This Should Scare Us! - Malcolm Gladwell & Mitch Landrieu

In a wide-ranging, unguarded conversation, Malcolm Gladwell and former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu use the city itself as a lens to examine America’s deeper fractures. What begins as a meditation on why New Orleans remains stubbornly, almost defiantly distinctive—resisting the cultural flattening seen in cities like Austin and Nashville—quickly expands into a larger argument: culture, not capital, is what holds societies together. Music, food, sport, and place are not luxuries, they argue, but the glue that sustains democracy when institutions falter. In New Orleans, joy and pain live side by side, producing a civic soul that cannot be replicated or scaled without losing its truth.

From there, the conversation turns darker and more urgent. Landrieu warns that the United States is living through one of the most dangerous moments in its history—not because of disagreement, but because of a growing comfort with autocracy and a collapsing ability to talk across difference. Gladwell probes whether America’s aging population, economic anxiety, and nostalgia for an imagined past are fueling fear rather than curiosity about the future. Together, they trace how trauma—from Katrina to 9/11 to economic precarity—has eroded trust, and why art, culture, and local community may be the last remaining pathways back to common ground. The message is unsettling but clear: democracies do not collapse all at once; they wither when people stop listening to one another, and when culture is treated as expendable rather than essential.

This episode is part of the ongoing conversations hosted by Baldwin & Co., a Black-owned bookstore, café, and cultural institution based in New Orleans. Baldwin & Co. exists at the intersection of literature, ideas, and community—creating space for rigorous dialogue, storytelling, and intellectual exchange.

Through author talks, podcasts, live events, and community programming, Baldwin & Co. amplifies voices shaping how we understand culture, history, politics, faith, and the future.

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