Pushing

Hello, hello everyone, Gather round.

Malcolm Gladwell here.

If you're a fan of my show, Revisionist History, then you know my deep and abiding obsession

with American higher education.

How it's broken, how it can be fixed.

Over our next couple of episodes, we dive into this topic again.

And as you will hear, one story makes me really angry.

And the other gives me hope.

Listen to Revisionist History, wherever you get your podcasts,

and you can always get our shows early and at-free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus.

That happened to me recently when I heard this voice on my car radio.

There was something just so haunting about his voice.

Self-assured but oddly tentative, like he was still working out the meaning of the song while he was singing it.

So of course, we just had to have him unbroken record.

It turns out like a lot of kids, J.S. and Dara became fascinated by American music

by listening to far away radio signals late at night.

The difference was that he wasn't listening to those signals in Buffalo or Memphis or Duluth, Minnesota.

He was in Nairobi, Kenya, listening to his parents' radio while they slept.

That's when he decided his own American dream was to come here and become a singer.

His first album, Tales of America, is full of great songs,

wistful, cautionary, even violent,

...