August 2019 Podcast Roundup

The Promise is a six-part documentary series from Nashville Public Radio about public housing in Nashville. The city has promised to revitalize its largest public housing project, the James Cayce Homes, by rebuilding it as a mixed-income neighborhood without displacing the current residents. This podcast goes into Cayce and interviews residents to see how they feel about this plan.  It also briefly touches on politicians and city planners, but it's really about how life is in Cayce.  Spoiler: most people want out or are there as a last resort.

It's actually really interesting because it ends up also being about police violence and I've always maintained that mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods are the answer to just about every social ill. It's a running theme in my minority politics course. But this podcast was critical of that solution and had examples that will definitely make me reconsider my attitude. I think most people are doing housing integration incorrectly and that's why it doesn't really work. Most people think all the buildings in a neighborhood should look the same (all apartments, all duplexes, all single-family homes), but I actually think just the opposite. It really should be mixed. I put my money where my mouth is. We live in a single-family home. To one side, there's another single-family home, there's a duplex on the other side, and a rental property next to that. There's an apartment building across the street. Our neighborhood is about as diverse as a small town in Wisconsin can be.

But this podcast had an element of sensationalism that I didn't care for and referred to domestic violence and a man killing his wife as "an incident," complete downplaying a lot of the power that the story has on a particular resident of Cayce.

Meanwhile, this early renovation of Cayce is still early.  I'd be interested in an update episode about this in five years.  How is integration going? Are middle-income people interested in living there? Are the facilities being properly managed? Has the existing community been weakened because the design of the buildings lacks outdoor space?  There are a lot of unanswered questions.

Let's move on to Room 20, shall we? A man is in an accident near the California/Mexico border in 1999. No one knows his name and he's known as Sixty-Six Garage.  He's in a vegetative state and is kept alive on a ventilator for twenty years.  This story investigates who Sixty-Six Garage really is.  This podcast could be so good.  It has so many interesting questions that it could have addressed. There are questions about immigration: was he running from ICE during his accident? what is the role of undocumented workers in the farm fields of California? There are questions of identity: does it matter that no one knows this man's name? if/when he gets his name back, does it substantively change his life in any way? how?  would he have gone unnamed if he was white instead of Hispanic?  There are questions of end-of-life care: should these vent farms in California exist? if there's no next of kin known, who makes decisions about whether people should live or die? should Sixty-Six Garage have lived all this time in Room 20?

But the podcast grapples with hardly any of these questions. It just details some tedious knocking of doors and calling of county offices for documents while weaving in the reporter's story of her own mother's death. I keep listening because I want it to get better, because I think some of the questions I listed above are super important, but it's not getting better.  This is seriously a disappointment.

Another month, another time when I keep putting Code Switch episodes to the bottom of my list just to listen and realize the episodes are some of the best things I've listened to all month.

So the first episode I want to talk about is "After the Cameras Leave." It's been five years since Michael Brown was shot and killed by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. What's it been like in Ferguson since then? How is his family and his community coping? Have there been any systematic changes in the system? I think the answers won't surprise you, but it will be enlightening. It's so stark to see it laid out in black and white that changes just don't happen.

The other episode was much more light-hearted. "Dora's Lasting Magic" is all about Dora the Explorer. Yes, that one. The one with the backpack and the blunt bob haircut.  Sometimes it's hard to explain to people why representation matters.  What does it say that the hosts of this show were able to have an open discussion in which someone argued that Dora was the most famous Latina in the United States (someone else offered up Jennifer Lopez, which probably gets my vote)?  The idea that boys and girls who came from homes in which Spanish was spoken were able to turn on the television and see that type of family portrayed in a positive life was impactful on many lives. And that's why media representation matters.

I'm going to be a podcast basic bitch and also recommend a Radiolab episode and a This American Life episode.  These are some OG podcasts, but they're still putting out amazing content.

In the episode "Right to be Forgotten," Molly Webster walks us through what exactly are the issues involved in whether or not someone has the right to have their misdeeds removed from the internet. In the 1970s, if you were arrested for a DUI, sure it might have made the newspaper and someone might have been able to look that up later in a library on microfiche, but generally that type of news disappeared, rarely remembered. But today your DUI can be found easily, along with your mug shots and it never goes away. It will be early on in the hits if someone Googles your name. Do you have the right to make it go away? Who gets to make that determination? What types of criteria should they use? It was yet another way I'm glad that the internet was not around when I was a teenager.

 It has been a long, long time since I was so entranced by a This American Life episode. But the episode called "Ten Sessions" is an inside look at one woman's journey through ten meetings with a therapist doing something called cognitive processing therapy (CPT).  She allowed her therapy sessions to be recorded and it was just so intimate and interesting.  If you're a graduate or current attendee of any type of talk therapy, this will probably seem shocking to you.  It certainly was for me. It's a unique type of therapy, but the early research shows it's effective. I'll be keeping an eye out for long-term results.