1/ Okay, so maybe this is my crazy socialist European perspective, but hear me out. I can’t get over this bizarre phenomenon where American podcast hosts - serious thinkers and writers - read out ads, as if they really love the product they’re being paid to promote.
2/ Case in point: @Gladwell's lovely Revisionist History podcast. The other day I was listening to one of his shows that started with a story about tea. Ah, it starts with an ad, I thought, and so I began to push the ’30 second forward’ button.
3/ I kept pushing, but after 10 minutes, Gladwell was still talking about tea! Turns out: the podcast was actually about the Boston Tea Party. You can’t distinguish the ad from the journalism anymore. What does that say about the podcast?
4/ An even more striking example is the ad Gladwell reads out in his latest podcast, for a home security system called Simply Save (Gladwell: ‘my top choice, hands down’).
5/ He starts with saying that most crimes are crimes of opportunity, ‘totally random’, could happen to anyone.
6/ Is that true? Of course not. Any criminologist will tell you that even though people in wealthier neighbourhoods worry more about getting burglarised, it’s people living in poorer neighbourhoods who are more at risk.
7/ But Gladwell goes on. ‘You know who’s most likely to be targeted by criminals? Homes without security. They are 300% more likely to be broken into.’
8/ 300 percent! And where does that number come from? I googled it. Turns out: the source is The National Council for Home Safety and Security. That’s the lobby group of alarm installers and contractors.
9/ Do independent experts actually believe home security systems are that effective? Uh no. From a recent article in the New York Times: nytimes.com/2017/12/22/rea… 
10/ OF COURSE the ‘300 percent’ figure is just correlational. OF COURSE people with home security systems are less likely to get burglarised. That’s because they’re richer (they can afford these stupid ‘Simply Save’ systems), and richer neighbourhoods are generally safer.
11/ This is exactly the kind of bullshit that Gladwell would normally be calling out. Hell, he could devote a full podcast to something like this. Correlation is not causation, wow!
12/ Again, maybe this is my crazy socialist European perspective, but you know what I think about public intellectuals who lower themselves by reading fake science from lobby groups, just for the money?
It’s really embarrassing.
[the end]
It’s really embarrassing.
[the end]
