Revisionist History

For 30 years, US News & World Report has been using a secret formula to rank the best colleges and universities in the United States. As a public service to our listeners, we hack the algorithm and discover the dirty little secret of the rankings game.

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In the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler granted a rare interview to the American journalist Dorothy Thompson. When Hitler later came to power, and prepared to stage the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Thompson’s warning about the man she’d met would frame the central debate over the games: Should we go?

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Did Malcolm Gladwell blow it in his bestselling book Outliers? What if all he did was write a primer for neurotic helicopter parents? To find out, Revisionist History descends on the University of Pennsylvania to run a roomful of eager students through a mysterious experiment, complete with Sharpies, huge white stickers, and a calculator. It does not end well.

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Charles Sherrill was everything a gentleman of his generation was supposed to be: rich, handsome, charming, Ivy-Leagued. He was impossibly well connected and extravagantly mustachioed. He was also the person who, as much as anything, decided whether American athletes would participate in the 1936 Olympics. Faced with one of the great moral dilemmas of the day, America needed the wisdom of Solomon. Instead, it got the wisdom of Sherrill.

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