How To Academy: Malcolm Gladwell with Valerie Jarrett

This event is presented by How To Academy, in partnership with WBEZ, Chicago's flagship NPR station. About the Event: Malcolm Gladwell has spent his career finding the hidden logic beneath familiar assumptions. Here, he turns that method on the question America keeps failing to answer: Why does the United States (wealthier, more educated, and more technologically advanced than almost any comparable nation) have higher rates of lethal violence than all of them? The paradox is real, and Gladwell takes it seriously. Through a series of stories (a young gunshot victim in Washington D.C.; a seventeenth-century English knight whose legal troubles turn out to matter to modern American law; a professor in Alabama with a terrible secret; a German prison so unlike anything in the American system it reads almost like fiction), Gladwell argues that America invented its own crisis, and has been telling itself the wrong story about it ever since. What emerges is not a simple argument about guns or politics but something stranger and more troubling: a portrait of a country that understands almost nothing about why it keeps killing itself. Urgent, unsettling, and impossible to ignore, this is an unmissable chance to hear from one of the most original minds in nonfiction. Each ticket includes your choice of a pre-signed physical copy or an audiobook edition of The American Way of Killing. Physical pre-signed copies of The American Way of Killing will be available for pickup at the event. About the Author: Malcolm Gladwell is the author of eight New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, The Bomber Mafia, and Revenge of the Tipping Point. He is also the cofounder of Pushkin Industries, an audio-content company that produces Revisionist History, among other podcasts and audiobooks. He was born in England, raised in Canada, and lives outside New York with his family and a cat named Biggie Smalls. About the Interlocutor: The Honorable Valerie Jarrett is Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board of directors of The Obama Foundation where she is overseeing the creation of a new world class cultural and civic institution on Chicago’s south side, and the Foundation’s programs that inspire, empower, and connect people to change their world. Ms. Jarrett was the Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama from 2009-2017, making her the longest serving senior advisor to a president in history. She oversaw the Offices of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs and Chaired the White House Council on Women and Girls. She served as the Chief Executive Officer of The Habitat Company. Prior to joining Habitat, Ms. Jarrett was the Commissioner of Planning and Development for the city of Chicago, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Ms. Jarrett received her B.A. from Stanford University and her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School.