July 2021 Podcast Roundup

Two years ago I wrote about the first season of Gangster Capitalism, which was about college admissions scandals. This year Andrew Jenks came back with another tale of higher education with Gangster Capitalism's look at Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Liberty University. If you want to hear about infuriating practices at an infuriating institution, this podcast is just for you.  I didn't know about Falwell's scandals, but the worst part of this his behavior is how it impacted students.  The stories of gay students, students who were sexually assaulted, students who were coerced into marriage, and stories of students who were essentially blackmailed into staying at the campus because their credits wouldn't be accepted at another credited college or university were deeply upsetting.

On Our Watch is an NPR/KQED production in which Sukey Lewis takes advantage of a new law in California that allows the public access to internal affairs documents from police departments in the state. Do you want to know how many times an officer can rape women in his patrol car before he gets caught? How many times he can sexually harass and intimidate women who are trying to get their cars through an emissions check, but will then find a job with another department? For folks who are in denial about the systematic corruptibility of the police in the United States, this is a must listen. For those of us who aren't in denial, it's even more important. I thought the last episode of the podcast was a bit weak, but otherwise it was fascinating and riveting.

Blind Landing is a weird little five-episode podcast. It's all about the 2000 Olympic Women's Gymnastic All-Around. It was a strange Olympics from a number of angles, what with the Chinese team in trouble for entering athletes under the age limit and the gold medal winner being stripped of her title because she took Sudafed, but what happened with the vault in the All-Around is both legendarily bad and underreported. This podcast interviews athletes and gymnast who were present. It doesn't actually point fingers at who was responsible, but it does give everyone a chance to say what should have happened. 

I have strangely vivid memories of this particular Olympics (I remember Kim Zmeksal falling off the beam in '92, Dominique Moceanu's amazing floor routine in '96, this vault debacle in '00,  and nothing until Gabby Douglas really) and I remember thinking that it was absurd that at the most elite level, this type of elementary mistake was made and how truly heartbreaking it was for Svetlana Khorkina.  Khorkina is a controversial pro-Russia, pro-Putin figure today, but at the time she was just a gymnast who had worked so hard to be at the apex of her career at this exact moment and she was just...devastated. I'll never stop feeling badly for her.

I feel like if you're even just a casual gymnastics fan, this podcast might be for you.  It's not hard-hitting or anything, but it's a thorough look at an event that I didn't even really realize had troubled me so much.