Podcast Roundup Week #13

This week I listened to 58 episodes. I'm not sure exactly how that happened, but here we are.

 The best podcast, hands down, I'm listening to right now is the fourth season of Missing & Murdered: Finding Cleo. Missing and Murdered is a CBS podcast that does deep dives into unsolved cases of missing and murdered indigenous women and children in Canada. There are so many heartbreaking stories in this podcast, but this season hits all of the horrors of what North Americans have done to our native populations. It's a hard listen, but covers it all - children torn away from families, addiction, suicide, disappearing cultures - in a linear fashion.  It's hard to listen to the abuse that children went through and even harder to hear the adults these children became talk about themselves as if they're telling stories about someone else. I'm not sure I'd recommend any of the previous seasons nearly as highly as this one. Report Connie Walker has really come into her own with this one.

If you're looking for something even less uplifting, how about Caught, an NYC podcast all about the juvenile justice system, the school to prison pipeline, and how the cycle of violence begins and never seems to end.  I've listened to five episodes and I have to portion them out because every single one of them makes me question my assumptions about the world. I am a victim advocate and I really think victims of crimes are frequently revictimized by the so-called justice system, but what do you do with a 14-year-old who stabs someone?  His brain isn't fully developed, but he did something he knew was wrong.  Poor impulse control isn't an excuse. Or is it?  I don't know. It's tough to listen, but important.

Forget all this sadness, NGS. Don't you have something uplifting?  No, not really. But I do have a great episode from 99% Invisible with my main man Roman Mars all about gerrymandering.  99PI did a summation episode of a FiveThirtyEight podcast called The Gerrymandering Project that looks at the exceptionally wonky and complex discussion on drawing district lines. I have always maintained that if you can fix gerrymandering and money in politics, you could save the representative democracy that is the United States. But what does it mean to fix gerrymandering? It's not as easy as you might think.

Intellectually, I was aware that the Social Security Act was passed in the 1930s as part of the New Deal. I did not stop to to think about how weird it is that all Americans have a number and dumb little piece of paper to show us that number and how hard it would be for people to figure out how to use it.  Planet Money's episode "XXX-XX-XXXX" does stop to consider that. And it's an interesting story.