The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 21: Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the Presidential Race, and Malcolm Gladwell on School Shootings

Episode Date: March 11, 2016

This week: Julia Louis-Dreyfus says that, in light of the 2016 Presidential race, “Veep” is now like a “sombre” documentary; Malcolm Gladwell looks at the subculture behind post-Columbine school shootings; and we explore the rumor that Alexander Hamilton’s ghost resides in an old house in Manhattan. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Welcome to your Buddha Buddy five-minute guided meditation. During this practice, we will focus on your body and breathing awareness to soothe the anxious mind. Find a comfortable seated position. Now close your eyes and take a deep breath. Picture your front door. Did you lock it when you left?

Take another deep breath in through your nose and feel your belly fill with air. Your pants seem awfully tight. You haven't been to the gym in several days. Has it been two weeks already? Exhale through your mouth. On your next inhale, fill your belly just a little bit less. Stop at like 80% full. Maybe not just when you're breathing, but when you're eating too.

Now let it go. Breathe in to the count of five. And slowly exhale. Clear your mind. Sometimes it helps to focus on a peaceful image from your past. You loved the beach as a child. You'd play and play and never let your mother put sunscreen on you. Now you have lots of freckles, and that mole might be new.

Are doctors supposed to just notice, or are you supposed to point these things out? As you continue to breathe in and out, not that fast, that's hyperventilation. How your focus to shift to shift. your surroundings. Now sense that someone just sat down next to you. Does this person think that you're weird sitting on this park bench with your legs crossed and eyes closed? It's a man. He wasn't looking at you before, but he is now. As we hastily reach the end of the meditation? Start to bring life back into your limbs. Move your fingers and wiggle your toes.

Notice that your foot is asleep. Now that you've centered your being and calmed your breath, you are ready to begin your day. Actually, your whole leg is asleep. You can't get up. You can't even do nothing. Nothing right. Guided meditation for the anxious mind.

A piece by Casey Johnston performed by Birgit Huppock. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Now, it's good that we've got you all anxious because we're going to throw a lot at you today, so get ready. A conversation with Malcolm Gladwell, a rapper who's barely out of his teens, and a ghost story. Let's start off with this, though. Julia Louis Dreyfus, one of the great comic actors working today. stop by for a visit.

Here's a question for you. Can I be a cartoonist for the New Yorker? You were once on Seinfeld. It's a pig at a complaint department. Yeah, and he's saying, I wish I was taller. See? That's his complaint. I get it. Do you? Because that's not a normal complaint.

How about if it was something like, I can't find my receipt, my place is a sty. Julia Louis Dreyfus killed on Seinfeld every week as Elaine Benis, and she's still killing as Selena Meyer on Veep. She plays an incompetent vice president surrounded by completely incompetent lackeys, and in the show's fourth season, she suddenly became a ravingly incompetent president of the United States.

Hmm. So I was just in a meeting with one of our political correspondents We were talking about how to cover this insane election. Yeah. And I said, by the way, I'm going to go interview in about a half an hour, Julie Lloyd Dreyfus, and she's amazing. And Veepe. And he got all excited. He said, this is the one thing I've ever seen in my life on television or in movies that it's exactly the way politics plays out behind closed doors.

That people are amoral, crazily ambitious. And you did a lot of research. You talked to chiefs of staff. and office holders and so on. And what were you hearing that began to inform what VEP would be? I think it's what I heard and also what I didn't hear, you know, sort of reading between the lines talking to these people and then also, you know, at the end of the day, they're just like you and me.

I mean, in other words, the parallels between politics and show business are there. And, and. Craven, venal, money-hungry, yeah. Ambitious and. and nasty and a lot of huge amounts of ego. Were the people honest with you? Some people weren't, some people weren't. But you can tell a lot of times.

Okay, so who was honest with you? Well, who was honest with me? I had one woman who's a scheduler for a senator. And she said that she sleeps with her Blackberry next to her head. And she said that proudly. And she said that she keeps when her boss travels, which he does frequently for, you know, around the globe, that she gets on his time zone. So, and she said nobody knows him better than I do. And it was, and she said that sort of with a kind of maniacal look in her face.

Like a 50s office wife in one of those wrong. Yes, she's quite young. This woman was quite young. So it had a nice creepy edge to it. Well, I don't mean that she was like, it wasn't a sexual thing necessarily, but it had a funky vibe to it. But did you get a sense when you were around politicians and people in politics that they believed in something? With certain people I do, yeah. With certain people I do.

Well, I think Joe Biden believes in something very strongly. And what's been your conversations with him about your shared office? Well, let's see. I mean, he confirmed, it was interesting talking to him because I spoke also to Al Gore. And they both sort of said similar things about the, there is a kind of, you know, it's the number two position. There's a reality there that's kind of a bummer. Yeah, that you're waiting for somebody's health to go or you're in the wings the whole time. I don't think anybody who strives or desires or dreams about getting into politics, dreams about being the vice president.

The show is going to resume in late April on HBO. Meanwhile, there's this crazy election going on. As we're sitting here, Donald Trump seems to be pulling ahead and becoming the Republican candidate. If I had told you that a year ago. You beat me to the punch, yeah. Right? You would not have believed it. It would be a joke.

feed put out, did a very smart thing. They went on the collected interviews that Howard Stern has done with Donald Trump about women. And he's going to be the Republican candidate, not necessarily a lock, but he's getting there. How do you compete with reality? Here's the thing. When this show started, it was political satire. And now it feels really like a somber documentary. I don't know what else to say. If you took language that these guys are saying you put it into our script, we would get notes from HBO saying it's too broad. Too much. It's over the top.

Yeah, can't do that. Right. Yeah. No insulting Mexicans and no thinking about sleeping with Princess Diana. Unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. He's pulling ahead.

I just thought I'd mention that. I know. Yeah. Does that going to influence how the show goes? Mm-mm. No. I mean, we tried to, we've created this sort of alternate universe where obviously none of these I mean, your guys look like Thomas Jefferson by comparison.

Maybe I should run as Selena Meyer. Well, and you're not going to tell us if you win or you're going to lose. But what's going to happen to the character of Selena? Does she change? Does she grow? Does she hug? Come on. What the fuck are you talking about?

Never. What are her politics? Her politics. I don't even know what party she belongs. No, you don't know what party she belongs to. Her politics are all about her and staying alive. Her politics are me politics. And she will hold any position if it keeps her in office. Those are her politics. You describe the differences between V, but sometimes there's a wonderful obsession about absolute nonsense. We have a clip here where the staff, which would probably be. talking about, I don't know, higher policy matters of domestic or foreign kind, talks extensively about pancake flipping.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is the pancake brunch set up. General holding area here. Yeah. juices and coffees, hot plates and grittles. Okay, the minute you see bubbles, you flip. No. You flip when you see holes.

Bubbles is too soon. Holes, not bubbles. Okay, I flip out bubbles, but fun fact, there are three kinds of, you flip, of syrup, Boisianberry, maple, and buttermilk. Uh-huh. Buttermilk is not a syrup. Okay, man, what if you said this? Yeah.

Who's aching for some bacon? No. Okay, I can't prep anymore, right? Really? I might vomit on Mike. Yeah. Now, this is a scene that comes right off of C-SPAN in a way. You know, these documentaries, the road to the White House,

and you see them set up some kind of thing for a candidate? Of course, yeah. This happens all the time, yeah. There's no reason to think that it doesn't happen. They do have these conversations. Going from one fucking event to another, can you imagine how exhausting that must be and trying to seem like you're so happy to be there?

Delighted to be there. Yeah. God. I'm so happy I'm not a real politician. So you began in a kind of improv background, in a theater background in college. Yes. And you were in a successful production.

A producer walks backstage, and he or she, I don't know, is from Saturday Night Live. He. And you're off to the races. Yes. Am I wrong and think it's been a pretty charmed career? No, you're not wrong. I mean, it hasn't all been, you know, chocolate and roses. Yeah.

But it has been a lot of fun. and even in retrospect, looking back when it wasn't fun, I guess it sort of was in a weird, bizarre way. Is it what you wanted? When you were doing theater in college, did you think, well, if I could have my absolute druthers, if this could all go well, I could be, and then you thought Merrill Streep or you thought Gilda Radner or what was in your mind in terms of ambition? I wanted to get a job. That was my ambition. I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to be taken seriously. as an actress, and I wanted a gig. And so, yes, my dream has come true. And particularly, I would say now, I really like working in an ensemble,

which I very much feel that V-B is. You were in an ensemble, Saturday Night, but it turned out the ensemble was not a happy family. At all, right. Why not? You went there, you thought this is the best of all possible world. you get there. And the one person you connect with is his most miserable son of a bitch on earth, which is Larry David, who's incredibly unhappy getting none of his sketches on the air. Correct. And you're, what's happening with you? Well, I cried a lot. I was very young, for starters. I was 21. Were you misused or were you not ready? Or what was happening? All of the above. Yeah. I will absolutely take responsibility for a lot of it because I was, um,

very naive. I came in thinking it was an ensemble. We'd all work together to find stuff. You know, I didn't know. I was a college student. I had no idea. I didn't come in with a bag of tricks. Now, the other thing I should mention is that a lot of people are doing drugs, big time drugs. I was, again, so naive. I just thought, you know, oh, that's so weird. That guy's script is, that sketch is like 17 pages long. And at the table read, he's howling, laughing. I wonder why. He seems so energetic. Yeah. And he's sniffling. What's that? Exactly. But anyway, it was kind of funky time. And when you say it was completely male, the ethos was male or just everybody at the writer's table is a guy? All of it. All of it. And it's not like this is 1947, and I don't mean to sound naive, but didn't anybody say this is missing half of human experience? No, people don't, no. That's not how. Maybe that's how people talk here at the New Yorker. Yeah. But not there. No. describe this. In other words, describe the world of Hollywood, why there aren't more women in places of authority, directors, producers, and more of the point studio heads. And yet, this is liberal Hollywood, supposedly.

Isn't this the reality almost in any business, big business, big money-making business? And I'd love to be, I'd love for you to tell me, well, no, it's not the case in, but what is it not the case in? Yeah. And so what's happening? Is anything happening in Hollywood? Is there a louder, more intelligent, more forceful discussion and proactive effort that you sense, or is it just a lot of chatter? I think it's a lot of chatter. And I don't mean to sound discouraging. I mean, I'm pushing back all the time as much as I possibly can. You know, it's been interesting because it's taken, I'm producing on VEP. but getting a credit as a producer in my lifetime has been sometimes I've gotten a lot of pushback on it in a way that I wonder if would be the case if I was a man. And how does the pushback take shape? How does it?

It's a negotiation that is hard. That is hard. That seems like certain parties aren't going to move on. And by the way, I'm not suggesting that HBO is difficult in any way to deal with. That is not the case, but there have been other instances in my life in which, I've produced and there's been a pushback. Anyway, I got my way, so that's good. Julie, thank you.

Are we done? We're done. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. It's fun. Julia Louis Dreyfus, the star and producer of Veep. Season 5 starts next month. I'm David Remnick.

Coming up on the New Yorker Radio Hour, a rapper writes about growing up. In fact, he's just moved out of his mother's house, and he's got to learn to fend for himself. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Let me tell you about living with my mom. I'm gone out of the window when she's gone.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Nightlife editor Matt Tramel is here. Now, Matt, you interviewed a young rapper named Wiki, who I've got to assume is named after the web encyclopedia. Yeah, he did get his name from Wikipedia, his pretty much ungulabel name. But his real name's Patrick Morales.

I first heard his stuff while he was a senior in high school. He went to private day school here in Manhattan and had this really sort of interesting mix. of punk and noise and UK garage and all these kind of sounds that weren't necessarily common in New York hip hop, but that he pulled off really well. And he made a name for himself in high school. Yeah, yeah, he's really, really young. He and his friends came together and formed this group called Letter Racer.

A bunch of kids that, like, rap, make music, play jazz, design clothes, skate, just cause all types of mischief in and around the city. And he just released a solo album called Little Me. So on a pretty frigid day, we headed down to Market Street, right under the Manhattan Bridge. You can see the East River. Yeah, we're in Chinatown. This is the crib. The Latter-Racer headquarters kind of, you know what I mean? But we live here, too.

That's the kitchen. It's pretty regular in there. There's some bugs and stuff. So Wickey is a pretty tiny kid, big mat of hair. He has two missing front teeth, but he wears it well. This is in my room right here. You guys record out of this bedroom? Yeah, we record right here.

Sammy helps me out with recording. He lives with us, too. His apartment was a bit of a flop house for him and his friends. A bunch of art on the walls and junk all over the ground, flip-flops everywhere. How long you've been here, Wic? I've been here, like, coming on a year, about a year. Growing up. Talks a lot about, you know, this sort of transitional moment that he's in growing up,

being from the city and sort of seeing the country touring as an artist and made this really great song about moving out of his mom's apartment. I really, really loved the record in the video, living with my mom. I was a fan of yours for some time, but that video just felt so different for you to do, so fun, so funny. The song is just like a dope song,

and it's something that I think a lot of people your age can relate to. I mean, it's just, like, regular growing up, but it was kind of cool because it was like I was traveling a lot. Like, we would be in Europe and be, like, around the country. I'm on the road I'm driving and flying I don't even know It's wherever the label

Tell me to go Whatever I'm able to get better It's show Yeah I know it live it spit and getting money That I blow Everything you're like in the hotel You're like getting put up somewhere But then when you go back home

It's just like regular Like still trying to sneak around the smoke Like when your mom's like not there You know what I mean? She's like folding clothes for you Just saying you go off into like the tour van You don't necessarily have that these days Yeah, yeah. Now I'm, like, free to, like, chill, but I got to, like, grow up and learn to clean my room.

Yeah, yeah, it's straight off, right? So how far away is your mom's apartment now? Like, do you guys live? Oh, yeah, she lives uptown on the Upper West Side, like 86, so she's not far. I should probably visit her more, but she's still. Yeah, actually, she came out to, when we played in Philly, she came out. Oh, nice. Okay. So it's cool she saw it. We're lucky. People from New York, kids from New York, because I know kids that be out here and they're like, yo, I lost my job. I'm like, I have to go back to Michigan. You know what I mean? Right, right. But like, for us, we're like, oh, yeah, whatever.

And then, like, you just kind of can go back and sleep in your mom's country if you really. You know what I mean? Like, oh, I got to go back to the Upper West Side. Right, right. That's not. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you know what I mean? Yeah.

Something doesn't work out. You can come home. I don't know. She, I mean, she is a little hard of me, but, nah. She would, she would, not. She would definitely hold me down for sure. Yeah. Wicky, you're how old?

22. And you grew up on the Upper West Side. You went to school up there. Like, where did you go to school? 110th? Okay, cool. Cathedral school. And then I went to Brooklyn Friends for high school.

Okay, nice, nice. I know a lot of kids that went to private schools in New York. And it's like one of the strangest, like, demographics of New Yorkers, I would say. Yeah, and it's like Slicky Boy, each other with Madonna's daughter. Like, you never know, you know what I mean? Like, that's the New York shit. Like, that's tight. There's kind of like an equalizing that, like, happens.

You're all still, like, knuckleheads. For sure. The Arnold Palmer video you guys put out, there's, like, Genesis Evans and, like, this rapper. And, like, there's, like, all these kids from, like, all these different little pockets. Yeah, yeah. That kind of get, like, brought together by, like, one thing. We're all just kind of, like, weirdos, I think, honestly. We're all unique.

They're characters, you know what I mean? And it's, like, when I was younger, I always thought you have to be, like, oh, are you into rap? Are you into, like, punk? Are you into this? Like, all these things. But it was cool. But New York. I guess also the internet open that up.

Everyone's kind of into everything. But I realize I don't have to be like the rapper kid or the punk kid. I can be in a punk band and be rapping. You know what I mean? Like kind of just like be me, you know what I'm saying? Whatever I was into. So I definitely came to talk about low me, the mixtape that you put out in December. Yeah.

That was like your sort of first solo wiki project since Rat King really took off. Rat King was about contrast between like noise stuff and rap stuff and you sort of like piercing through all of that. Little Mead just sort of cleared everything up. Yeah, well, I knew I wanted to work on a solo project and then I feel like Rat King I would write more like for like the city or something or for everyone. This was more personal.

I think probably one of the first verses I wrote for that was like on Little Me the track where I'm like, my wife, tell me you got to pray before my flight, do it for a sake and for a sight, you know what I mean? I remember sight. Do it just to make it through the night. I'm a size, my eyes, and try to check. They want my fingers in it at this height.

I'm bigger because I'm bright. Words me volume's, I'm riddling it right. Y'all can't even fiddle with the mic. Hat, the kids, days I don't need riddle in the right. Kid and I'm gonna get them when it's right. Gotta wait for the right time. I remember writing that when my girls is like a sleep on the couch. And then like I remember talking to sport and being like,

yo, I need a beat for this. It's a great wide world. It's just little world. You get into it on the record, but what does that title mean to? Yeah, it's just like realizing like the world's bigger than the city kind of and like growing up a bit and it's like, but growing up but then realizing I'm still young, you know what I mean? Like, and that's part of growing up being able to call yourself immature. You know what I'm saying? Like it's just little me like take it for what it is and like but then kind of like having pride behind it.

We don't must have just seen smoke blind so you sit sitting type of stool thinking who really run the city that's me still getting here with the city. is doing this shit that we need. I don't get it, man. Try to do me till I'm dead it, man. Always was a little kid, and I will literally do anything, plenty of music, get ahead of that weed. In the legs, just a liquor for free shit,

but my liver yelling, what you're trying to kill me? When I'm trying to kill y'all. Patrick Morales, the artist known as Wiki, talking with the New Yorkers Matt Tremel. You can stream Wiki's album by going to New Yorkeradio.org. He's on tour this spring. Malcolm Gladwell probably needs no introduction. He's the author of The Tipping Point and Outliers in other books, most recently David and Goliath.

He has an entirely unique approach to journalism that's informed by sociology, psychology, social psychology, and at this point, there's a legion of Gladwell imitators on the shelves. Recently, he turned his attention to a truly awful subject, the rise in school shootings in America. He wrote a piece called Thresholds of Violence and talked about the issue with the New Yorkers, Dorothy Wickenden. There was this case of a kid named John Ladoo in a little town about an hour south of Minneapolis, who is caught by police, by surest chance. The police happened upon him in his rented storage locker, where they find all of the ingredients for explosives.

And they take him in to the police station. And he confesses that he was planning to essentially blow up his high school to create the biggest school massacre ever. And he's not mentally ill. He's not abused, wasn't abused or traumatized or bullied. He is an honor roll student. He's on the spectrum. He's a kid with what we used to call Asperger's.

But he's in no way, like this sort of speaks volumes. His parents are incredibly alarmed. because he's in police custody and they don't realize that, and the cops haven't called them. And the reason they're alarmed is it's past 9 o'clock, and he's never out past 9 o'clock. You know, he's that kind of dutiful a child. And they had no idea he was compiling weapons and bomb making materials? They knew that he made bombs, but then... And that didn't cause alarms?

But wait a minute. That's not normal behavior? It's totally normal behavior. It is normal behavior. Kids had been making little bombs. He made little bombs, not big bombs. bombs. Kids have been playing with chemistry sets and making bombs

for as long as there have been chemistry sets. I can name to you editors of the New Yorker and you can probably guess who made bombs as kids. This is a normal thing for adolescents to do to experiment with explosives. You know, there's, especially adolescent boys. So his parents really thought he was completely normal. There was no problem. Thought he was a science geek, which is what

he is. He was, in fact, in what comes clear in his confession, is that his interest in killing other people is minimal. He has barely even thought about that. So what motivates him? And he also, by the way, did differentiate himself very clearly from Adam Lanza. He said, I am not Adam Lanza. Yeah, no, no, no. Well, he wasn't, to my mind, it's unclear whether he even would have gone through with it had he not been caught. He got obsessed with the technical question of what it would take to blow up a school successfully. And he was particularly obsessed with Columbine.

And as he points out, Columbine is a failure. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold intended to blow up their school in Littleton, Colorado, and Columbine High School and failed. And that's why they started shooting everyone, right? So in his purely kind of narrow, obsessive way, he's just trying to solve the technical problem that has bedeviled his predecessors. Could you talk a little bit about the sociologist you wrote about who studied riot behavior as a form of social contagion. And you apply his theories to the evolution

of school shootings. What do they have in common? A riot is, builds among a number of people in one time and place. These are, these are the acts almost always of solitary geeks, as you say, who are working through their own obsessions. How do you compare those two phenomena? Yeah. Mark Granavetter is the name of this, one of the great, if not the greatest American sociologists of the last 50 years. And he had a theory about riots, which is the mistake when you look at a riot is to assume that every rider has the same set of motivations and that every rider is identical. Imagine we've got one person who's a bit of a radical, and he's really upset about something

and he throws a rock through a window. He doesn't need anyone else around to do that first. He's willing to act on his own as the first guy. He has, what Grandin would say, a threshold of zero. He requires no other person to go before him to do a radical act. Someone else might watch this and say, oh, I'm going to join in. That person would never have acted if they were the first, but they'll act if someone else goes first.

They have a threshold of one. Then there's someone else who's a little more conservative. They would never be the first in. They would never even be the second in. But they would be the third in threshold of three. And he goes all the way up. If you have a ride of 100 people, you could hypothetically have a group of 100 people.

hundred people, each of whom had a different threshold ranging from zero to 99. The 99th person in is my mother, right? She's the person. My mother would not be the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, but if absolutely every one of her cronies from church were rioting, she might riot. Have you told her that? I don't think she'd be happy to hear that at all. No, well, actually, my mother would probably say she was in the 70s. But, but, um, but, um, but, um, But that's a really very different way of understanding a riot. So when I read that, I thought, oh, this is really interesting because we see the same thing with school shootings. How so? That's what I wanted to pin you down.

Like take one of these school shooters. Where do they fit in this paradigm? So John Ladue, when we compare John Ladue, the kid I was writing about last year, to the kids who was doing school shootings in the early 90s, it's night and day. The first, if you take a look at the list of the first six major school shootings in this kind, or the one's leading up to Columbine, what you see are kids with profound psychosis, kids who had the most brutal childhoods imaginable. I mean, you just cannot imagine, you know, how bad they're, or kids who are fit the clinical definition of psychopathology, psychopaths. Eric Harris is a textbook psychopath.

I mean, there is nothing normal about that kid. So in the beginning, you see these kind of florid indices of pathology. But it's how we get to John Ladoo. So he's like number three who would be joining the ride. It's not a perfect, you know, you can't do the perfect sequence like Veneveter has. But I think you can observe in a very general way over time the fact that the longer this phenomenon persists, the more likely it is for someone. who is relatively normal to participate. You know, because it's interesting.

And Tipping Point all those years ago, you began sort of talking about some of these ideas, and the subtitle of that book was how little things make a big difference. So it made me wonder whether there's a way, when you're looking at a mass psychosis like this, that repeats itself over and over again over time, and you begins to have this pattern. Is there a way that you can apply the tipping point

to correcting social epidemics? This one is weird. So, for example, there has been a school of thought with respect to school shootings for some time that says, the problem is the press glamorizes these kids. If we stopped glamorizing them, we stopped writing about the perpetrators, we stopped making a big fuss about them, we would diffuse the contagion. I used to believe that. Now, I think it's nonsense.

And the reason it's nonsense is it's a pre-indexamination. internet age notion of the media's influence. These days, these kids aren't, they're not reading the New York Times about the previous school shooter and getting clues or watching the 6 o'clock news and getting clues. They are participating in a subculture, which is sustained by the shooters themselves. They are going on YouTube and finding the relevant videos. They are reading the online journals of so-and-so. They have their own unbelievably rich, exhaustive.

a library of cultural materials, which they are drawing from to sustain this epidemic. That's why I say it's out of our – I don't know what you did. Do you shut down the internet? I don't know. I mean, this is why I have run out of possible means of remediating this epidemic. How big a problem is the availability of guns? This is such a huge part of our political debate. Well, you know, those who say that you can solve this problem with gun control are engaging in a fantasy. Can you prevent some cases of this by locking up all the guns? Sure. Is that politically possible in the near term in the United States? No. My problem with the gun control argument is that it so grossly simplifies what's going on here that this is,

that this is, you know, we had tons and tons of guns in this country and no school shootings for a long time. So school shootings are not a necessary or inevitable consequence of having lots of guns. What we're looking at here is a powerful, contagious, adolescent cultural pathology that has used the availability of guns to extend its reach. But, you know, there have been school shootings in Germany and Norway and Canada and places. where there aren't a lot of guns. So I don't know. And if you look at the cases of these kids, in many of these cases, they got access to guns that would still have been available even in the presence of much more draconian gun control measures. They're just taking their parents' guns. Now, you know, how do you, or their neighbor's guns, or their... Or they're building bombs with

homemade materials of... Yeah, it doesn't solve the, you know, you and I can go online and buy all the materials we need to make a bomb that can do serious damage. So I, you know, It just seems to me people are looking for an easy solution here. Now, let me say one crucial thing here. This should in no way undermine the importance of gun control. There, that's what I'm waiting for you to say. This is a gun control can solve the much bigger problem of the kind of unpremeditated shootings done in the heat of passion or drunkenness or drug use that claim the lives of tens of thousands of Americans every year.

That's the reason to ban guns. School shootings are a wholly separate and more complex phenomenon. Let's not muddy the waters by trying to extend an incredibly powerful and important social initiative to this specific difficult issue of school shootings. So what do you say then to mothers and fathers of teenage boys who might be interested in building little bombs or who have an obsession with guns? That too is a very common phenomenon. Is there nothing to do to alleviate the contagion to bring it down, bring it back? Well, I do think that we should explore ways of making experimentation with bombs and guns socially safe. So instead of stopping it, you should do the opposite.

In other words, you reacted with alarm when I talked about how adolescent boys like, to make bombs. I have two girls. Yes, that's right. But our response should be the opposite. It should be like, this is a phase that many adolescent boys go through. They're genuinely and legitimately fascinated with these.

And by the way, the people who built, played with their chemistry sets and blew things up as children, many of them went on to be... Great chemists. Great chemists. They, you know, they contributed to some of the greatest scientific successes of the 20th century. So, you know, this impulse can be channeled

very positive directions. Let's do that as opposed to denying that it exists. I will also say that, you know, if you were a 17-year-old in the United States, anywhere from, you know, the First World War through to the end of the draft in the early 70s, your desire to play with guns as an adolescent was satisfied when you got drafted. And that ended. And I'm not, I wonder whether this is in a kind of unintended consequence of the end of compulsory military service. Interesting. Thank you so much, Malcolm. Thank you. Malcolm Gladwell talking with Dorothy Wickenden.

Dorothy hosts our podcast Politics and More, talking every week with correspondence from the magazine, about what's happening in politics. You can find it on iTunes or wherever you get podcasts and at new yorkerradio.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Next week on the program, Nate Silver, the statistics guru who runs blog 538,

joins me to look at the rise of Donald Trump and the most lunatic presidential campaign in memory. I hope you'll join us for that. Now, I tend to be a pretty skeptical person. That's what journalists are all about. So I'm kind of amazed by how many people have a ghost story that they absolutely swear by. If the story didn't happen to them,

it happened to someone they know and trust. So we're going to close the show today with a story that, well, the reporting, let's just say, challenge the fact-checking department. And I can't absolutely swear that it's true. All the same, here's the New Yorker's Becky Cooper. I got this email from a man named David Siegel. He's a friend of a friend, and he said he had a story for me.

So I decided to meet him. Hi. I'm David. I'm Becky. Nice to meet you. Come in. He said it's going to sound crazy, but I was house sitting for a friend. a friend of mine. And there were these noises. And I couldn't quite figure out what they were,

but they were getting louder. It sounded like something was stuck in the chimney. It sounded like... I don't know if I can imitate this noise, but it was like, and the noises get so loud that we have to sleep with earplugs in. I mean, I can't even tell you how loud this noise was. And he says, you know, at some point, it got to be so bad that we called the friend whose house we're sitting. My name is Joe Hamilton. We bought this house in 1994. And we said, Joe, you know, we don't know what's going on. We think there's something stuck in the chimney.

But there are these noises that you can't ignore. I just sort of laughed and said, oh, you know, guys, it's an old house. It creaks, it moans. And that's probably what you're feeling. You're just not used to it. And David was absolutely, nope, nope, something's going on, something's going on. He tells her it's more than just noises. These strange things start happening in the house.

My daughter was staying in this room. and this door would just close by itself. By itself. It was too weird. And what happened all the time. He tells her there's one night when the babysitter comes to the house, and she says, man, the upstairs tenants are really loud tonight. And when she leaves, David and his husband look at each other

because there aren't any upstairs tenants. Finally, Joe tells him he might not be completely crazy, that the house might have a ghost and not just any ghost. She said, well, did I ever tell you that this was near the property where Alexander Hamilton died? I told him the story of the previous owner who had sold me the house and said that she felt that Alexander Hamilton's ghost lived here. How are you? I'm fine. You know what? I need both hands for this moment. I just want to put having guests and I want to just put some spaghetti in this hot water. Could you mind holding for a second?

No, that's fine. That's Irene Connors. She moved out of that house in 1994, and she sold the place to Joe. I wanted to get the ghost story from someone who reportedly had actually seen the ghost. I remember three trousers, the slim man wearing a white powdered wig, wearing a very... So what she says, she was washing the sink here, and I don't know when this happened. And here's where the stove now is. Yeah, exactly, where the sink was. And she said she saw his face, like right there. I wasn't concerned. He wasn't a frightening thing.

figure. I don't want to make up anything, but he simply was there. So Irene does believe in the ghost, but Joe Hamilton, the one who bought the house from Irene Connors, her last name is Hamilton, but she's not actually related to Alexander Hamilton, is not so sure. I said, do I need to worry or wonder about this? And we were just starting the renovation. And she said, just lay out your plans for him. Like, so he can see him. It's like, and he won't bother you at all. And so that's what we did. and we left the plans out for a long time. And I don't think he ever bothered us.

I'm either terribly insensitive and not aware of these things. But he never bothered us. I have never believed in ghosts. I've never experienced ghosts before. And this was the first time I ever thought maybe there is a spirit in this house. If you know anything about Alexander Hamilton, you probably know that he died in a duel and that the duel took place in New Jersey. He survived the duel, at least for a while.

and was taken across the Hudson River to his friend's house, William Byard, in the West Village of Manhattan. There's a plaque at 82 Jane Street that says basically, this is the site where Alexander Hamilton died. The house we're talking about, though, is 71 Jane Street. 71 Jane Street is across the street, and a few houses east from the plaque. But the word on Jane Street is that the plaque might be wrong. So I went to solve this bit of the mystery in the map division of the New York Public Library. The map division room? The map division.

Oh, I see. Yes. Thank you very much. Kate Cordes showed me around and showed me this old map from 1767. This is what will eventually become the West Village, Greenwich Village. There are only a few major landowners

over here at this time. The library has a tool that overlays the old New York City map from the 1700s over today's grid. So this is the NYPL map war group. I could see the streets of today's Manhattan, 14th Street. Horatio, Jane. And you can move the slider here.

It goes back and forth. And then she slid the transparency bar of the old map. It appeared like a ghostly image of the city's streets. There's Bayard's estate. And suddenly it was clear. The shadow of Bayard's house, a darker splotch than the rest of the farmland around it, was a block further north than where the plaque now is.

And the midway point between the plaque and Byard's house, the house remember where Hamilton died, is 71 Jane Street, which is where David heard the sounds. How does a bastard, orphaned, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spotting the Caribbean by Providence and Poverist and Squammer, grow up to be a hero and a Scot. Joe Hamilton, my husband and I have been talking about this a lot. Why did he maybe appear in this house?

And we think part of the reason was because there's so. much publicity around the show that he's actually finding his legacy. There's a musical on Broadway now called Hamilton, which tells his story. You've probably heard of it. It just won the Grammy for Best Musical Theater album of the year. Middle school kids can quote the lyrics. David thinks maybe it wrestled up the ghost. I'm sure he has received more press inches in the last year than he received probably in the last 200 years.

David decided to have a sance to communicate with the ghost of Alexander Hamilton, and he invited me to come. So you stayed here for two months, and then why all of a sudden have you decided to invite a medium? Well, I thought that, I mean, this story is sort of nuts. Let's admit that. The story is nuts. But I had been introduced to a medium through a mutual business colleague, but I've never seen her at work. Hi. I'm Littney.

Hi, Becky. Nice to meet you. So she is standing in the entrance and we're all gathered around her. And she wants to go through the house and feel if she feels the presence. And so we walk up to the third floor, which is the floor where his daughter had stayed and she walks in. Do you want to walk around yourself? No, it's fine. She explores a room and it's clear she feels something. This is where the spirit kind of maybe was or searching around.

Let me go in the other rooms just to compare. We're now walking into the other bedroom that has the fireplace. No, no. That room. That place. That room. This is a small child that's here. So her first sense of the spirit in the house is that it's not Alexander,

that it's a child. But whatever it is, she leaves the room all of a sudden. She can't stand to be in it because she says the energy is too strong. So we walk back down with her and she takes out her Ouija board. And she puts it down, and we all gather around her. Joe's on a seat and David's on the couch next to her. And I'm sitting sort of at the foot of the couch on the floor next to her. And she's holding her Ouija board, which has a tiger painted on it,

and numbers and letters and then like one yes area. And she starts trying to communicate with this spirit. Litney and David's hands are moving around in circles on the board, counterclockwise pretty quickly across the alphabet. I am here and I would like to help. Okay, can you bring that spirit that's in this house willingly on here? I am scared. Can you feel the energy here?

Yes. Despite my skepticism, Litney creates a sense of presence in the room. And the planchette of her board slides back and forth over the letters on it, and she says, can you tell me your name? Do you remember your name? P.H. I. Philip?

David's eyes are just getting bigger and bigger and more intense as this is happening because that's the name of Alexander Hamilton's son. What happened to you, Philip? I did. Is this where you lived? Not so sure, right? You miss your mother.

Do you know your mother's name? E. L. I. E. L. I. Z. A. Eliza. That's the name of Alexander Hamilton's wife, Philip's mom. Can you look past the... room where you were little? Can you keep looking? Don't be scared. They're not there. Okay.

Can we ask them to come closer? You see someone? Can you see your mother there? Can you leave the house? And that was it. The ghost was gone. That's usually how it works. Basically, what happened to me, my sense was this was a little baby boy and he died. He died. Sometimes when people die, they leave their bodies fast and they don't know where they are. They're just confused. They just don't know if they're still here or they're not here, and they get kind of stuck. It seemed like both Joe and David believed Litney, even if she didn't get all of her facts right. Hamilton did have a son named Philip, two, actually.

The older one also died in a duel. The other one, Philip number two, didn't die as a young child, and he didn't die in that house. But he was taken as a baby into the room by his mother to give his father a kiss goodbye on his deathbed. As long as we're entertaining the possibility of ghosts, I suppose it's possible then that a spirit might forget its age and go back to a house where such a meaningful event happened and then get stuck. Or maybe this is New York City and this is something that happened 200 years ago and there are hundreds of people who have lived and died on that block since then,

and maybe one of them was named Philip, and maybe they got lost. But then there's Irene. She's the original owner who believes she was visited by the ghost of Alexander. She wasn't at the seance, but I told her about it, and she wasn't having any of it. So do you believe that the spirit or the presence of Alexander Hamilton was in your house that night? Yes, no question. He was too real. I think that I believe there are many things in this life that we can't say. I think it's another word.

I do believe that when we leave this life. In Hamilton the musical, there's a song about the thing people leave behind when they die, their story. I mean, there's lines that ring so true with me. Who lives, who dies, who tells her story. Let me tell you what I wish I'd known when I was young and dreamed of glory. You have no control. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? I can't help but think about that all the time.

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? I mean, isn't that what this is really about? Even us just sitting here? Maybe as long as we're telling Hamilton's story, he's somewhere looking over our shoulder, hoping that we get it right. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? Every other founding father's story

gets told. Every other founding father gets to grow old. Becky Cooper is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. And that wraps up the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for being here with us. I hope you'll join us again next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Yards. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riann and Corby, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sharon Meshih, Sarah Nix, Paul Schneider, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Becky Cooper, Rick Kwan, and Sarah Lilly. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.