
I looked up, looked around, and nothing, no roar of support,
(29:33):
only a long, cold silence. I've never seen less enthusiasm
for a great idea in my life? What is the
matter with you guys? A young man spoke up first, Well,
it's like, be completely honest. It's to be selfish about it.
It would probably have heard our chances of being right
(29:54):
here in this room because I'm old from my grade,
I did well my standardized test scores. Maybe if they
readjusted it, I would be more of in the median.
He was a twenty two year old senior in college.
So selfishly, I would say, no, it's not an idea
from a society standpoint, perhaps, so you're being honest. I'm
being honest. Yeah, it's like saying, you know, legacy admissions
(30:16):
or something like that. My father went to pen and
my mother went to pen. Oh you're drowning. Yeah, if
we get rid of this, you know. But I'm just
gonna be honest. It's fantastic. Who else wants to then?
Matteo raises his hand. He is an eighteen on his sticker,
an age privilege advantage of a year and a half.
(30:38):
And I think that's a poor idea because it assumes
that everyone who is older is like always going to
be smarter. Any one whose younger is always going to
be less smart. I've seen some pretty old people do
some terrible things. No, no, no, Matello, that's not what
it does. Well, it's neutral. It just adjusts for the
age grading. But I want my score to be my score.
But wait, wait, I want to I want to? Can
(30:59):
I just harpen? You said you want your score to
be your score? Yeah? But why is? Why is an
adjusted score a score that accounts for your degree of
maturity somehow less characteristic of who you are than an
unadjusted score. I would have thought the opposite. A score
that doesn't include information on your level of maturity would
seem to be more artificial than one that does. I
(31:20):
don't know, I guess i'd have I would want to
look at the algorithm before I made an actual judgment,
because I'd be surprised if I was okay with everything
theoretically that everything that the algorithm would say. The students
stood up, one by one, using their prodigious powers of
analysis and imagination to come up with one objection after another.
(31:41):
Why do you think you guys are so hostile to
attempts to remedy the situation. My fear with algorithm is
that it could be gamed. So if this were implemented
where we know that if you're younger, you get say
one hundred point bump in the SAT or are you
more favorably throughout your whole educational career. And we're probably
sending our kids off to kindergarten at four, or we're
(32:01):
planning whenever we have our kids, look at where the
cutoff date is. We're kindergarten, you know, in September maybe,
and saying all right, we're going to reproduce nine months
before in December or January. Yeah, it's the current system
that's being gamed. We're responding to the gaming, are we not? Yeah,
so I guess I'm the fear is that the album
(32:24):
QUI regained yea, and yes exactly. I put my hand
on the table to steady myself. My head was spinning.
These were the children of outliers, children raised according to
the rules of a game I kind of helped set
in motion. And now the consensus among seventy five elderly
(32:47):
ivy leaguers was that the system should remain rigged in
favor of the elderly. The apple cart must remain upright
with the shiniest and oldest apples on the top. Now
do I blame them, No, I don't. This is what
happens when we give up on fairness as an essential principle.
(33:09):
All that remains is cynicism. The students of pen do
not see the point of changing a system because their
parents did not see the point of changing the system,
and their parents didn't see the point because the schools
didn't see the point, And the schools, for goodness sake,
can't even rise from the slumber of their indifference to
see that it makes no sense to give everyone an
(33:32):
assessment test on the same day we gain the things
that we've given up on. I tribe my best in Outliers,
but I subtitled the book the Story of Success. And
if I learned anything from that afternoon a pen, it's
that we want to think about success as a word
to describe ourselves, our own progress. But it's not really
(33:56):
people who are successful. It's the systems around us. Great
students and great hockey players come from great teams and
great classrooms. And if you want to judge the success
of those teams in classrooms, start by looking at their composition,
like when was everyone born? And if we can't get
(34:18):
that one right, God help us with everything else all right,
thank you guys. I hope this has all been fun.
I hope this makes you feel free to wear your
numbers for the bouncy school year. Revisionist History is produced
(34:42):
by Eloise Linton Leaving Gistu and Jacob Smith, with Tali
Emlyn and Harrison VJ Choi. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Original scoring by Luiskara,
mastering by Flawn Williams, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact
checking by Keisha Williams. Special thanks to Solmon Hood Klawan
(35:04):
for production to help on this episode. I'm Malcolm Glabe, Hey,
Revisionous History listeners. I'm capping off this episode with a
preview of a new Pushkin show that really has me hooked.
It's called Death of an Artist. Death of an Artist
(35:25):
has all the elements of a gripping story, a suspicious death,
tumultuous relationship, a murder trial, questions of morality, feminism, power
and balance, and divided our world. On September eight, nineteen
eighty five, up and coming artist Anna Mendietta fell from
the thirty fourth floor window of her husband and famous
sculptor Carl Andrea's apartment. Host Helen Molesworth asks was Carl
(35:50):
Andrea involved. You'll revisit Anna's untimely death, the trial that followed,
and both the protests and silence that have followed this
story ever since. Okay, here comes a sneak peak. You
can follow the story by searching for Death of an
Artist wherever you get your podcasts. It's nineteen seventy three,
(36:11):
Iowa City. There's a damp chill in the air. We
are on a sort of shabby block in front of
a brick apartment building with a white door in need
of a paint job and a storefront window with its
blinds drawn shut. The sidewalk just in front of the
door is covered in blood, and it looks like the
(36:33):
blood might be seeping out from under the door jam.
It's a busy week day and as pedestrians pass the
puddle of blood, they notice it and casually step around it. Eventually,
a man in a green and black plaid jacket pauses
and looks around as if looking for an explanation. When
(36:54):
none comes, he walks away. Then a well dressed white
woman uses her umbrella to poke at the bloody puddle,
but after a moment or two of inspection, she also
walks away. Finally, an older gentleman emerges from a nearby
storefront and silently cleans up the mess, and the evidence
(37:15):
of whatever happened is suddenly gone, and with it disappears
any account of whose blood was spilled and how. The
whole scene is being captured by two young women in
their twenties, sisters who sit in an old car parked nearby.
(37:36):
One of them holds a super eight camera, the kind
you'd make home movies with back them. The other snaps
photos with a thirty five millimeter camera. They are Anna
and Raclean Mendieta, Cuban refugees who landed in this unlikely
place as children in nineteen seventy three. Anna was a
(38:00):
first year MFA student at the University of Iowa. She
was funny, loud, outrageous, and had to take no prisoners
vibe and in the way of sisters. She had roped
rect Clean into helping her make a new piece, and
like many works on a maid, it would come to
seem tragically prophetic. In the wake of her death. She
(38:23):
basically staged what looked like the remnants of you know,
physical violence with what looked like blood in the doorway
of a building, And I thought it was extremely powerful
for a very young artist to be doing that, and
to be doing it in this small, largely white town
of Iowa City was fascinating to me. That's Connie Butler,
(38:47):
one of the many curators who would come to admire
and study on a Mendietta's work in the decades that followed.
The photos in film the Mendietta sisters took that day
would ultimately become a work of art called Moffett Building Piece.
The fact that it still exists only in these little
thirty five millimeter slides, which you know, you have to
(39:07):
get very close to with a loop, and it's a
very intimate way of viewing these things. You know, that
implicates you as a viewer too, almost as if you
are yourself looking at a crime scene. Anna's interest in
blood wasn't only meant to shock. She was keenly aware
of violence and injustice when she made them off at
(39:28):
Building Piece. She was investigating her own community's reaction to
a brutal crime, a rape and murder that had happened
on campus a few months before. Here's how she explained
her inspiration. A young woman was killed, raped and killed
at Iowa in one of the dorms, and it just
really freaked me out. So I did sort of rape
(39:50):
performances type things at that time, using my own body.
I did something I believe in and that I felt
I had to do. That's not actually Anna Mendietta's voice
you're hearing. That was Tanya Brigera, another artist from Cuba
who you'll hear from more later. Anna Mendieta's question was
(40:15):
could you make art about something so awful? And she
used blood, not paint. Blood is the most essential substance
of life. Could it jolt people out of their daily routines?
Could blood make people pay attention? She didn't know it yet,
but the Moffett Building piece was about to be her
first major artwork, and in a circular way, that's kind
(40:38):
of terrifying. The question she asked about how we react
when we encounter the residue of violence. This question would
haunt all of us after she died. I'm your host
Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony
(40:59):
Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist Episode one.
The haunting for my entire professional life, I've been a
(41:20):
member of something called the art world, an exclusive network
of artists, gallery dealers, curators, collectors, and philanthropists. For two decades.
I was lucky enough to be a museum curator, making
me one of a small group of cultural insiders who
determine what art we see and how we talk about it.
(41:41):
In the museum world and in art history, there are
a lot of unspoken rules about what you can say
publicly and what is supposed to stay private. It turns
out I wasn't that good at sticking to the script,
and I guess I'm still not good at it, because
I'm going to tell you Anna Mendietta's whole story, all
the way to its shocking and troubling end, and much
(42:08):
to my surprise, I discovered it's a story many of
my colleagues in the art world would prefer I didn't
tell at first, blush. It seemed like people didn't want
me to talk about it because of who else is
part of that story. Anna's husband, the famous sculptor Carl Andre.
(42:30):
He is one of the so called fathers of minimalism,
a cultural hero to many a revered artists with lots
of connections and he was a suspect in Anna's death.
Even though Carl Andrea and Anna Mendietta were a highly
visible art world couple, even though something terrible happened between
(42:53):
them the night she died, you will not read about
it on a museum wall label or in most art
history textbooks. Reviews of their exhibitions tend to take care
of it in a sentence or two. You would not
know that Mendietta's death divided the art world in nineteen
and in many ways still does. I'm not the first
(43:18):
person to try and tell this story. In fact, many
of the voices you'll hear in this show are from
interviews conducted by investigative journalist Robert Katz. He published a
book in nineteen ninety that remains the most comprehensive look
into this art world tragedy. He spoke with dozens of
Anna and Carl's friends in noisy restaurants, in parks, in
(43:41):
busy offices, and you'll hear the voices of some art
world insiders on these tapes who have since decided not
to talk. Most folks don't want to discuss what happened
that night. They don't want to talk about what the
ramifications of that night were on the art world. They
don't want to contemplate what it means when a community
(44:01):
is torn apart by violence, and they don't want to
discuss whether or not justice has been served. All these
different folks not talking for all of their different reasons
means that a veil of silence started to fall over
this project, and I can't lie. The more silence we encountered,
(44:22):
the more sad and frustrated I became. And the more
silence we encountered, the more I wanted to talk
Pushkin. In the middle of our preparations for season seven
of This Your Favorite podcast, the Revisionist History team got
on a train to Philadelphia, four of us carrying props,
(00:37):
recording equipment, and extra microphones. Our destination the Gothic, ivy
covered Cathedral of Higher Learning that is the University Pennsylvania.
And why did we go? Because we had cooked up
a little experiment and we were curious to see how
it would fly. Thank you. We commandeered one of the
(01:06):
main lecture halls at the Wharton School in I did
seventy five or so students, all seniors, smart, focused, discipline,
future masters of the universe, and asked them to answer
ten simple questions, such as, how many years of your
K twelve education were a public school and how many
were a private school at the time of your graduation
(01:29):
from high school? How many continents had you visited at
any point during your middle school and high school years?
Did your parents provide you with a private tutor? I
looked out at rows and rows of eager students, hunched
over their deaths in anticipation, took a deep breath and began, So,
(01:55):
my name is Malcolm Gladwell. I am the host of
the podcast Revisionist History. The theme of this season of
Revision's History is experiments, and one of the experiments of
this season involves all of you. So, you guys are
guinea pigs. Yes, guinea pigs, because in the manner of
(02:17):
all guinea pigs, they were entirely in the dark about
what we had in store for them. And as you
probably guessed from some of the questions that you were given,
what I'm trying to do is I'm conducting at an
experimental investigation into the nature of the privilege of the
(02:39):
people in this room. The students quickly finished the questionnaires
and put their names and birthdates at the top. My producers,
Eloise and Harrison, are sitting at a big table at
the front of the room, in full view of all
the guinea pigs. They go through the completed questionnaires one
by one and use the answers to generate a number,
(02:59):
a score, which they write on a giant white sticker
with a big bat sharp beeat And now the real
experiment begins. I'm going to sign every one of you
a number. If they can figure out what their number means,
they will understand something essential about how broken the system was.
That propelled them to the IVY League, and how to
(03:21):
fix it. Just peel off the back and I would
like you to fix a sticker to your chest so
we can all see each other's numbers. You're going to
look around the room, see everyone else's numbers, see your number,
and hopefully that will aid you in your investigation of
what exactly the nature of this experiment is. I'll just
read the students sat there with their numbers stuck to
(03:44):
their chests, looking around in befuttlement, trying to make sense
of everyone's score. I tried to help them figure it out,
gave them hints nudges. First, think about this. I gave
you a series of questions. Some of those questions involved
a yes or no answer. So you saw two people,
(04:05):
Alloway's and Harrison, who quite quickly, in the space of
about five minutes ten minutes, went through seventy five or
so responses, and we're able to very quickly and easily
assign you a number. So think about this. Logically, it
wasn't a complex algorithm, right, there was no computer used.
It was how long would you say you were spending?
(04:26):
And Harrison, how long would you spending on each questionnaire?
Six seconds, five six seconds. Okay, that's a clue. Guys,
let's go come on. Hi. My name is Abe. They
might have just looked at the zip code, because that's
a pretty good predictor of privilege just in and of itself.
(04:46):
Abe has derived his hypothesis from question six, what is
the zip code your family lived in during your high
school years? Perhaps he speculates the number on his chest
with some kind of complex, mysterious derivative of his zip code.
I didn't see if you had a computer, but if
you did, there was no else was there a computer? Now?
(05:07):
I did ask you as a calculator quantity. Abraham, with
all due respect, are you suggesting that Eloise and Harrison
had memorized every zip code? It's plausible they're very smart.
Not that smart. I'm Zach. I think it really has
to do strictly with the private verse public education system
(05:29):
in the US. Nope, that's not what we were looking for. Hi,
my name is Joseph. A question that I thought was
already interesting on there was about if you have any
siblings and if so, how many. Nope, not that either. Hi.
I'm Kaylee. One that I don't think I've ever been
asked in relation to this, was if I drank when
I was in high school? What age that I get
(05:52):
drunk at? Kayley's referring to question number nine in high school?
Did you drink alcohol? And if yes, when did you
first get drunk? Could you come up with any reason
why I would have asked that question? Or do you
think that's just one of the ones that I'm is
blowing smoke on? I have my own hypothesis, but I can't. Oh,
(06:13):
come on, what if I'm wrong? This is all about
being wrong? Oh, this is all about being wrong. Once
upon a time, in two thousand and eight, I wrote
a book called Outliers, the first chapter of which was
(06:36):
devoted to a phenomenon discovered in the nineteen eighties by
the Canadian psychologist Roger Barnesley. Here's some of what I wrote.
The explanation for who gets to the top of the
hockey world is a lot more interesting and complicated than
it looks. Good, Lord, I do not sound like I'm
enjoying reading my own book listening to this part of
(06:59):
the Outliers audiobook. Now, I'll admit I have some regrets
about that chapter. We'll get to that, I promise Anyway,
it occurred to me, as I planned our trip to
Philly that I should talk to Barnsley again and go
over his discovery one more time, make sure I understood everything.
So I called him up and asked him to retell
(07:20):
the story of how in the early nineteen eighties he
and his wife Paula stumbled upon what has come to
be known as the relative age effect. We were living
in Lethbridge, Alberta, and we went to a Junior A
hockey team. It was the Lethbridge Broncos. At that time.
Barnesley's wife Paula started reading the game program, which had
(07:43):
the rosters of both teams listed in it. Paula said,
over to me, Roger, when do you think all these
hockey players were born? And I remember thinking to myself, well,
you know, that's kind of a silly question. So I
did a quick calculation. I said, you know, Paula, they're
average age eighteen. It's about nineteen eighty two, so they're
(08:05):
probably all born in around nineteen sixty four. And she said, no, no, no,
I'm not talking about the year. I'm talking about the month.
And I said, what are you talking about? And she
opened up the page of the program where they had
listed the roster of the team, and it just jumped
out at us, just jumped out that the majority of
(08:27):
these players were January, February, in March, and then you
seem to get the odd April in May, and very
few in the fall. And I said, my goodness, that's
just remarkable. He went home and expanded his search further.
Everywhere he looked in competitive hockey, same thing. For some reason,
(08:47):
most players were born in the first part of the year,
and that's when that famous forty thirty twenty ten by
the Coursers of the Year showed up. The famous twenty
ten phenomenon that he's talking about is what in Outliers
I referred to as the iron law of Canadian hockey. Quote,
(09:09):
in any elite group of hockey players, the very best
to the best, forty percent of the players will have
been born between January and March, thirty percent between April
and June, twenty percent between July and September, and ten
percent between October and December. Due Now, why is this.
(09:33):
It's because Canada is obsessed with hockey and coaches start
picking players for all star traveling squads at the age
of nine or ten. Since the eligibility cut off for
Canadian hockey is January first, that means the coaches are
choosing among nine year olds who are as much as
twelve months apart, and twelve months age difference at the
(09:54):
age of nine is a lot. The January kids are
bigger and stronger and more co ordinated than the December kids,
which means that the January kid is more likely to
be chosen by the coaches for the traveling squad, which
means in turn that they will practic two or three
times as often, play more games, have better coaches, better
competition than the kids left behind, and what began as
(10:17):
a completely arbitrary advantage based on a quirk of birthdays
turns over time into a real advantage. The same phenomenon
holds true in other sports, soccer, swimming, you name it.
You can find a relative age effect everywhere, and of
course it also applies to the classroom. Teachers aren't any
(10:41):
better than coaches at disentangling ability from maturity, so relatively
older kids in elementary and middle school end up getting
more encouragement, they tend to get better grades, and they're
more likely to be chosen for things like gifted and
Talented programs. Meanwhile, relatively younger kids are more likely to
be diagnosed with learning disorders or flagged for problem behavior.
(11:05):
I cannot tell you how many parents have come up
to me over the years and said, because I read
your book Outliers, I held my kid back from starting school,
and it was the best decision I ever made. Of
course it was. But parents holding their kids back doesn't
solve the problem. It just creates a relative age effect
arms race. There's a fancy private school near me where
(11:27):
so many parents of younger children have held their kids
back that now the parents of the formerly eldest children
have responded by holding their kids back, whereupon the first
out of parents are increasingly holding their kids back a
second time, meaning that there is at least the theoretical
possibility that in the most competitive corners of American private education,
(11:49):
some kids may never graduate from high school. Maybe I
should have seen on that coming when I wrote Outliers.
I should have made it clear that I was not
trying to teach neurotic, upper middle class helicopter parents how
to game the system. I just wanted schools and sports
leagues to stop behaving like idiots. So Barnsley's paper on
(12:14):
relative age effect came out in nineteen eighty five. Outliers,
which was I think the first time Barnsley's work got
wide publicity, was published in two thousand and eight. The
world has been alerted for decades to the fact that
all kinds of supposedly meritocratic systems have been hijacked. Has
(12:34):
anything changed? You're in front of your computer, are you?
I put the question to Roger Barnsley, the og of
relative age effector research. What have we learned? Can you
google the roster of the Canadian junior hockey team national
(12:55):
hockey team for twenty twenty one twenty two the current roster?
Thank you right now, And I want you to go
down the list of the forwards. Just use the forwards
for the sake of simplicity. And I want you to
just read the twenty one months of birth of the
(13:15):
forwards on the current Canadian junior national hockey team. Their
birthdays are just their names. I just want their birth months, okay,
you see? And then Barnsley repeated what his wife Paula
did decades ago at the Left Bridge Broncos hockey game.
He listed the birth months by number of the members
of the national junior hockey team. Listen for birth months
(13:39):
of seven or higher two ten, one one one two
eleven eight four, two ten, five, four five, two six
one three one one five three two four seven one.
It's the same thing, the same thing. They've learned nothing.
It's the same phenomenon. You saw it, You saw it
(14:01):
this forty years ago. The iron law of an Adian
hockey is still an iron law. Is that funny? It's depressing,
very depressing, very depressing. Here we are both Canadians, we
are we are citizens of a country that cares more
(14:24):
about hockey excellence than anything else. Must be clear, anything else,
and we are leaving an astonishing amount of talent on
the table exactly and refusing to learn. One of Canada's
own problem with academics forty years ago said to the
hockey establishment, what are you doing? That's right? And they didn't.
(14:45):
They haven't done anything. Canadian hockey hasn't done anything, but
maybe revisionist history can. The inspiration for the revisionist history
(15:05):
Warton School relative age effect experiment came to me when
I was talking to Adam Kelly, former footballer turned university professor.
Kelly is a disciple of Roger Barnsley. He works with
sports leagues to help them solve their age related problems,
like England's basketball Federation, which spent a small fortune setting
(15:26):
up regional centers to identify promising players. We looked at
the proportioned players who were selected into those talents centers
across at the nation, and that was at age. Groups
selected from thirteen to fifteen, both at male and female,
and those who are born in birth quarter one were
ten times more likely to be selected ten times. Birth
(15:50):
quarter one is the three months closest to the English
basketball eligibility cutoff date. Yeah, which absolutely crazy, isn't it?
Same old story. The talent spotters thought they were picking
the most promising players, but in fact they were just
picking the oldest kids, because the oldest kids were, of
course the tallest and most coordinated anyway. Kelly's also thought
(16:14):
a lot about education. Why is everyone taking now examine
exactly the same time. Surely we should all be taking
it at that same time within our lifespan. So if
you're born in August, you're taking your exam almost twelve
months earlier than someone who's born in September. So that
(16:34):
person's at twelve months more learning than you, which is
super obvious when you think about it. In New York State,
all the big elementary school math and English standardized tests
are in late March early April. We're talking third graders,
eight and nine year olds. At that age, kids get
smarter every week. Yet we're trying to assess kids by
(16:55):
their test scores. And some of the kids were judging
had been around as much as a year longer than
other kids. Why don't we have the January kids. I'll
take the test in January, and the February kids in February,
and on and on down the line. I have no idea,
honestly no idea. So I gathered the research arm of
(17:17):
Revisionist History with our props, recording equipment, and extra microphones,
and headed for the Gothic, ivy covered Cathedral of Higher
Learning that is the University of Pennsylvania to see if
a group of really, really smart young people can figure
out the importance of the month when they happen to
be born. Turn all your pieces of favor, put your
(17:42):
name of the ta, and once we are you're finished,
we will collect them, and then we will commence the
exercise so we give out our elaborate questionnaire, but secretly,
all we're interested in is people's birthdays. And then Eloise
and Harrison go through each questionnaire and use the birthdays
(18:02):
to do a simple calculation. Technically, the youngest you could
be as a college senior at the time of our
experiment was to be born in September two thousand and one,
So if you were born then you got a zero
zero birth privilege. If you were one month older, born
in August two thousand and one, you got a one.
(18:24):
July two thousand and one you got a two, and
so on. The higher the number on the sticker, the
older the student wearing it. We even had a contingency
for students who might have skipped a grade somewhere along
the way. You get a negative number if you were
younger than the expected age of a college senior. First
thing we found out there were no negative numbers in
(18:46):
the room. Back when I was in college, I knew
dozens of people who had skipped grades. Apparently that doesn't
happen much anymore. But it was worse than that. There's
no zeros. They win a one, two, twos, threes, fours, fives,
(19:08):
anyone less than ten. Stand up. One student finally stood
up in a back row, a college senior who was
a few months shy of her twenty second birthday. Oh
you're ten. Oh a ten in a back row or
another ten emergence. We've got the twelve, We've got these twelves.
We got some tens. Take a look. This is bananas.
(19:29):
This is as bad as the Canadian national junior hockey team.
In our sample of students from one of the world's
most selective universities, there were no young seniors. None, not
even close. There was no one at all who had
been born in two thousand and one, which is the
year you would expect most seniors to be born in.
At one point, a student started talking about her experience
(19:52):
in a gifted in talent to program. So I asked
for a show of hands. Do you mind me asking
how many of you guys were in gifted in talented programs? Wow?
Basically all of you, which makes sense right. These were
a group of relatively old students, and being re to
be older makes it more likely to get into a
gifted and talented program, And getting into a gifted and
(20:14):
talented program makes it more likely to get into a
school like Penn, which is why a group of seniors
that day at Wharton were all really old. What begins
as arbitrary advantage hardens into privilege, a simple fact about
their own success that our students still hadn't figured out.
(20:40):
I'm going to get another clue, guys, the particular dimension
or privilege we're interested in measuring, I'm going to say,
with a great deal of certainty, is in this room
the most significant form of privilege or lack of it
that you would have experienced as students. At this point,
(21:03):
I've pulled out all the stops trying to help them.
I've had people with the highest numbers stand up up.
At one point, I made everyone with a number over
twenty get up from their seats and line up against
the wall. They were still guessing, but it was like
they were throwing darts with a blindfold on. They were
pretty clear. Demographic similarities at the top end in spectrum
(21:27):
racially was the most obvious in my eyes. Yeah, but
also just in general that there were very few at
the low end of the spectrum yeah, was also noteworthy.
How do you feel about being in the higher number
of group as opposed to the lower number group? I mean,
it's just a fact like it is. It's an I
(21:50):
would say, I'm coming into I was. I'm aware of
my privilege as a as a white woman, but I
think it's about what you do with that privilege that's important.
And then, after forty minutes of floundering in the shallow
end of the revisionist history research pool, a group of
students in the front row put their heads together and
(22:12):
then raise their hands. We have a hypothesis. That's Adam.
Everyone in this front row group had the highest privilege
score we handed out twenty four plus. Of course they
figured it out first. They were the oldest students in
the class. Next to Adam was Joseph. He was wearing
(22:33):
a suit in a tie. Yeah. Yeah, we have a
hypothesis twenty four plus. Is that a significant factor? Here?
Is age? Our absolute age? Like how old are you girls?
We're all a bunch of old seniors over here, older
than usual. Eureka. Phase one of the experiment was over
(22:55):
now phase two because I intended to ask them if
they wanted to do something about their arbitrary privilege. In Australia,
they've invented something called maturity based corrective adjustment. Procedures matcaps
(23:22):
as it's known for provisional use in the sport of swimming.
I will confess that I am madly in love with
this idea. It turns out that if you take a
bunch of measurements of kids and plug them into an equation,
you can estimate their physical maturity quite accurately. So you
(23:42):
don't have to rely on chronological age to assess someone's
level of development. You can do one better and measure
maturity directly. So what these equations do is they fighture
in indices like height, wight, chronological age, and sitting height,
and they use those fighters to then estimate how far
(24:03):
away a particular individual is from that point of peak growth.
That's Stephen Cobley, a professor at the University of Sydney
who created maccapps along with his colleague Michael Roman. Here's
how it works. Imagine we have two fourteen year old
swimmers competing in a hundred meter freestyle, both with the
(24:23):
exact same birthday, Joey and Tim. So these academics would
first calculate the biological maturity status of each swimmer, that is,
how far each one is from their estimated point of
peak performance. So let's say, for example, Joey is actually
twelve months less biologically mature than Tim at this exact moment.
(24:46):
Then comes the cool part. Cobley then looks at thousands
of data points for fourteen year old swimming in one
hundred meter freestyle and calculates what is twelve months of
maturity worth on average in terms of swimming time for
kids competing in that age group. He enters the data
into the maturation based Corrective Adjustment Procedures algorithm, and presto,
(25:08):
the seger adjusts Joey's time to account for the fact
that at the moment he raised Tim, he was twelve
months behind developmentally. An adolescent swim meet in Cobley's ideal
universe has two sets of results, the raw results and
then the maturity adjusted results. What you're doing is your
(25:28):
effectively lowering the time of the folks who are slightly
behind in terms of their maturity status. Cobley did a
test run of the maccap's algorithm on a sample of
seven hundred Australian swimmers, all boys, competing in a hundred
meter freestyle. The first thing he discovers is similar to
what we found a pen among the top twenty five
(25:51):
percent of all adolescent swimmers. There were no late maturing boys, none, zero,
which is an astonishing fact. Australia is a country that
takes swimming as seriously of Canada takes hockey, and they
have basically decided to banish a big group of swimmers
from consideration just because their talent happens not to appear
(26:15):
soon enough. When you looked at these seven hundred swimmers,
in some sense, the damage has already been done. We've
already chased away the slow developers. They've quit, they've got discouraged.
They thought they were bad swimmers. They didn't realize they
were simply behind. Yeah, so what happens when you run
(26:36):
everyone's race times through the matcap's algorithm, adjusting for maturity,
the order of finish in every race changes. They're really
talented swimmers who just happened to be slower to mature
now have a chance. They used to be lost to
the system. Now you can tell who they are. Now
you can go up to young Joey and say, I
know you didn't make the final, but take a look
(26:58):
at your matcaps time. You might be the best swimmer
out there. What's the most somebody moved up, but we've
seen large percentage, We've siently seen big changes in ranks.
So if we've got cases for events where someone who
was outside let's say the top twenty, suddenly was in
the top three. I read your paper and the first
(27:21):
start I had was, Oh, wow, this belongs in the classroom.
Right when you identify who gets into special gifted and
talented programs, or when you decide who just isn't smart
n L. When you look at who you discourage and
who you encourage, you've got to be making the same mistake, right, Yeah,
(27:42):
I think so. I think the cautionary bit that we
have to remember is it's that old question of yeah,
but how far do we go? So if we're going
to factor, if we are going to factor relative age
in in education or biological development in education adjustments, shouldn't
we be factoring in other things that we know are influential? Absolutely?
Why wouldn't we, Well, exactly why wouldn't we If we've
(28:08):
developed a better way of identifying talent, why wouldn't we
want to use it everywhere? Back at Wharton, I climbed
up on my soapbox. I talked about how maccapps had
freed swimmers, and the tyranny of birthdays communicated my enthusiasm
for bringing the Australian Revolution to the shores of the
(28:30):
United States. So in Australia they started to do this.
Eleven year olds are all swimming the one hundred meter freestyle.
We've got twelve kids. We have, you know, an order
of finish. Then they run the times through an algorithm
and have a new order. Now, would you feel comfortable
with all of your if you go back to your
(28:51):
k through twelve experiences? Would you feel comfortable if they
ran all of your test scores through an age correction algorithm.
Around the room, I saw young people of promise, focused,
eager they would be my disciples. I was so full
of excitement. I put the question to a vote, yes
(29:11):
or no. I see to a short hand who likes
the idea. There was a great stirring and wrestling. My
heart leapt into my throat. I thought I had brought
the birthday rights revolution into the heart of the lion's den.
I looked up, looked around, and nothing, no roar of support,
(29:33):
only a long, cold silence. I've never seen less enthusiasm
for a great idea in my life? What is the
matter with you guys? A young man spoke up first, Well,
it's like, be completely honest. It's to be selfish about it.
It would probably have heard our chances of being right
(29:54):
here in this room because I'm old from my grade,
I did well my standardized test scores. Maybe if they
readjusted it, I would be more of in the median.
He was a twenty two year old senior in college.
So selfishly, I would say, no, it's not an idea
from a society standpoint, perhaps, so you're being honest. I'm
being honest. Yeah, it's like saying, you know, legacy admissions
(30:16):
or something like that. My father went to pen and
my mother went to pen. Oh you're drowning. Yeah, if
we get rid of this, you know. But I'm just
gonna be honest. It's fantastic. Who else wants to then?
Matteo raises his hand. He is an eighteen on his sticker,
an age privilege advantage of a year and a half.
(30:38):
And I think that's a poor idea because it assumes
that everyone who is older is like always going to
be smarter. Any one whose younger is always going to
be less smart. I've seen some pretty old people do
some terrible things. No, no, no, Matello, that's not what
it does. Well, it's neutral. It just adjusts for the
age grading. But I want my score to be my score.
But wait, wait, I want to I want to? Can
(30:59):
I just harpen? You said you want your score to
be your score? Yeah? But why is? Why is an
adjusted score a score that accounts for your degree of
maturity somehow less characteristic of who you are than an
unadjusted score. I would have thought the opposite. A score
that doesn't include information on your level of maturity would
seem to be more artificial than one that does. I
(31:20):
don't know, I guess i'd have I would want to
look at the algorithm before I made an actual judgment,
because I'd be surprised if I was okay with everything
theoretically that everything that the algorithm would say. The students
stood up, one by one, using their prodigious powers of
analysis and imagination to come up with one objection after another.
(31:41):
Why do you think you guys are so hostile to
attempts to remedy the situation. My fear with algorithm is
that it could be gamed. So if this were implemented
where we know that if you're younger, you get say
one hundred point bump in the SAT or are you
more favorably throughout your whole educational career. And we're probably
sending our kids off to kindergarten at four, or we're
(32:01):
planning whenever we have our kids, look at where the
cutoff date is. We're kindergarten, you know, in September maybe,
and saying all right, we're going to reproduce nine months
before in December or January. Yeah, it's the current system
that's being gamed. We're responding to the gaming, are we not? Yeah,
so I guess I'm the fear is that the album
(32:24):
QUI regained yea, and yes exactly. I put my hand
on the table to steady myself. My head was spinning.
These were the children of outliers, children raised according to
the rules of a game I kind of helped set
in motion. And now the consensus among seventy five elderly
(32:47):
ivy leaguers was that the system should remain rigged in
favor of the elderly. The apple cart must remain upright
with the shiniest and oldest apples on the top. Now
do I blame them, No, I don't. This is what
happens when we give up on fairness as an essential principle.
(33:09):
All that remains is cynicism. The students of pen do
not see the point of changing a system because their
parents did not see the point of changing the system,
and their parents didn't see the point because the schools
didn't see the point, And the schools, for goodness sake,
can't even rise from the slumber of their indifference to
see that it makes no sense to give everyone an
(33:32):
assessment test on the same day we gain the things
that we've given up on. I tribe my best in Outliers,
but I subtitled the book the Story of Success. And
if I learned anything from that afternoon a pen, it's
that we want to think about success as a word
to describe ourselves, our own progress. But it's not really
(33:56):
people who are successful. It's the systems around us. Great
students and great hockey players come from great teams and
great classrooms. And if you want to judge the success
of those teams in classrooms, start by looking at their composition,
like when was everyone born? And if we can't get
(34:18):
that one right, God help us with everything else all right,
thank you guys. I hope this has all been fun.
I hope this makes you feel free to wear your
numbers for the bouncy school year. Revisionist History is produced
(34:42):
by Eloise Linton Leaving Gistu and Jacob Smith, with Tali
Emlyn and Harrison VJ Choi. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Original scoring by Luiskara,
mastering by Flawn Williams, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact
checking by Keisha Williams. Special thanks to Solmon Hood Klawan
(35:04):
for production to help on this episode. I'm Malcolm Glabe, Hey,
Revisionous History listeners. I'm capping off this episode with a
preview of a new Pushkin show that really has me hooked.
It's called Death of an Artist. Death of an Artist
(35:25):
has all the elements of a gripping story, a suspicious death,
tumultuous relationship, a murder trial, questions of morality, feminism, power
and balance, and divided our world. On September eight, nineteen
eighty five, up and coming artist Anna Mendietta fell from
the thirty fourth floor window of her husband and famous
sculptor Carl Andrea's apartment. Host Helen Molesworth asks was Carl
(35:50):
Andrea involved. You'll revisit Anna's untimely death, the trial that followed,
and both the protests and silence that have followed this
story ever since. Okay, here comes a sneak peak. You
can follow the story by searching for Death of an
Artist wherever you get your podcasts. It's nineteen seventy three,
(36:11):
Iowa City. There's a damp chill in the air. We
are on a sort of shabby block in front of
a brick apartment building with a white door in need
of a paint job and a storefront window with its
blinds drawn shut. The sidewalk just in front of the
door is covered in blood, and it looks like the
(36:33):
blood might be seeping out from under the door jam.
It's a busy week day and as pedestrians pass the
puddle of blood, they notice it and casually step around it. Eventually,
a man in a green and black plaid jacket pauses
and looks around as if looking for an explanation. When
(36:54):
none comes, he walks away. Then a well dressed white
woman uses her umbrella to poke at the bloody puddle,
but after a moment or two of inspection, she also
walks away. Finally, an older gentleman emerges from a nearby
storefront and silently cleans up the mess, and the evidence
(37:15):
of whatever happened is suddenly gone, and with it disappears
any account of whose blood was spilled and how. The
whole scene is being captured by two young women in
their twenties, sisters who sit in an old car parked nearby.
(37:36):
One of them holds a super eight camera, the kind
you'd make home movies with back them. The other snaps
photos with a thirty five millimeter camera. They are Anna
and Raclean Mendieta, Cuban refugees who landed in this unlikely
place as children in nineteen seventy three. Anna was a
(38:00):
first year MFA student at the University of Iowa. She
was funny, loud, outrageous, and had to take no prisoners
vibe and in the way of sisters. She had roped
rect Clean into helping her make a new piece, and
like many works on a maid, it would come to
seem tragically prophetic. In the wake of her death. She
(38:23):
basically staged what looked like the remnants of you know,
physical violence with what looked like blood in the doorway
of a building, And I thought it was extremely powerful
for a very young artist to be doing that, and
to be doing it in this small, largely white town
of Iowa City was fascinating to me. That's Connie Butler,
(38:47):
one of the many curators who would come to admire
and study on a Mendietta's work in the decades that followed.
The photos in film the Mendietta sisters took that day
would ultimately become a work of art called Moffett Building Piece.
The fact that it still exists only in these little
thirty five millimeter slides, which you know, you have to
(39:07):
get very close to with a loop, and it's a
very intimate way of viewing these things. You know, that
implicates you as a viewer too, almost as if you
are yourself looking at a crime scene. Anna's interest in
blood wasn't only meant to shock. She was keenly aware
of violence and injustice when she made them off at
(39:28):
Building Piece. She was investigating her own community's reaction to
a brutal crime, a rape and murder that had happened
on campus a few months before. Here's how she explained
her inspiration. A young woman was killed, raped and killed
at Iowa in one of the dorms, and it just
really freaked me out. So I did sort of rape
(39:50):
performances type things at that time, using my own body.
I did something I believe in and that I felt
I had to do. That's not actually Anna Mendietta's voice
you're hearing. That was Tanya Brigera, another artist from Cuba
who you'll hear from more later. Anna Mendieta's question was
(40:15):
could you make art about something so awful? And she
used blood, not paint. Blood is the most essential substance
of life. Could it jolt people out of their daily routines?
Could blood make people pay attention? She didn't know it yet,
but the Moffett Building piece was about to be her
first major artwork, and in a circular way, that's kind
(40:38):
of terrifying. The question she asked about how we react
when we encounter the residue of violence. This question would
haunt all of us after she died. I'm your host
Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony
(40:59):
Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist Episode one.
The haunting for my entire professional life, I've been a
(41:20):
member of something called the art world, an exclusive network
of artists, gallery dealers, curators, collectors, and philanthropists. For two decades.
I was lucky enough to be a museum curator, making
me one of a small group of cultural insiders who
determine what art we see and how we talk about it.
(41:41):
In the museum world and in art history, there are
a lot of unspoken rules about what you can say
publicly and what is supposed to stay private. It turns
out I wasn't that good at sticking to the script,
and I guess I'm still not good at it, because
I'm going to tell you Anna Mendietta's whole story, all
the way to its shocking and troubling end, and much
(42:08):
to my surprise, I discovered it's a story many of
my colleagues in the art world would prefer I didn't
tell at first, blush. It seemed like people didn't want
me to talk about it because of who else is
part of that story. Anna's husband, the famous sculptor Carl Andre.
(42:30):
He is one of the so called fathers of minimalism,
a cultural hero to many a revered artists with lots
of connections and he was a suspect in Anna's death.
Even though Carl Andrea and Anna Mendietta were a highly
visible art world couple, even though something terrible happened between
(42:53):
them the night she died, you will not read about
it on a museum wall label or in most art
history textbooks. Reviews of their exhibitions tend to take care
of it in a sentence or two. You would not
know that Mendietta's death divided the art world in nineteen
and in many ways still does. I'm not the first
(43:18):
person to try and tell this story. In fact, many
of the voices you'll hear in this show are from
interviews conducted by investigative journalist Robert Katz. He published a
book in nineteen ninety that remains the most comprehensive look
into this art world tragedy. He spoke with dozens of
Anna and Carl's friends in noisy restaurants, in parks, in
(43:41):
busy offices, and you'll hear the voices of some art
world insiders on these tapes who have since decided not
to talk. Most folks don't want to discuss what happened
that night. They don't want to talk about what the
ramifications of that night were on the art world. They
don't want to contemplate what it means when a community
(44:01):
is torn apart by violence, and they don't want to
discuss whether or not justice has been served. All these
different folks not talking for all of their different reasons
means that a veil of silence started to fall over
this project, and I can't lie. The more silence we encountered,
(44:22):
the more sad and frustrated I became. And the more
silence we encountered, the more I wanted to talk
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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