THE BOMBER MAFIA: Malcolm Gladwell on Warfare, Audiobooks, and the Future of Storytelling

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Education

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2021

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Malcolm Gladwell’s extraordinary new book, “The Bomber Mafia,” tells the story of a group of pilots who met on a muggy airbase in central Alabama and hatched a plan to revolutionize warfare. This was in the 1930s, the era of the bomber, a new breed of aircraft that could supposedly drop a bomb from six miles up and land it in a pickle barrel. If you could do that, you wouldn’t have to level cities, rack up casualties, or send a single soldier onto the battlefield. Planes could win wars all by themselves. Or so the young pilots thought. “The Bomber Mafia” is about how that dream unraveled in World War II, but because this is a Malcolm Gladwell book, it’s about a lot of other things, too, like a Dutch computer genius, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard. It also dares to ask a vexing moral question: what happens when a piece of technology that heralds positive change is driven off course? To listen to “The Bomber Mafia,” visit thebombermafia.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	I want to make audiobooks, particularly audiobooks like this, because there's something
0:10.3	you can do, and there's a response you can summon in telling the story this way that you
0:16.6	cannot do in the page.
0:18.9	I'm Rufus Griskem, and this is the next big idea.
0:23.2	Today, Malcolm Gladwell, on his latest book, The Bomber Mafia, The Power of the Human
0:29.0	Voice, and why audiobooks are the future.
0:41.7	If I asked you to make a list of the most important moments in the Second World War, what would
0:46.6	you choose?
0:47.6	Now, really, think about it.
0:49.6	Pearl Harbor, Storming the Beaches of Normandy, dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
0:54.9	When ever is on your list, my guess is that you didn't include January 6, 1945 that
1:00.1	they a brilliant young general named Haywood Hansel lost his job commanding a fleet of
1:04.2	B-29 bombers in Guam.
1:07.3	It was a job he'd been born for.
1:10.0	Hansel came from a lot of military men that stretched all the way back to the Revolutionary
1:13.6	War.
1:14.6	He followed quickly in their footsteps, joining the Army in 1928, getting his wings, and
1:19.4	becoming an instructor at the Air Corps Tactical School in Alabama, all before his 35th
1:24.2	birthday.
1:25.2	There in Alabama, he found his calling.
1:28.0	He wasn't just meant to be a military man, he was meant to be a revolutionary.
1:32.8	He fell in with a band of renegades who spent a lot of time talking about recent advancements
	...

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