Podcast Roundup Week #4

So, even though classes DID start this week, I'm basically just trying to learn students' names and make sure they have read the syllabus, so there's still a lot of podcast listening.  This week it was 51 episodes plus three I deleted within five minutes because there's not much interesting to me about non-religious, but kind of religious orders in the Middle Ages, but maybe that's your sort of thing. 

Anyway, here are some thoughts.

I've written about how much I love The Adventure Zone before.  Three brothers and their father play a role-playing game and hilarity ensues. Seriously, this podcast is side-splittingly funny and their family dynamic is charming. They just finished Season One of a giant arc and now they are doing short, experimental arcs to see who will be their new game master and what role-playing game they will play. If you don't want to listen to all seventy episodes of their first foray (playing Dungeons and Dragons), this could be your entry point to all the comedy.  I would heartily recommend the two episodes of the Amnesty arc using the Monster of the Week RPG. You need to know nothing about role-playing games to enjoy this, I promise. 

And on a much more somber note, NPR just did a series on maternal mortality rates in the United States and Code Switch had a very sobering episode called "This Racism is Killing Me Inside" about how everyday slights caused by discrimination have terrible health outcomes. Constant low levels of stress hormones caused by these tiny, reoccurring events "cause a lot of different health vulnerabilities, and it increases your susceptibility to infection but also the early onset of chronic diseases, in particular - hypertension, diabetes, morbid obesity."  This episode looks at one black mother who died very shortly after her baby was born, after her postpartum concerns were ignored repeatedly by doctors.  I found this episode almost too hard to listen to and it was very eye-opening.  I'm considering adding a unit to one of my classes on race and health.