Podcast Roundup Week #11

This week I listened to 49 episodes and unsubscribed from two podcasts altogether.  I'm much more likely to just hit unsubscribe these days than I used to be. I used to really give podcasts a break, but now if you have one or two bad episodes, I just don't have time for you.

Here are the highlights from this week.

The BBC's The Documentary had an episode called "China's Generation Gap: Part Two" that looked at changing norms regarding marriage and family in China, with a particular lens towards how the one-child policy affected women and women's roles. I thought it was a particularly well done view of China showing both an old school dude who is appalled that his son only has a daughter (but the family name!) all the way to young women who don't really see the need for marriage at all, although the desire to have children does seem to remain strong.

Death, Sex, and Money had a great episode called "Sharing DNA, and Nothing Else" about a woman who found out through one of those mail-in ancestry kits that the father she grew up knowing was not actually her biological father. Also, she doesn't want to get to know this guy because...politics. In 2018, this makes so much sense to me. With the worries I have about the unintended consequences of these DYI DNA kits, this show really spoke to me. And when the woman talked about her father dying in front of her, I almost started crying in the middle of the street. I know I talk about DS&M a lot on this blog, but it's consistently excellent and Anna Sale is such an empathetic, but good interviewer. She gets honest responses, but never flinches from asking hard questions. I feel like this show makes me a better person.

Speaking of crying, Code Switch released "A House Divided by Immigration" in which a family has kids with various immigration status (one is a citizen, two have DACA-protection, one is a DREAMer with no protection) and the youngest, the one who is a citizen, called the interviewer back into the room to tell her that if his family gets deported he's going with them and it was such a powerful moment from a teenage boy who until this point had seemed like a clueless kid who didn't seem to care about anything that I did choke up. You know what's important to this kid? His family.  Immigration is one of the most salient political issues of the day, but sometimes it's hard to forget in all the partisan bickering that there are real people and real consequences to these issues.

In a more lighthearted recommendation, This American Life had a David Sedaris story "The Youth in Asia" in a recent episode. He tells the story of the role that pets had in his family's life in his typically hilarious way.  Sedaris tells of having to put his cat to sleep and here's the line where I laughed so hard I cried. My mother sent a consoling letter along with a check to cover the cost of the cremation. In the left-hand corner, under the heading marked Memo, she'd written, "Pet Burning."His mom sounds like she would be fun.  I like to put things under the Memo line because I'm pretty sure no physical eyeballs actually look at checks these day.  Anyway, it's good old-fashioned David Sedaris if you need a giggle.