Pushkin

If you listen to season one of revisionist history,

I think you know that I have a weakness for the big idea,

maybe even a fatal weakness.

On my tombstone, it's going to say, Malcolm Gladwell, rest in peace,

and it is one big idea, is that there was one big idea to explain everything.

I began season two of revisionist history with the same obsession.

I think I interviewed 30 or 40 people, read a few dozen books,

camped out in the NYU library, all in search of that little tingle.

That moment when you realized that actually this is just weird enough,

this is totally some history with revising.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mark Cohen, philosopher.

You can't step in the same river twice because each time you step in the river,

you're stepping into different water.

And then the professor starts talking about Heraclitus, rivers,

and the ship of Thesius, and light bulbs, light bulbs go off.

The question is, if you change, if you have a ship and you change a sex of ancient griefing,

and you change one board at a time, is at the end of the day, is ship different?

Oh yeah.

That's what this is.

In the season coming up, I'm going to take you to McDonald's

and the French fries they had back in the day.

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