Podcast Roundup Week #16

This week I listened to 36 episodes. I'm not going to complain about the weather again, but the icy rain kept me indoors a lot.

When I was in grad school, an assignment in our introduction to qualitative methods class was to interview someone, although the assignment didn't specific what the topic of the interview should be. One of my classmates interviewed everyone she talked to about food because food is universal and food is personal. She got great results and I think she is wasted in political science and should be an anthropologist, but what do I know?  Anyway.

Food is something I think about a lot, but don't talk about much. My husband hates the process of eating, he hates food, and his relationship with food is not the same as mine. We talk as little as possible about food because it inevitably ends up with someone angry or crying. So I sometimes find myself skipping through episodes The Sporkful because it's too much joy about something that is so fraught in my life. I'm glad that other people can have awesome experiences with food and talking about food, but I just can't bear to listen to it.

But the episode "Your Mom's Food, Part.2: Midwest Meets Masala" really touched me. A woman marries a man from a different culture than her own Midwestern culture and it's changed her relationship with food and her relationship with her parents.  The woman starts crying when she thinks about how it's her job to feed her son and if her son refused her food it would be heartbreaking and I was crying thinking about all the times food I've made has been refused and it does feel terrible. It's like I'm not good enough, even though it has nothing to do with me personally. And the mom talking about how she raised her daughter to be her own person and go off and live her own life, but that it's hard when that life isn't how she imagined it also made me cry. So, basically, I really resonated with everything in this episode.  Maybe I need to give The Sporkful another chance to win me over.

Nate DiMeo tells the best stories. That is all. He could give a master class in taking something small, possibly uninteresting, and spinning it into an enthralling tale no one could resist listening to.  The Memory Palace has episodes that are rarely longer than fifteen minutes, but stick with me forever. I still talk about "Gallery 742," years after I first listened to it, an episode about a dressing room of a Gilded Age woman - a dressing room I've never seen and a woman I'd never heard of before listening to the episode.

The recent episodes "Junk Room" brilliantly ties in the political turmoil of 2018 with the political turmoil of the past in a loving portrayal and history of Statuary Hall.  It's everything I aspire to be as a writer, but will never quite get to. 

Also, Code Switch had a great introduction to racially segregated housing ("Location! Location! Location!") that I might use next semester in my housing unit. That's definitely more of a note for me than for you, dear reader.  Although if you don't know what redlining is or why environmental catastrophes hit communities of color harder than others, it might be worth your time to listen.