But What If We're Wrong?
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52 One of these historians, Polybius of Megalopolis, supposedly retraced Hannibal’s path himself in order to understand how Hannibal did it. But imagine how difficult this would be, with the limited resources of the era. It might decrease the story’s accuracy. Much more recently, an international team of microbiologists discovered massive numbers of a microbe belonging to the class Clostridia embedded in the soil of an Alpine pass, the Col de la Traversette, dated to the same period Hannibal would have crossed the Alps. The Clostridia bacterium is a product of horse manure, and the quantity discovered reflects the bowel movements of a huge army of mammals moving through a relatively small area. It’s the best evidence that something akin to the classic Hannibal legend happened at this specific place at this specific time. But that’s still a long way from knowing what actually transpired 2,200 years ago.
53 There’s a temptation to argue that television is part of a continuum, and that it represents the second step in a technological ladder that starts with radio and will continue through whatever mode eventually usurps network TV. There is, certainly, a mechanical lineage (the Paley Center for Media was originally known as the Museum of Television and Radio). But anecdotally, this will never happen. We will not connect the content of television with the content of whatever replaces it. The two experiences will be aesthetically incomparable, in the same way that TV and radio are incomparable. Over time, society simply stopped connecting the content of the radio era with the content of the TV era, even though many performers worked in both platforms and the original three networks started as radio outlets; from a consumer perspective, they just felt different, even when trafficking in the same milieu. For example, sitcoms were invented for radio. There were situation comedies on radio long before even the richest Americans owned TVs, and that includes a few sitcoms that were conceived on radio and jumped to the tube. But the experience of watching a sitcom was totally alien from the experience of hearing a sitcom. It altered things so much that the second definition became the universal definition. By 1980, using the word “sitcom” to describe anything that wasn’t a TV show required explanation. Its origin in radio is irrelevant, and we would never compare Cheers or M*A*S*H to something like Fibber McGee and Molly. They have a mechanical relationship, but not a practical one. They seem entwined only to the specific generation of people who happened to live through the transition.
54 This, somewhat obviously, requires the mental evasion of certain critical details—the ancient Egyptians didn’t have electricity, they didn’t invent the camera, and it would still be at least 5,200 years before the birth of Shonda Rhimes. But don’t worry about the technical issues. Just assume the TVs ran on solar power and involved the condensation of river water and were sanctioned by Ra.
55 I should note again that there’s also a popular line of thinking that argues against this type of realism. Some screenwriters feel that directly using an explicit example of any non-essential object dates the material and amplifies the significance of something that doesn’t really matter to the story; in other words, having a character ask for a specific brand name like “Heineken” (instead of the generic “beer”) forces the audience to notice the beverage a little too much, which might prompt them to read something into that transaction that detracts from the story. It imposes a meaning onto Heineken as a brand. But remember: If we’re looking backward from a distant future, we don’t care about the story, anyway. We want the scene to be dated.
56 When a record producer on Nashville (“Liam McGuinnis”) was introduced into the story line, he appeared to be directly modeled after musician (and current Nashville resident) Jack White. I now see “Jack White” in every scene involving this character, which is unintentionally hilarious, especially since he constantly does things Jack White would never do, such as have sex with Connie Britton (a.k.a. “Rayna James,” who is 60 percent Reba McEntire, 25 percent Sara Evans, and 15 percent Faith Hill).
57 As I note these characters, I find myself wondering how confusing it must be for readers born in (say) 1995 to contextualize the meaning of TV personalities from TV programs they’ve never even heard of. But something I’ve learned from lecturing at colleges is that young people read nonfiction books very differently from the way I once did; they instantaneously Google any cultural reference they don’t immediately comprehend. Learning about the life of Ann Romano is no different from learning about the life of Abe Lincoln. Due to Wikipedia, they’re both historical figures.
58 Gladwell went to college in Toronto. People from Toronto view the Bills as their local franchise.
59 What she actually said was: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
60 I should note that I was involved with this episode. But my involvement was negligible.
61 1332 Weathervane Lane, just in case somebody out there is writing my unauthorized biography and is using this book as source material.
62 She was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in the John Cassavetes film Faces.
63 “I think the human as a storytelling animal, as some people put it, is because this [left hemisphere] system is continually trying to keep the story coherent, even though these actions may be coming outside of conscious awareness,” University of California psychology professor Michael Gazzaniga said in a 2011 interview with Jason Gots. “Why does the human always seem to like fiction? Could it be that it prepares us for unexpected things that happen in our life, because we’ve already thought about them in our fantasy world?”
64 By comparison, Lyndon Johnson left office with an approval rating of just 49 percent (according to the University of California’s American Presidency Project). Reagan’s approval rating of 63 percent is especially remarkable when you consider that only 32 percent of Americans polled by Gallup in 1988 classified themselves as Republicans.
65 Which is obviously true.
66 Which is obviously true.
67 The Chicago Daily Tribune was not able to republish its most famous headline as “Dewey Defeats Truman.” They just had to live with it.
68 Part of what I like about Barry’s description of Civil War revisionism is how it accidentally mirrors the elliptical path of his own career. When he was a working newspaper columnist at The Miami Herald in the 1980s, Barry was considered a comedic genius. He won a Pulitzer Prize. But soon after winning that award, he was viewed as considerably less funny. When CBS made a TV show about his life in the mid-nineties, his writing started to seem forced and unoriginal. His literary style is now marginalized as the problematic template for all derivative newspaper columnists who aspire to be wacky and deep at the same time. Yet when Barry dies, he will be universally (and justifiably) remembered as a comedic genius, just as he was when he started.
69 This was validated by several people who read an early draft of this book and advised me to cut the section on climate change entirely, contradicting the advice of my editor (who wanted me to retain it and write even more about the psychology behind people’s need to feel right about this particular issue). I ultimately ignored everyone.
70 Are these particular pundits the best sources, or do these pundits know the best sources? This has never been explained and probably should have been fixed the week after the show first debuted, but they’ve elected to just stick with the ambiguity for thirty-four years.
71 I insert the word “almost” because there’s at least one thing analytics always get wrong: They refuse to acknowledge the existence of “clutch shooting” or “clutch hitting.” Math tells us that being “clutch” is a myth, and that the performance of athletes placed in identical “clutch” scenarios will roughly equate with however they’d perform in any normal scenario. This is wrong. For one thing, every “clutch” situation is unique and distinct, so there
’s no way to compare any two real-life scenarios, even if all the technical details are identical. But the larger reason is that absolutely everyone who has played sports at any level knows that clutchness is real, to a depth that would make it become real (even if it wasn’t) for purely psychological reasons. I am not the type who would ever argue that you can’t understand pro basketball if you haven’t played pro basketball. That argument is dumb. But you probably do need to have competed in a physical sport somewhere, at some level (even if it was just an especially serious summer of Little League). The recognition that certain people respond better under pressure will happen instantly, and you’ll never try to convince yourself otherwise.
72 A follow-up story on the website Evolution News clarified the rumor with the story “The Octopus Genome: Not ‘Alien,’ but Still a Big Problem for Darwinism.”
73 I am, to a degree, reducing (and extrapolating) the complexity and nuance of Nagel’s concept. In a note, he writes: “My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat, one must take up the bat’s point of view. If one can take it up roughly, or partially, then one’s conception will also be rough or partial.”
74 I suppose some might argue this is already true.
75 If there’s a 10 percent chance an event that might kill 13,000 people will occur in a region with a population of 8 million residents, am I really in that much danger? Is anyone? Are those odds better or worse than the possibility that I’ll have a heart attack?
76 I have no idea where that specific figure comes from, or what constitutes a “correct” weather prediction. Based on my own unscientific sense of the world, I feel like weather forecasters are roughly correct a little more often, even in Ohio. But remember, this is allegedly a joke. Do not cite this in your term paper.
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