Pushkin Industries is an American publisher of podcasts and audiobooks. It was co-founded in 2018 by Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg. [1] [2] [3] As of 2021, it hosts over 25 podcasts. [1]
The company was co-founded in 2018 by Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg, based on an idea by Weisberg. [1] The two worked together on Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History at Panoply Media and after Panoply exited the medium, the two wanted to do more projects together and started Pushkin. [2]
In 2019, Tim Harford launched his podcast Cautionary Tales on the network. [4] [5] That same year, Pushkin began producing audiobooks, beginning with Gladwell's Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know .
Among other books, it published Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, co-written by Gladwell and based on interviews with the musician Paul Simon. [1] Gladwell's The Bomber Mafia was written and conceived of as an audio production with sound effects and music. Only after the script was complete was a book produced. [2]
Pushkin Industries won "Podcast Network of the Year" at the 2021 Adweek Podcast Awards. [6]
In July 2022, Pushkin Industries agreed to buy the podcast studio Transmitter Media, marking the company's first acquisition. [7]
In September 2023, Pushkin laid off 17 employees, comprising more than 30% of its staff. As part of the reorganization, former Transmitter owner Gretta Cohn became CEO, while Weisberg took the title of executive chair. The change came amid significant layoffs in the podcast industry, including at Spotify and Sony. [8] In November 2023, the company's producers and staff voted to unionize and joined Writers Guild of America, East. [9]
As of 2024 [update] , the company's most popular podcasts include Gladwell's Revisionist History; Harford's Cautionary Tales; The Happiness Lab, hosted by Laurie R. Santos; and Against the Rules with Michael Lewis. [10]
Slate is an online magazine that covers current affairs, politics, and culture in the United States. It was created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. In 2004, it was purchased by The Washington Post Company, and since 2008 has been managed by The Slate Group, an online publishing entity created by Graham Holdings. Slate is based in New York City, with an additional office in Washington, D.C.
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell is a Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has published seven books. He is also the host of the podcast Revisionist History and co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries.
Jacob Weisberg is an American political journalist, who served as editor-in-chief of The Slate Group, a division of Graham Holdings Company. In September 2018, he left Slate to co-found Pushkin Industries, an audio content company, with Malcolm Gladwell. Weisberg was also a Newsweek columnist. He served as the editor of Slate magazine for six years before stepping down in June 2008. He is the son of Lois Weisberg, a Chicago social activist and municipal commissioner.
Lois Weisberg was the first Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of Chicago, from 1989 until January 2011.
Henry Madison "Hank" Rowan Jr. was an American engineer, businessman, and philanthropist.
Timothy Douglas Harford is an English economic journalist who lives in Oxford. Harford is the author of four economics books and writes his long-running Financial Times column, The Undercover Economist, syndicated in Slate magazine, which explores the economic ideas behind everyday experiences. His column in the Financial Times, Since You Asked, ran between 2011 and 2014 and offered a sceptical look at the news of the week.
Gretta Cohn is an American media executive and cellist who is CEO of the podcast network Pushkin Industries.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is the debut book by Malcolm Gladwell, first published by Little, Brown in 2000. Gladwell defines a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states: "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do." The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the steep drop in New York City's crime rate after 1990.
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Laurie Renee Santos is an American cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale University. She is the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory, Director of Yale's Canine Cognition Lab, and former Head of Yale's Silliman College. She has been a featured TED speaker and has been listed in Popular Science as one of their "Brilliant Ten" young scientists in 2007 as well as in Time magazine as a "Leading Campus Celebrity" in 2013.
Megaphone is a Software as a service (SaaS) business owned by Spotify. The company provides software for podcast hosting and monetization as well as an ad network to generate additional revenue for podcast publishers. It was formerly an audio content producer started by The Slate Group as Panoply Media, and later shifted to focusing solely on software for monetizing, measuring and distributing podcasts of media companies and independent producers.
Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist and the host and executive producer of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans.
Revisionist History is a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell produced by Gladwell's company Pushkin Industries. It began in 2016 and, as of 2024, has aired nine seasons.
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Andy Bowers is an American radio journalist and podcaster, and is the co-founder and chief content officer of Panoply Media, a podcasting production and services company owned by The Slate Group. After working as a White House and foreign correspondent for NPR during the 1990s, Bowers joined Slate in 2003, and founded the magazine's podcasts in 2005. The growth of the Slate podcasting network led the magazine's parent company to create Panoply in 2015.
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know is a nonfiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on September 10, 2019. The audiobook version of the book follows Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast-style structure, using Gladwell's narration, interviews, sound bites, and the theme song "Hell You Talmbout".
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War is a 2021 book by Malcolm Gladwell that examines the US Bomber Mafia of World War II, which advocated precision aerial bombing as a means to win a war. Gladwell stated the audiobook for The Bomber Mafia came about as an expansion of material from his podcast Revisionist History, and that the print book originated from the audiobook. The book follows the Bomber Mafia, especially Major General Haywood S. Hansell, and the development of a high-altitude precision aerial bombardment strategy in World War II as a means to limit casualties. After difficulties in applying the Bomber Mafia's theoretical strategy, Major General Hansell was replaced by Major General Curtis LeMay, who utilized tactical changes such as attacking Japanese population centers with napalm to ensure a Japanese surrender. Upon release, The Bomber Mafia was met with mixed reviews, with reviewers praising its audiobook version but criticizing the book for a lack of detail and factual accuracy.
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Cautionary Tales is a podcast produced by Pushkin Industries and hosted by economic journalist Tim Harford. Each episode presents a story of historical failure and analyzes it for patterns and lessons useful in the current day.