February 2021 Podcast Roundup

So I had a bit of a podcast crisis this month. I did a software update on my phone and then my podcast app stopped working. I wish I could explain how stressful this was to me, but I ended up putting another app on my phone (Pocket Casts, which is not ideal, but I won't review podcast applications here) and then I had to resubscribe to all the pods I listen to, but I seriously culled the herd.  Meanwhile, I miss my old app and am so so angry that I did that update to my phone because it messed up a bunch of things, and I'm pretty grumpy about all of this.

Anyway.  One of the reasons I don't love Pocket Casts is because it's harder to keep track of the episodes that I want to talk about here. So this list is short, but it's quality.

When we lived in Minneapolis, one of my volunteer gigs was doing court monitoring at the Hennepin County courthouse.  I would go to the office where the non-profit I volunteered was located, drop off my coat and/or anything that would get flagged by the x-ray, walk to Starbucks for a treat, and then go to the courthouse. I was able to go through multiple buildings in the dead of winter without lugging around a coat in Minnesota because the buildings were all connected through skyways, an intricate maze of connections that keep people off the streets in the steamy heat of summer and arctic temps of winter.  

I'd always been a fan of the skyways. They allowed me to do my work without lugging around extra material. When I would go holiday shopping, I wouldn't have to go outside. When we watched the Holidazzle parade, we could just hang out and watch in the skyways. So when I say an episode of 99% Invisible called "Beneath the Skyway," I totally assumed that it was going to be a joyous exploration of the skyway system, how it was invented, how it was paid for, and how amazing it is.

Instead, I soon learned that there are entire groups of people who do not like the skyways and want them to be dismantled.  There are many reasons for this dislike, but it mostly has to do with the fact that the skyways are a hostile place to folks who aren't the white-collar folks working in the downtown buildings and that it leads to the streets being perceived as dangerous because people don't use the streets because they aren't using the streets.  And then I was sad as I had to reevaluate my outlook on something I think of as a fundamental piece of Minneapolis identity.

At some point over the summer and fall of 2020, I heard some rumors about the magazine Bon Appetit  - racism, sexism, toxic workplace stuff. I didn't really follow the story, but Reply All was going to put out a multi-part mini-series on the topic, so I thought I'd use that to catch up. The first part, "The Test Kitchen, Chapter 1," was released on February 4 and the second on February 12. 

(NOTE: My opinion on those episodes is that they weren't well done. I don't have a ton of background on what the series is about and I was seriously confused about some basic plot points. I also don't know the framing of the story. Is this a story about hearing voices that aren't usually heard? Is it a story about a toxic workplace? Is it a story about how this toxic workplace is representative of systematic racism? I don't know because they haven't framed the story for me.  

Maybe that's fine. This series is obviously produced with people who already have some knowledge of the story and I'm not that audience. Not every piece of media has to be for me. But I'm disappointed because I think hearing from people of color who have worked in corporate media is important, but I'm not sure that the point of the series.)

Meanwhile, back at Reply All, some former employees at Gimlet Media, which produces Reply All, begin tweeting about the hypocrisy of the mini-series, basically saying that the diversity issues at Gimlet are intense and people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Two people involved in The Test Kitchen episodes have left the show, including one of the hosts of the show.  So much podcasting drama.  The Gimlet and Reply All subreddits go crazy (here's a more indepth thread if you're into the drama) and I'm sitting here wondering how a beloved podcast loses its steam so quickly.  It'll be interesting to see if the rest of the Test Kitchen episodes come out.

I'm really late in Floodlines.  It was on lots of lists of the best podcasts of 2020, but I wasn't really interested in hearing a story about a natural disaster made worse by human actions in the midst of a natural disaster made worse by human (in)actions, so I just kept putting it off. But in my cleaning up of my podcasts, I once again downloaded the episodes and started listening.  And I was right. The similarities of the stories, from decision-makers not making important decisions fast enough to poor people getting the rawest deal, were profound. But it's also a beautifully told story about Hurricane Katrina and what exactly happened in New Orleans in 2005.

There are interviews from people who survived the storm - one who was in a hotel, one who spent time at the convention center, one whose house was not touched but became an advocate for the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina.  There is one incredible interview from Michael Brown, the head of FEMA at the time. But the story of Le-Ann is the one that will stick with me forever. She was fourteen when she lived through Katrina and it changed the trajectory of her entire life.  I cried a little when she said she felt like no one ever saw her or heard her story.  Powerful.  Vann Newkirk is the host of this show and he's absolute perfection - he's gentle when he needs to be, has his own life experiences to back up his questioning, and his editorializing is limited and therefore, so much more compelling than if he hit us over the head with it in every paragraph.  This is a podcast that should be held up as a model for investigative reporting.