Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - When Parakeets Plundered New York

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

Cautionary Conversation: An invasive parakeet species began spreading in New York City - and the government decided to kill every last bird. Tim Harford is joined by Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, host of The Last Archive, to talk about the great parakeet panic of the 1970s and a history of anxieties about population growth.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You can find pushkinplus at pushkin.fm-plus or head over to the Revisionist History Show page in Apple Podcast. Pushkin It's nice to have visitors from time to time, especially cute visitors. So it was in America in the 1950s. Who wouldn't want an adorable little parakeet for a pet? In Argentina, the parakeet was an agricultural pest, rats with gaudy wings, brightly feathered, chattering locusts. The Argentines were happy to ship them up north as an exotic pet. And for a while, America was happy to receive those parakeets. Except

parakeets can be gratingly annoying, all that talking and talking, it's cute until it isn't. And so people started releasing them into the wild. And then in 1969, catastrophe! A shipping crate fell apart at JFK airport, hundreds of parakeets escaped, maybe thousands, maybe. Everyone could see what would happen next it would breed and breed and soon there would be parakeets everywhere marauding and pillaging like cute little flying Vikings. I'm Tim Halford and this is a special cautionary conversation about the great parakeet panic. Today, our cautionary conversation is with Ben the Daff Hafery, the long-time producer and the new host and writer of our sister podcast, the last archive.

Hello Ben. Hey Tim, how you doing? I'm doing very well. Welcome to cautionary tales. I loved the story about the parakeet panic. We should probably start with a little bit about you. You're a self-confessed bird lover. Am I right? I am. I am a bird lover. It's true. It's sort of struck Ornithology, which has this amazing archive of bird song. And we were doing an episode about that lab. I was working with a lot of the bird song from it. It was one of the last trips I took before the pandemic struck. So I was in this mixing hole listening to tons and tons of bird song and not really leaving my apartment. And then one morning, a morning dove started to show up on our fire escape and would

coup in the way that morning do and sort of winny when it flew away, which is another kind of funny thing about these rather absurd birds. And there's a term in birding called spark bird, which is the bird that kind of kicks off your fascination with birds. The moment when you stop seeing them as an undifferentiated population and start to see them as like individual magnificent creatures. And that morning dove was my spark bird, swiftly followed by a family of blue birds and of tree solos, who I was lucky enough to live in close proximity to and watch grow up. So I sort of became fascinated by birds in 2020.

And it was that love that led me to the parakeets. I think you're not alone in having had this appreciation for birds and for for birdsong during the pandemic in particular, those those strange lockdown months, although I love the fact that you Basically you were seduced by the audio you're listening to tape of bird songs, and that's what softened you up Yeah, and even with the morning of you know We keep the curtains closed overnight, and so it would be in the morning when the morning of a land And I would hear it rather than then see it at first So it was the audio and then it became more typically visually oriented.

And I remember that episode of The Last Archive, we should probably explain to the loyal cautionary tales listeners, the few of them who don't listen also to The Last Archive, that The Last Archive is a wonderful podcast, also produced by Pushkin, like cautionary tales, aims to tell these really rich stories, although it has a slightly different air to it and lots of beautiful, beautiful archive, audio among other things. Like you said, I do consider cautionary tales like our sister podcast. I love cautionary tales. I feel like it's very much an ASMR vein, but one thing that we always try to do on the show is use a lot of archival tape. So we talk about parrots and parakeets. I think the same thing. I should, this is a terribly ignorant question that kind of like little parrots or what. Yes, parakeets are a parrot.

And there are many different kinds of parakeets. This specific story is about monk parakeets. They, similar to other kinds of parrots, have the capacity to mimic human speech, though it's not as pronounced in a monk parakeet as it is in an African gray, for instance. But they're kind of your classic parrot looking bird in that they're bright green, and they have a hooked bone-colored beak, and they're sort of gorgeous, and have extremely gregarious, larger-than-life personalities,

which is part of why you might want them as a pet. And also a part of why you might not want them anymore after a while. Not want them as a pet, yeah. So, in the 1950s and 60s, there was a huge market for monk parakeets. I think there was something like 60,000, more than 60,000 monk parakeets purchased in the United States in a period of three years in the 1960s. And it was part of this broader exotic craze that was happening, like you have pink flamingos,

Hawaiian shirts, teaky torches. A lot of what it was is GI is coming back from the war who'd been stationed in the South Pacific and then bringing this love of other parts of the world but also this kind of comforting fiction of kind of everywhere that wasn't America mashed up into one place. So you had this Polynesian culture, but also South American culture,

and the parakeets kind of fit in there right alongside your pink flamingos with the added bonus that you could try and teach these birds to talk. Like people made records of training birds, how to speak, that you were supposed to use as instruction or even just play so that your bird could learn from the record, how to talk. Do people used to teach their parakeets to scream obscenities? Because that's really what the British like to do with parrots.

Teach them to say rude things. I'm sure there are plenty of Americans. Probably a lot of the New York parents, especially, were being taught how to swear loudly. There's a lot of colorful swearing around here. And I'm curious, Ben, are you a monk parakeet fan? I would never own a monk parakeet. I actually do think that would drive me insane,

but there's a cemetery in Brooklyn about a mile from where I live. I found out that there was a colony of bright green monk parakeets living in the front gate of the cemetery. I love living near them, but no, I would not want to own one. I really wanted to talk about this idea of the parakeet panic,

but the sense that the parakeets were gonna take over and that something had to be done. So tell us about that. So basically over the course of the 60s, a lot of these birds are up in the United States and people very swiftly get sick of them and start to release them. It's not known at first that the bird can survive quite well in New York City or that it's as flexible as it is, but it turns out monk parakeets are able to sort of change the

kinds of things they eat. And they're also really good at keeping warm in their nests because they have these sort of complicated nests, little cubby holes that they fit into and they keep each other warm because they have high body temperatures. So it turned out that the monk parakeet was quite able to survive in New York City. It was in 1971 that a woman was walking in Long Island and noticed a sort of spec of bright green in the grass Strange looking bird called an ornithologist who came and identified it as a baby monk parakeet and this was proof that Monk parakeets were reproducing in the wild in New York State this sort of led to mass campaign on the state level been partnership with the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club and even with some involvement from the federal government to

stamp out the bird before it established itself as a large population because in Argentina and other South American countries, the Monk Parakeet was thought to be an agricultural pest. And so the fear was it's gonna kill native birds, it's gonna eat up crops from our crop land, it's gonna cause tons and tons of damage and have really significant agricultural costs and also just be really annoying. And the model for this was sort of thinking about other invasive species, but in particular,

the starling, which is another bird that was introduced famously in New York state in the late 19th century and has become a significant population since then, and was thought to be a mid-air agricultural pest. There's a crazy subplot there to do with Shakespeare, which we won't get into. People should listen to the episode. But look, forgive me, maybe this is my ignorance. But when I think of the major problems facing the United States in 2023, even if I limit myself to the major environmental problems facing the United States in 2023, I do not think to myself, monk parakeets, they're the guys. If only we didn't have the monk parakeets, it would all be fine. But you found, I mean, it's hilarious.

You found this 700-page document in the New York State Archives, and they were really, really worried about the parakeets, it seems. Yes, they were extremely concerned. It's important to note, I think, that this is happening right at the birth of the environmental movement in the United States. First Earth Day is April 22nd, 1970. It's basically within a year of that, that the Monk parakeet panic really gets going. The New York State Department of Conservation is a newly formed body the same way the Environmental Protection Agency is newly formed body and they're part of managing the parakeet population. So there's this sense that we are destroying the planet

and the small things we do are spiraling wildly out of control. And the parakeet is sort of a paradigmatic example of this. It's like, oh my God, look what we've done. You know, we've got rivers catching fire. And also we let this bird loose. And now that's going to go crazy. And we're just going to be overwhelmed by a booming parakeet population. In addition to all of the other things, we've started that have spun wildly out of control. So the state was really concerned about this. And they mounted a campaign for people to write in and say if they'd seen Monk parakeets, where they'd seen them.

They had employees who were going out and trapping and killing these birds by various means. I found this folder in the state archives that has 783 pages of correspondence and research and wanted posters and just all manner of things related to this campaign to completely annihilate the population of Monk Parakeets in New York State, which was thought to be 400 to 600 birds and was feared that it was going to double every three to four years. Can you give us a flavor of what was in this archival folder? Sure. I thought I'd show you first this is a wanted poster from Virginia that says wanted

information relating to escaped alien at the top and then has this sort of sketch of a monkey on it. Escaped alien. I love it. I know there's this sort of undertone of xenophobia to it that I think the poster captures very effectively. If you should see this bird, please report your observation to your VPI Extension officer. This is from New York State. This is a second grade class in Bellport, New York, who were writing to the state about their parakeet sightings. So it's got this amazing double space line paper, child's handwriting, Dear Mr. Brown, the Monk Parakeet is all over Bellport.

I have seen about 30 of them underlined, and one nest, and the one is written backwards. The nest is on the gutter, but what I really want to know how to get rid of them, please send back a letter and tell me how. Very truly, it was Lee. Well, it was Lee sounds really, so Lee sounds really worried. Lee was very concerned. And then this, this I love is a letter from a corrections officer on Rikers Island,

which is a famous and much hated island prison in New York. It says, Mr. Trim, I am an NYC correction officer, assigned to Rikers Island. My post as work gang officer takes me over most of the island, which is still wooded and undeveloped. I was pleased to find that remote areas of the island are overrun with fesyn. One day, in February while on my outside patrol, I saw feeding on slices of bread that inmates throw from the windows the usual accumulation of local birds and what I identified as a half moon parrot. I observed him for several minutes

and he was then joined by others. I counted, counting as my business, 27 birds and all. I made inquiries of other CEOs and inmates and could not come up until now with a logical explanation. An inmate truck driver told me that at our abandoned fairy house there were hundreds. I checked this out and found this to be true. For obvious reasons, the island is restricted and cameras are forbidden. However, if the proper requests are made, it just might be permitted to check out the sanctuary of what I believe to be monk parrots. And then the state actually does go to Reikers Island to capture the parrots, and seems to have failed in that endeavor.

An old stored posterity. Incredible. Incredible. I'm speaking to Ben Adafafrey, the host of the last archive. Corsely tales will be back after the break. This year we're making more shows than ever and we're giving them early to push in plus subscribers. If you become a member of Pushkin Plus you get to hear every episode of Revisionist History two full weeks before everyone else. And you get the shows without any ads and and when we do a special mini series on the show like we will this summer you get that whole set of shows all at once. A binge drop just for you.

And without giving too much away, I'll tell you, our special series this upcoming season is bananas. More episodes, more stories you won't hear anywhere else this year, you've got it. Revisionist history heads from New York to New Orleans to the Wild West, from the high planes to high school debate club. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. You can find Pushkin Plus at pushkin.fm slash plus, or head over to the Revisionist History Show page in Apple Podcasts.

page in Apple Podcast. Now, this all reminds me of something and it clearly reminded you of something similar, which is these worries about overpopulation, human overpopulation, which were catching on at around the same time. And the person I always think of is the ecologist Garrett Hardin, who wrote a very influential piece in the social sciences about the tragedy of the commons as Paul Erlich, famously, 1968 to the population bomb. You actually take it back to the work that inspired Paul Erlich,

this guy Charles Elton, who had never heard of. Totally. There's this big concern about human overpopulation. Like, these are the parakeet years, they're the human overpopulation years, and people were concerned about that at Earth Day as well. But a lot of our ideas about population, booms and busts, they're informed at least by how we think about animal population cycles. And that work has been around for a while. formed at least by how we think about animal population cycles. And that work has been around for a while.

There's Thomas Malthus at the end of the 18th century talking about human overpopulation already, and a lot of these people in the 70s are thought of as like neo-Malthusians. But there's also the ecologists and the animal population people, including this guy, Charles Elton, who found Oxford's Bureau of Animal Population in the 1930s, and is the guy who, in 1958, writes a book called The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, which is actually first done as a three-part program on the BBC in 1957. So it's written for a popular audience, and is one of the first places where this idea about invading animal populations booming and growing wildly out of control becomes popularized.

Even though the field of invasion biology doesn't really take off until the 1990s, he's still to this day the most cited person in the field. And he's been doing this research on animal populations over the 20th century, but interestingly, there's this kind of cross-pollination between how we think about animal populations and human populations. Like, there's a guy, William Votan,

an ornithologist who writes a book called The Road to Survival, I believe, in the 1940s, that inspires Paul Aurelich's The Population bomb. There's this kind of shared anxiety about growth in natural things, like whether they're animals or people that are happening at the same time, and this confusing work of basically how to manage populations because the fear is that they're going to overwhelm the natural limits of the planet, which is sort of a harmful idea for the environmental movement in those eras.

I think it's done a lot of damage. I think about Garrett Hardin, for example, the tragedy of the common sky. I remember coming across him as a young, economic student. The basic idea is if you don't have ownership over common land, then people will just let their livestock overgraze the common land. Too many cows on the common land, too many sheep on the common land, common land gets used up. Everybody dies. It's a disaster. And I remember explaining this to my girlfriend at the time, happily mansplaining away. And she was outraged because I was basically saying,

oh, and this is why it's a good idea that we don't have commons anymore. And it was much more interested in medieval history than I was. And she's like, no, they privatized the commons. They drove all the peasants off. They all starved. The commons worked. This is a willful misreading of history.

Hardin had basically made this purely mathematical argument right down the equations. And this is what happens. And when I looked into it more closely, I realized that social scientists who had looked at this with more interest found that in fact, people did find ways to manage common property. These things didn't inevitably end in collapse.

I became fascinated by Eleanor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, who basically looked at the same problems as Garrett Harden, but actually looked at how those problems were solved in reality. She found, oh, actually, these can be tough problems, but communities for centuries for millennia have been figuring out how to solve them. And it does remind me of the parakeet situation and the overpopulation situation because there's

this thing in common to it all, which is you have this kind of brute force intellectual tool or this kind of overly simplified schematic for looking at things. And you lose some of the fine grain detail and individuality and flexibility that allows you to come to happier conclusions than the comments will always be a tragedy. And population is the central problem we have to solve if we want to solve our environmental woes. So I do think there's a meaningful parallel there.

Yeah, people got very interested in things like forced sterilization. There was a famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, I think it was the early 1980s and Garrett Harden basically said that we can't help these people and the image he conjured was of a lifeboat Americans are in the lifeboat and these Africans are in the water drowning and asking to be pulled onto the lifeboat, but if we pull them onto a lifeboat With us then the lifeboat will sink There's a racist undertone to that. There's a very much like, you gotta let those guys starve,

and that may seem heartless, but actually, it's really the right and ethical thing to do if you really think about it. Right, the mathematically necessary. Yeah, yeah, I mean really horrendous. And now of course, people are worried that maybe population is falling. Right. So in a lot of rich countries, so South worried that maybe population is falling. Right.

So in a lot of rich countries, so South Korea, South Korea is crazy. Nor.78 children per woman in South Korea at the moment. You need roughly two children per woman to maintain the population. So at that rate, the population of South Korea is collapsing, absolutely collapsing. And that's the most extreme example, but there are lots of wealthy countries where the headache now is population falling, not population rising. Yeah, and here we are just a half century away from at least the most recent panic about this. And yeah, I agree, the narrative has completely flipped.

What happened to the monk parakeets? Basically, the state sought to eliminate all of the birds in the wild, and they, in 1970 for really begin to wind this down, it's thought that there are fewer than 10 monk parakeets remaining in the wild, and so they declare mission accomplished. But of course, there are still lung parakeets in the wild. They did not succeed in getting every last one, and probably there have been subsequent introductions from the pet trade. So now there are lung parakeets living in New York City still. They live in Brooklyn College. They live in the spires of the main gate at Greenwood Cemetery. But there are pretty controlled populations.

They aren't doing agricultural damage, at least that we know of. They're not competing with native species in any particularly egregious way. I actually believe that their nests provide housing for other birds. So there are a neutral to positive impact on the environment. Those sort of initial projections about what the monk parakeet was going to do to this country were overblown. And you know, anyone listening in the United States today will know that we are not living in the in the post-parakeet apocalypse. So it has a happy ending and for me it has this sort of greater significance about how we think about the natural world. I think there's this urge

to define what is natural and to say these animals belong in this place and those animals don't. And of course, introduced species can absolutely become problems and often do for people or for other native species. But I think it's this sort of overzealous attempt to preserve one idea of what is natural against all of the changes that we have inevitably created on the planet that leads to this kind of a-haven-the-white whale quality to the monk parakeet pursuit. And I think that it's in the Austrian way necessary to have a more finer-grained nuanced attitude towards these things.

But there's also this thing about parrots where they kind of blur the line between human and animal in a funny way. I think one of the reasons people are driven crazy by birds is because there's this at first charming and then sort of unsettling way in which they approximate a lot of human behaviors and human speech. And I think being reminded of the fact that there's less than we'd like to think that separates us from animals is a thing people don't like very often. And so that is my conspiratorial view of what was going on on some level with the monk

parakeets. They kind of stand in for us and for our place in the animal world and for the damage that we've done to the environment. And so must be stamped out. I loved listening to the story. As you can tell, it made me think, it sparked a lot of thoughts. I hope people will look up this episode of The Last Archive, only for the Shakespeare sub-plot. Stay with us Ben, after the break, I want to talk about the greatest author of fantasy and science fiction in the 20th century, year, we're making more shows than ever, and we're giving them early to Pushkin Plus subscribers. If you become a member of Pushkin Plus,

you get to hear every episode of revisionist history two full weeks before everyone else. And you get the shows without any ads. And, and, when we do a special mini series on the show, like we will this summer, you get that whole set of shows all at once. A binge drop just for you. And without getting too much away, I'll tell you,

our special series this upcoming season is bananas. More episodes, more stories you won't hear anywhere else. This year, you've got it. Revisionist history heads from New York to New Orleans to the Wild West. From the high plains to high school to bake club. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. You can find Pushkin Plus at pushkin.fm slash plus. Or head over to the Revisionist history show page in Apple Podcasts.

We're back. I'm Tim Haafard. This is a cautionary conversation with Ben Nadaf Haafry, who is the host of our sister podcast, The Last Archive. Then I was absolutely delighted when an episode of the last archive dropped into my feed and it revolves around Ursula Laguin and an Ursula Laguin story. I don't want to say anything at all about this episode because it's just magnificent and I don't want to spoil any of it, but I do want to talk about Ursula Laguin because I'm a huge fan. I would love to. And I've only read certain of her story. When I say I'm a huge fan of Laguin, I'm a huge fan. I would love to. And I've only read certain of her story. So when I say I'm a huge fan of Laguin,

I'm a huge fan of her Earthsea stories. So tell me, what am I missing? What else should I read by Laguin? My favorite of her stories is the ones who walk away from Omelace, which is the short story that the episode revolves around kind of a utopian thought experiment. But of her novels, the one that I love that I actually, I suspect you would like as

well, is the Dispossessed. Do you know anything about the plot of that one? I don't. The Dispossessed, I love because it has a similar kind of anthropological attitude towards these different planets and how their societies are structured, but it's got a great story too. And it's set in this galaxy where there's a capitalist planet called Urus. And at some point in the distant past, there was an anarchist uprising on the planet. And the way that they resolved this tension is they shipped the anarchists off to a moon called an heiris. And so there is now an anarchist planet, an heiris,

and a capitalist planet, or us, and they just sort of keep their distance from each other except for the exchange of resources. But on the anarchist planet, there is a young physicist named Chevik, who is a genius. He's quite brilliant. I think he's modeled on Robert Oppenheimer, who was actually Ursula Laguin's father's

friend. And he is seeking to produce a kind of scientific truth that the economics of an heirs don't really support. And so he is the first man from an ares to go to Uros in some very long period of time. And the story is about his stay on the planet and the compromises that he makes and the kind of what his quest for knowledge and his experience of this capitalist planet due to him. And it's just a really great story. It's really, really rich and interesting stuff. and it's just a really great story. It's really, really rich and interesting stuff.

Okay, I will read it. Can you tell me like what is Earth's all about and why do you love it? Well, there are several books in the Earth's sequence. So one interesting thing about them is that LaGuin wrote three in I think the 1970s, early 1970s, and then came back 20 years later, and started writing more, and the later books are almost a repudiation of the earlier books in a way that is, oh, wow. Quite upsetting if you loved the earlier books, which I did. She is almost attacking

her own creation. There's some really interesting politics there So if you think about all the best bits of Star Wars and all the best bits of Harry Potter Before either Star Wars or Harry Potter existed Plus a whole lot of awesomeness that George Lucas and J.K. Rowling couldn't even dream of that's that George Lucas and J.K. Rowling couldn't even dream of. That's earthy. So it's about a boy who is a gifted raw wizard talent who gets sent to wizard school, but it does not unfold in the way that you think it might unfold. I mean, as with any great novel, you have to read it to appreciate it, but there are a couple of lovely touches. One is that the first book he's an adolescent, the second book is he's middle-aged and the book is told

from the perspective of an adolescent girl who meets him, and the third book he's an old man, and the story is told from the perspective of an adolescent boy who is watching him move through the world as a great and accomplished arch-mage. He's also a person of color, so our hero is a person of color and it's barely mentioned and in fact often not correctly depicted on book covers. I've talked too much about it already, just read it. I really want to read it. I'm first curious to know what you think the best bits of

Star Wars are. And I also, I actually am really curious to know how she repudiates it and her later work. So the echo of Star Wars is that the magicians in Earthsea have this tremendous power to control the natural world, so it's like the force. And again, this is before Star Wars. Yeah. Ever existed. So they control magic, but it can be abused or it can be used wisely. And I think she delivers a much more subtle and interesting take on the consequences of misusing that power. What does it mean to have such control over the world through your magic and then to abuse that control? And it's so much more unsettling than Darth Vader. And don't get me wrong.

I mean, I'm a Star Wars kid. I like Star Wars. That's good, but Earthsea is even better in that sense of what corruption looks like for these superheroes, almost. I actually have the audio book downloaded, so I'm excited to start listening to it. Yeah. And the repudiation, so there are a couple of things that I didn't notice as a boy when I first read these books. All the wizards are men or boys. There are no female wizards.

And that's just something you sort of take for granted, because like, you know, as a fantasy world and whatever, you just don't even notice it, because so often, in particular, we men don't notice that actually there aren't really very many women in the story. And that's interesting in that this story was written by a woman. And yeah, book four, suddenly she starts to chip away and you thought these guys were the good guys, but are they the good guys? What happened to all the female power? What happened to all the female wizards?

It really makes you start to rethink the people and the culture that you previously viewed as heroic. It sounds really cool. So she's dealing in a lot of ideas from anthropology and I talked to a lot of anthropologists about her so they'll look when, and they love her because these science fiction societies and other planets, they're kind of anthropological exercises. Like you have these descriptions of other ways of being,

and sometimes really intricately worked out language systems and symbolic systems. I guess I'm curious, do you feel like your love of a vessel of the Gwynn and or science fiction more generally has anything to do with your interest in economics? Yeah, it's a good question, but I think, well, I was certainly was reading Tolkien and CS Lewis and Anne McCaffrey and Frank Herbert Anderson of the Gwynn long before I even knew what economics was so I think it predates that.

But I mean the Gwyn is she's a touch down while you were looking at birds and starting to really appreciate bird song during lockdown in the spring of 2020 I was creating a role-playing game heavily inspired by Ursula Luguin and Earthsea and running that over Zoom for my friends. So as the world was burning all around us, I was collectively spinning this fantasy universe inspired by Ursula L win because because who better her core People should also look up this amazing last archive episode

About well, it's sort of about Ursula. Gwyn and it's about a much bigger top with a lot they should look up The episode about the parakeet panic tell us a little bit about the last archive in general It's motivated by this question who killed truth? So where did that come from? The show began about, I guess, four years ago now. It was created by the historian, Jollipor, who was my thesis advisor in college. And it was occasioned by the Trump administration, really, where there's all this panic about alternative facts and post-truth and deep fakes, this sort of epistemological chaos, where it felt as if nobody knew what to believe anymore.

And there was a lot of media attention given to the idea that we were in this epistemologically unstable ground, all of us all the time. And I think something that bothered us about that and Jill especially as an American historian is that that epistemological instability just absolutely does not begin with Donald Trump. There's a much larger history there and there's especially a 20th century history there

that has to do with technology, the history of science and the history of media as well as rising polarization. And of course, this is not just a US problem, but US history is the focus of the show. Looking at times people have created new ways of knowing things and how these new truths get worked into a democratic society and also new ways of doubting things. So there's a lot of history of science, a lot of history of technology, history of the media, but it's also meant to be a celebration of the many different ways of finding truth

and especially of finding historical truth, even if it's a 700 page document about killing all the monk parakeets in the 1970s. So, it's a celebration, it's a epistemological mystery, and hopefully it is a podcast people all enjoy. I'm sure they will, I love it, and one of many things I love about it is that it never really tells you what to think. It just keeps surprising you and prodding your curiosity and inviting you to think for yourself.

So people can find and subscribe to the last archive wherever you listen to your podcasts. Ben Adaf Haferi, thank you so much for joining Corsionary Tales. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it and I love the show, so it's very fun for me. Corsionary Tales is written by me, Tim Halford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines, with support from Edith Rousselo. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Julia Barton, Greta Cohn, Little Malade, John Schnarrs, Kali Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor,

Nicole Marano and Morgan Ratner. Corsinary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It helps us for, you know, the serious reasons. And if you want to hear the show, add free. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and Apple podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. I'm going to go to the next one. Thank you. I'm Malcolm Gladwell here with some great news for revisionist history fans. This year we're making more shows than ever and we're giving them early to pushkin plus subscribers if you become a member of Pushkin Plus, you get to hear every episode of Revisionist History

two full weeks before everyone else. And you get the shows without any ads. And and when we do a special mini series on the show, like we will this summer, you get that whole set of shows all at once. A binge drop just for you. And without giving too much away, I'll tell you. Our special series this upcoming season is bananas. More episodes, more stories you won't hear anywhere else.

This year, you've got it. Revisionist history heads from New York to New Orleans to the Wild West. From the high plains to high school debate club. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. heads from New York to New Orleans to the Wild West from the High Plains to High School to Bay Club. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. You can find Pushkin Plus at Pushkin.fm-plus or head over to the Revisionist History Show page in Apple Podcasts. you