Encore: Good Old Boys

Malcolm Gladwell here, my new book, The American Way of Killing, investigates America's gun violence crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examine Why the US has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Get the American way of killing at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever audiobooks are sold.

Pushkin. This episode contains explicit language. There are all kinds of reasons for wanting to do a podcast episode. You want to tell a specific story, you want to make an argument, make sense of a particularly powerful piece of tape, but the simplest, and let's be honest, the most selfish reason is that you want an excuse to hang out with someone you love.

And this was the origin of the Randy Newman episode. I am one of the very large group of music lovers who think that Randy Newman is a genius, and that his best albums, like Sail Away or Good Old Boys, are basically as good as pop music ever gets. So I tracked him down, actually through his son. Thanks, Amos, booked a flight to Los Angeles, and on the plane ride asked myself, okay, of all the million things I could possibly talk to Randy Newman about, what would make for the best story? And somewhere over, I'm sure, Nebraska, I realized, oh, it's obvious.

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