March 2021 Podcast Roundup

 

The brilliant Nate DiMeo from The Memory Palace recently re-released "Butterflies," an episode all about another brilliant man who thought he was doing good for the world, but whose legacy is much more complicated than he would have thought while he was alive.

Not to be the basic bitch of podcast listeners, but Planet Money is currently in the middle of a series called "We Buy a Superhero." I was not impressed by the premise at first, but PM has a history of buying ridiculous things (a barrel of oil, a toxic asset, etc.) and making interesting stories about the process, so I went in with mixed expectations. The third episode of the series, "Resurrection," is when I really started to get on board. The team finds the perfect superhero, Micro-Face, a superhero with a microphone on his face!  They talk to the wife of the man who created the character and that interview might be the most touching thing I've listened to in weeks.  If you aren't sold of PM as a podcast, give these shows a try.

Death, Sex, & Money had a show from The Experiment on its feed and I thought it was worth drawing attention to both the episode the podcast itself. The podcast is a collaboration between The Atlantic and WNYC focusing on how the experiment of the United States as a country and its democratic republic government is working.  It's a new podcast, started in January of 2021, so there isn't a huge backlog to get through and the topics are wide and varied and usually include a historical component, but not in a boring way.  

Anyway, the particular episode I was introduced to is called "The Volunteer" and it's all about how, in the final days of the Trump presidency, thirteen federal inmates on death row were executed by the federal government after no federal executions had taken place for thirteen years.  This is the story of a man who volunteered to be with two of those men as they were murdered in the role of spiritual advisor. I'm someone who has slowly grown less and less sure of the morality of the death penalty over time and this story may have tipped me right over into a fervent anti-death penalty crusader.