Pocast Roundup Week #27

I listened to 33 episodes this week. I thought during the summertime, I'd really fly through episodes, but it turns out that I listened a lot more during the school year. I'm trying to figure out how and why that is, but there you go.  Here are a couple of highlights.

Ear Hustle is an awesome podcast. It's a podcast produced by and about prisoners living in San Quentin, a prison in California.  It tells a wide of variety from the perspective of people inside a prison who don't work there. The podcasting medium works so well for this. Sometimes they produce in a studio (one fact I've learned listening to the podcast is that there are a lot of enrichment activities and classes for inmates), but my favorite moments of audio are when they go in the yard or into someone's cell.  The last episode of the second season, "So Long," is all about prisoners who are leaving prison.  What's their plan when they leave?  How are they going to make it happen?

There's a really interesting moment when Nigel Poor, who is a volunteer at the prison and one of the co-hosts of the show, asks Earlonne Woods, the other co-host who happens to be incarcerated at the prison, if Woods thinks that the men leaving San Quentin will be back.  He is very optimistic that they will stay out. People who have been in prison for a decade or more tend to know what they have lost in terms of time on the outside and won't come back was his argument. Poor seemed skeptical, knowing, I guess, that recidivism rates for California prisoners are more than 60%.  It was a tense moment, but a telling one, too.

I can't possible leave without a shoutout to Code Switch's episode "Looking for Marriage in all the Wrong Places." This could have been just another boring story about how online dating doesn't work particularly well  unless you're good-looking, white, and heterosexual.  I mean, honestly, that isn't exactly news.  But the story telling here made it riveting.  The writing of the story invested you from the very beginning (contrasted with Jon Ronson's limited run podcast The Butterfly Effect that I literally unsubscribed from after twenty minutes when I didn't know what the story was about AND I was bored).  How was Rhohin going to find love when he wasn't exactly the perfect type?  What was going to happen?  How were we going to get there? And, unlike most Code Switch stories, this one has a moderately happy ending. Go, Code Switch team. You're consistently doing good work on complex, interesting topics.