Podcasts 9.23
Continuing our feature on Podcasts, we have a few suggestions for you and welcome your recommendations. What do you listen to? What’s your favorite? Do you prefer your news in the written word or streaming? Have you thought of making your own Podcast? Let’s hear from you! And now a few Podcast suggestions:
If Books Could Kill is hosted by Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri. The show targets "airport books—that captured our hearts and ruined our minds,” popular nonfiction books often marketed as pop science or smart thinking which Hobbes describes as "the superspreader events of American stupidity." Each episode is dedicated to the discussion of a single book, along with the book's wider cultural influence. The hosts “focus on flawed arguments, poor uses of data, factual errors, and the drawing of unsound conclusions or overgeneralizations. They often take a comic tone and will poke fun at the books and their authors.”
https://podcasts.apple.com/ru/podcast/5-4/id1497785843
The podcast 5-4 describes itself as a “podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It's a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court's most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics.” 5-4 is hosted by Rhiannon Hamam, a public defender, and Michael Liroff and Peter (who asked to be identified only by his first name because his employer is unaware of the podcast). For more info, check out https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/arts/5-4-supreme-court-podcast.html
https://stuffyoushouldknow.com/
Stuff You Should Know launched in 2008. Shamelessly called by the hosts (Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant) the “best darn podcast in the land! If you’ve ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime, and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Oh yeah! We also had a TV show that ran for one season on Science Channel (it was the most expensive pilot they’ve ever produced). At the risk of tooting our own horn, we also have a Trivial Pursuit game, a book called An Incomplete Compendium of Mostly Interesting Things, and we once had our own category on Jeopardy! National College Championship.”
You’re Wrong About hosts Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes describe themselves as “journalists obsessed with the past. Every week we reconsider an event, person or phenomenon that’s been miscast in the public imagination.” The show “explores misunderstood media events by interrogating why and how the public got things wrong. Topics have included events like the Challenger Disaster, O. J. Simpson Trial, and the Murder of Kitty Genovese and covered people such as Anna Nicole Smith, Yoko Ono, Tonya Harding, and Lorena Bobbitt.” It was named one of the ten best podcasts by Timein 2019.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/podcasts/serial-the-retrievals-yale-fertility-clinic.html
The Retrievals -- from Serial Productions and the New York Times: “The Retrievals is a five-part narrative series reported by Susan Burton, a veteran staff member at “This American Life” and author of the memoir “Empty.” Burton details the events that unfolded at the Yale Fertility clinic, and examines how the patients’ distinct identities informed the way they made sense of what happened to them in the procedure room. The nurse, too, has her own story, about her own pain, that she tells to the court. And then there is the story of how this all could have happened at the Yale clinic in the first place. Throughout, Burton explores the stories we tell about women’s pain. “How do we tolerate, interpret and account for it? What happens when pain is minimized or dismissed?”
We hope you enjoy these and, now, search for your own favorites and let us know what you recommend! As always, we’d love to hear from you.
--Jane Hilburt-Davis