July 2019 Podcast Roundup

Because of Dr. BB's unfortunate clavicle injury, I am the default dog walker and chore doer. What this means for you is that I listen to hours and hours of podcasts every day. I have a lot to say and not a lot of people to talk to about my opinions, so be ready for a lot this month and next!

Ear Hustle's episode"Kissing the Concrete" is everything I wanted when I heard about the new season. The premise of the show is that there's this woman who works with an inmate who is incarcerated at San Quentin prison and they produce a podcast about prison life. Excellent. But the co-host who was incarcerated, Earlonne Woods, was recently released from prison.  So they recruited a new co-host inside the prison walls and now we're getting occasional stories from Woods about what the reentry process is life for former prisoners who are trying to reintegrate into regular daily life outside of the prison walls.

The first couple of episode of this season were lackluster, though.  I was starting to get worried that Ear Hustle had lost its way. But this episode was exactly what I was looking forward to! It follows the story of Woods, who had a place to live and a job all lined up and Ronnie, a meth addict who is leaving without so much as a plan once he leaves the prison. They describe that if you're released on parole, you have a lot of conditions attached to your freedom, but if you're released on probation, you're just on your own. As you can imagine, things are not going particularly well for Ronnie as the episode progresses. It was sad to listen to, but exactly what I want from this podcast right now.

And, in keeping with that topic, New Hampshire Public Radio recently released a short, four-part series called Supervision in which our intrepid reporter Emily Corwin follows a man who was recently released on parole.  It details many important issues with reentry, including poverty and homelessness. I'm not sure what Corwin's original idea for this podcast was, but I was shocked by the ending and I'm pretty sure she was, too. 

 I went to graduate school with an ex-con who was really interested in reentry programs. At the time, I was mostly annoyed with her because she would bring ex-cons into our computer lab to help them with things like resumes and job applications, but in retrospect, I wonder how much institutional knowledge she has and what she thinks of the sudden interest in offender rehabilitation and reintegration. I'm particularly interested in these types of programs for drug offenses and less interested in rehabilitation for people who were incarcerated for violent offenses, but then again, the hosts of Ear Hustle were convicted of violent offenses.  I don't know. I'm just finding myself having to reevaluate my feelings on so many things as I listen to these pieces.

22 Hours: An American Nightmare is a podcast about a DC-area murder in which a married couple, their 10-year-old son, and the housekeeper were killed in a vicious manner.  I've never heard of this case and I am impressed by the production of this podcast. They've organized the somewhat complicated timeline in a way that makes a lot of sense and they have great audiotape. The interviews, particularly with the housekeeper's friend (who was also a former housekeeper of this family) were particularly powerful. I wish all the episodes of this were already out because waiting for the next episode to drop is excruciating. I had never heard of this case before, so I don't actually know the outcome of the trial and have successfully resisted the temptation to Google answers, but I'm not sure how much longer my willpower will hold up.

NOTE: The episodes get less well organized as time goes on. That being said, I think the case is absolutely fascinating and I bump each new episode up to the top of my playlist as it comes out.

After all the O.J. Simpson-related popular culture in the last few years, if you had asked me if I needed more material about Simpson in my life before listening to this podcast, I might have said no. After the brilliant 30 by 30 Ezra Edelman documentary, O.J.: Made in America, I would have said the definitive film had been made. And maybe so. But Confronting: O.J. Simpson, a podcast told from the perspective of Kim Goldman, Ron Goldman's sister, is something different.  She's getting amazing interviews from lots of players in the crime and the trial.  There's something here that's personal and direct.  Goldman doesn't spoon feed you. If you don't have a working knowledge of the major players of this case, this isn't the podcast for you. But if you want to know how Ron Goldman's family is doing 25 years after the circus of the Trial of the Century, this might be for you. If you want to know how Marcia Clark, Chris Darden, and Kato Kaelin respond to probing questions from a family member years later, this might be for you.

 Death, Sex, and Money's episode "A Brother, A Sister, and Their Eating Disorder" is exactly what I expect from a DS&M episode.  Anna Sale, the host, has recently come back from maternity leave and I'm so excited that she's back. She interviews a sibling pair who each have an eating disorder. What I really loved about this episode is that it took seriously what it's like to be a man with an eating disorder. As a woman with a relatively normal relationship with food who live with a man with an eating disorder, it is sometimes hard to find stories that relate to me and my life. And when the man, Oscar, talked about how he doesn't like people to watch him eat and he didn't want to talk about he normally eats for dinner, I was nodding and it really resonated.  I don't like to hear about other people with eating disorders, but I do like to know that I'm not alone.

"Stories about the St. Louis" from The Memory Palace tells the story of the ship the St. Louis, a German oceanliner that left from Hamburg in 1939 towards Cuba, with 900 passengers aboard, most of whom were Jewish refugees.  Cuba wouldn't accept their visas and the ship sailed around, asking for help from the US (which FDR ignored) before sailing back to Europe.  It's a powerful story about innocent people asking for help, asking for asylum, asking for safety, and being turned away. It's a powerful story about how we treat our fellow human beings. Nate DiMeo, our silver-tongued host, guides us through this story without making explicit parallels with what's happening at the US/Mexico border today, but letting us know that's exactly what he wants us to be doing.

I work tangentially in the world of college admissions. I tutor for one of the major test preparation companies in the county. So it's no surprise that I started listening to Gangster Capitalism with some finely tuned antennae, basically looking for criticisms for my chosen career. The first, and so far only, season of the show is about the college admissions scandal. I find it less interesting to learn the ins and outs of how rich people bought their children's ways into the colleges of their choice, but more to hear the stories of how it impacted OTHER people. How does it impact other student athletes who don't get a spot on a team because that spot was unfairly sold off to someone with money? How does it impact the students of color who don't have access to the resources to conduct this type of fraud?  It's not so much about the scheme, although there's plenty of that, but it's more about who is hurt by this. I don't LOVE this podcast, but I can't stop listening, so that's something, I guess.  I mostly just wish it focused on the impacts of these crimes and how to prevent them in the future than acting like this is some giant spy story.

Have you ever heard about how medical trials usually don't have data on women because they don't usually do research on women? And how crash tests use dummies with male anatomy and that's why seatbelts suck so hard for women?  And how kitchen counters are designed to be comfortable for the height of an average man even though women do most of the cooking?  If you feel like women are left out of everything, the 99% Invisible episode called "Invisible Women" interviews a woman who wrote a book on how women are not part of data collection on lots and lots of things and that undervaluing is doing a disservice to everyone. Highly recommend. Feminist slant? Check. Data collection? Check. A social science problem with a solution?  Check.