Podcast Roudup Week #34

This week I listened to 44 episodes. Next week I'll be in the car an awful lot, so I'm hoping that I can catch up on my backlog and be ready for new episodes once many shows come back from their August hiatuses.

Let's move on to some noteables!

Cover-Up is People's first foray into podcasting. I think, on the whole, it's pretty successful. This seven episode podcast series takes a look at the infamous Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 in which U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy's car was found upside down off a small bridge, along with the body of political aide Mary Jo Kopechne.  Now, if you had asked me before I listened to this podcast what this scandal was about, I would have said something about drinking, prostitutes, and the Kennedy family's absolute power in Massachusetts. I would have been right on two out of the three.

What I like about this podcast is that Kopechne is front and center. The podcast doesn't ignore her - a person who was ideologically and politically motivated who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure, there are some conspiracy theories and stories about the Kennedys doing what powerful, rich people do, and there's talk about the tragic deaths of all of Kennedy's older brothers, Joe, John, and Robert, not to mention the terrible treatment of his sister Rosemary, but the podcast never lets the story stray too far away from Kopechne.  I binged this whole thing in two days and I don't regret a single second of it.  There's solid reporting here, although it was a bit of a shame that no one from the Kennedy or Kopechne families actually spoke on record. I highly recommend this if you're even kind of interested in American history, American royalty, or good old-fashioned gossip.

Gimlet's Start-Up is a podcast purportedly about what it's like to start a business, but it's gone so far astray from that premise that I'm not sure exactly how to describe it any more. Its most recent miniseries, about a church planting, is about whether or not a venture should succeed, but it's not exactly about business. Anyway, I digress.  The miniseries is a 5-parter and I really struggled to get through the first three episodes because 1) I don't believe in religion, 2) I generally find that people who proselytize to be obnoxious, and 3) I don't think that churches necessarily should be something that grow or that the US, of all places, needs more churches. But in the last two episodes of the miniseries, the podcast starts to grapple with some of the very things that were causing me discomfort.

I'm still a bit uncomfortable with what I see as kind of a crazy attempt to publicize religion, but I also see it as really complicated. Religion is a large part of some people's lives and how they grapple with religion's relationship with the role of women in society and social issues like homosexuality and abortion is often fraught.  I think that the discomfort I felt listening to this was actually probably a good thing for me to feel. I don't usually associate with evangelicals and the few that I do know, I avoid the topic altogether. If we're to see any progress in political relations in this country, I think we're all going to have to get a lot more used to uncomfortable conversations.

I've written about it before and probably will again, but 99% Invisible does a great job of illustrating how important infrastructure is in a lot of their episodes.  "Built to Burn" is an episode that details how our national policy on fighting wildfires is misguided. First up, a few mostly easy landscaping and building changes on most homes could prevent fires from gobbling up homes. Second of all, if we don't allow naturally occurring wildfires to happen, they're going to get worse because the underbrush will just get more and more flammable.  Make changes to individual homes and then watch the fires do what they do to promote new growth.  It's something I've been saying for years, but, hey, Roman Mars and the gang definitely say it better than I do.