September 2019 Podcasts

You know how summer is bad for television? It's all repeats and nothing new? That's sort of how I felt about September podcasts. I was really reaching for quality programming.

I really jive with the Planet Money people. They do talk about economics, but I feel like 50% of their episodes are really about measurement problems. Their recent episode called "The Modal American" is really just an issue of how to define and measure something. How do you measure what the "average" American is?  Is it income?  Gender? Geography? Occupation? Number of family members? Age?  This question is really a conceptual definition, combined with a measurement question. As someone who sits around pondering these types of questions all day, I wholeheartedly approve of this episode. Then again, I'm a numbers nerd.

Bundyville has two seasons. The first season is all about some crazy insane sovereign citizen types who think the federal government is not a real authority. I liked the first season well enough, although I had some serious issues with giving people like this a voice. This second season, though, is sort of a mystery/crazy right wing conspiracy combo.  It takes a look beyond the Bundy family and focuses on what types of violence are spurred by the viewpoints of people like the Bundys.  It was a scary look at what goes on in the anti-government movement.

Patient Zero is a New Hampshire Public Radio joint (they also put out a podcast called Bear Brook, which gets high marks from me, although that story is way too complicated to follow in podcast form, which is why I've never written about it here) that tells the story of Lyme Disease.  What is it? What causes it? How do you treat it?  How did they figure all that out?  Is there such a thing as chronic Lyme disease?  Why isn't there a vaccine? If you're into public health, man's relationship with the wild, New England, epidemiology, or your dog's health, this is a podcast for you. The story about the Lyme disease vaccine is absolutely baffling to me.  Every single episode is well constructed, well edited, and super interesting.  This is a surprise hit of the fall for me. 

Unravel is an Australian ABC podcast. I listened to their fourth season called Snowball.  It tells the story of an American woman who basically preys upon a New Zealand family and turns out to have quite a history as a con artist. The twist with this season is that the reporter who is doing all the research is part of the family. It's really smart and interesting and I enjoyed listening to it - it's sort of an unusual perspective of a tangentially impacted victim telling the story. The New Zealand impressions of American accents are worth it all by themselves and don't even get me started on how amazing the Kiwi slang expressions are. 

But, all of this aside, I spent most of the month relistening to the Balance arc of The Adventure Zone.  There are people who claim that early Balance episodes are not worth listening to, but I actually really thought the podcast was most fun when Giffin, the DM, wasn't taking the storytelling aspect of his job so seriously. The early episodes are full of jokes, goofs, and dad jokes. I very much enjoy those early episodes. And I listened again because I can. I don't relisten to podcasts very much, but I can see myself pulling out these episodes when new podcast releases come to a halt in the late summer/early fall.