Malcolm Gladwell on “The American Way of Killing”
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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm kind of shocked to say it, but Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for 30 years. We got here at just about the same time.
And in his reporting for us and in a shelf of best-selling books, Gladwell takes ideas from the social sciences and other fields and applies them to topics that most of us had never really thought about. You could almost call Malcolm Gladwell a genre unto himself. But we don't often think of Malcolm Gladwell tackling the news, writing about what's in the headlines every day. And that's exactly what he does in his new book. And I'll tell you, it's not easy to read.
The book is called The American Way of Killing, and Malcolm's subject is gun violence. He looks at the mass shootings, suicides, and vast numbers of deaths and injuries in this country, and I could rattle off the statistics, but by now you know them only too well. One unbelievable data point. Firearms have been the leading cause of death among American children since 2020. We don't lead the world in gun deaths, but among the wealthy nations we're an outlier and to a stunning degree.
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