A Utopia

Looking at the long Korean history, most dynasties had the status system. In the society with the status system, the birth determined one’s occupation, and the door to become high-ranking officials was opened only to the person who is of a noble birth. However, as there were many people of talent among lowly people who is likely to contribute a lot to a nation, highly praised kings tried to alleviate the barrier between the status and tried hard to open offices according to their talents, not their births. Eventually, the status system was abolished now, and it’s hard to find other nations with caste system except for India. Nonetheless, we are living in a new hierarchy society, and people can’t rise from humble family anymore. If born poor, he or she can’t catch up the with the rich regardless of how hard he or she tried. What Malcolm Gladwell tried to convey through his 4 th  podcast ‘Carlos Doesn’t Remember’ also reflects these grim actualities. He said that civilized...

One honorable person once said, “Power comes with responsibility”. As Malcolm Gladwell has a great influence on the public as a famous journalist and writer, I think he should have been more responsible about what he says at the podcast. To be frank, I was quite disappointed by how biased and illogical Gladwell was with his talk about the relationship between dining and financial aids of Vassar and Bowdoin. Gladwell kept claiming that students who can afford full tuition should choose to go to Vassar rather than Bowdoin because Vassar is offering more financial aid to students, while Bowdoin is using all the money for school amenities and their fabulous dining. Listening to such podcast, I was expecting him to explain about the FA systems of Bowdoin, which he didn’t mention about. Thinking he is too biased, I searched about the FA systems of Bowdoin, and it took less than 5 minutes to find out that Bowdoin is a no loan school that offers need-blind admission with full-need. Cons...

In modern globalized society, most of the people are under the influence of others, though others didn’t intend to affect one another. In the podcast ‘Revisionist History episode 3: The Big Man Can’t Shoot’, Malcolm Gladwell mentions Wilt Chamberlin, one of the renowned basketball player as an example of who made a stupid choice because of other’s eyes. Wilt Chamberlin was perfect basketball player except for one defect that he was poor at shoot free throws. In 1962, he could fix his only flaw by making his shots to underhand shots, which guaranteed the much higher rate of success and made him the basketball legend. However, he switched his shooting style back again, marring his splendid career; it was because others he was aware of the way others are looking at him. He renounced to be excellent because people remarked that underhand shot seems like a granny and looks silly, and there were no many basketball players who use underhand shots. It’s about the ...

In the podcast 'Revisionist History Episode 1: The Lady Vanishes', Malcolm Gladwell talks about ‘moral licensing’.  Moral licensing, what I've never heard of before listening to this podcast, is the phrase explaining the phenomenon that the good deed is always followed by the   misdeed,   because people use their good behavior as a permission to do something wrong. During the talk, he mentioned 19th-century female painter Elizabeth Thompson and 21st-century Australian PM Julia Gillard to demonstrate the moral licensing. Though they were renowned for their work at first, they got to encounter the contempt and fierce attack of misogyny. He also mentioned Barack Obama and Donald Trump (though their name was not directly mentioned, everyone can easily infer that) as an example of moral licensing, saying their good deed -that they’ve voted for the first US black president- was followed by their misdeed –voting for the president with extreme nationalism. The first imp...