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This year has been a landmark one in podcast history. Adnan Syed, whose case was the basis of the explosive first season of “Serial” and further coverage in “Undisclosed,” has been released from prison after twenty-three years. And as the media landscape continued to change, with the resulting upheavals shaking up the subfield—excellent ending shows, handing over the reins, adapting audio talent—great work continued to be done at all levels, from corporate giants to public radio to independent. Investigative reporting continued to thrive, but some of the more nurturing series lightened the mood, infusing the format with humor, surprise and joy — like when Tom Hanks appeared in Dead Eyes. Here are ten of the best podcasts I heard this year.
10. “Let’s Make Science Fiction”
Vancouver-based production studio Kelly & Kelly, which made the highly entertaining satirical true-crime series This Sounds Serious, has a knack for making difficult genres (drama-style script, riff-based documentary) enjoyable to listen to. In Let’s Do Sci-Fi, three comedy writers – Ryan Bale, Maddie Kelly and Mark Chavez – set out to write a sci-fi series, but as they pitch ideas for crabs the size of German Shepherds, three-mile-long intergalactic ships and ” space horses,” it’s hard for them not to make each other laugh. Each episode they enlist the advice of an expert and discuss a new aspect of sci-fi world building, but most of all, the show is a refreshing exercise in understanding what the creative process is all about: imagination, risk, logic, fun, and space horses.
9. “Dead End: A New Jersey Political Assassination Mystery”
This series by WNYC’s Nancy Solomon focuses on a 2014 murder that sounds like the plot of a creepy mystery novel. A prominent and politically connected couple, John and Joyce Sheridan, happily married for forty-seven years, are stabbed to death in their suburban New Jersey home; the crime scene includes a knocked over cupboard, a fireplace, a missing murder weapon and a bedroom arson started with petrol. All of this leads to a bigger mystery: What the hell is going on in New Jersey? The investigation of the case is suspicious from the beginning. It was ruled a murder-suicide by John Sheridan — a “meek grandfather” and health care CEO with ties to three New Jersey governors — and then dropped; evidence is ignored and misused; possibly the interviewees remain uninterviewed. Solomon, who covers New Jersey and its political corruption for WNYC, takes listeners on a revealing journey through the state’s tangled political, legal and economic dealings through the people and projects connected to the Sheridans and their four sons — including Mark, then a lawyer working for the election campaign of Gov. Chris Christie, who is turning from a “man of power” into a disheartened realist. This is one of the best podcasts I’ve heard about how things do and often shouldn’t happen in government. Just before the streak ended, New Jersey reopened the case.
8. “Heavyweight”
Jonathan Goldstein’s venerable Human Connections podcast, now in its seventh season, is truly great, and this year’s series is no exception; like Normal Gossip, a new and deservedly beloved podcast, it explores startling interpersonal stories with zeal and curiosity. But “Heavyweight” includes the themes themselves and tries to solve a haunting problem from a man’s past – an important painting found in the trash on a Brooklyn street corner; longstanding misunderstandings between high school best friends who were secretly in love; a mystery involving grief and beatboxing; A VHS mishap from the 1990s in which a teenage girl tapes a Billy Ray Cyrus concert over a television interview of her veteran father. That Goldstein manages to navigate these delicate personal situations at all, let alone a microphone, is always amazing; the show achieves a combination of warmth, humor and depth that is still rarely felt, and is the best of what the podcast format can do.
7. Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s
Cree journalist Connie Walker, who grew up on the Okaneese First Nation in Saskatchewan, has brought several stories of crimes against Indigenous girls and women to an international audience through her podcasts, including Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo and Stolen: The Search’ for Jermaine.” In Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s, Walker investigates a more personal case after her brother tells her a story: that their late father, an officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, once pulled over a man for reckless driving, realized , that he had been a priest who had abused him as a boy and had “helled him”. Walker remembers her father as tormented and violent, but her younger siblings knew him as a better man; she felt, that the story may be a “clue” to understanding him.Her father knew the priest at St. Michael’s Indian Residential School, where he lived as a boy, and Walker’s investigation leads her to the story of the Canadian school system that separates root the children from their families, forcibly assimilated them into Anglo-Christian language and culture and led to generations of trauma and abuse, much of it perpetrated by priests and nuns. As the episodes unfold, we hear from community elders who were students at St. Michael’s, and even by a priest described as abusive by Walker’s uncles. (The priest, now old and infirm, remembers the school fondly and tells Walker that abusing children “isn’t my style.”) “To survive in ‘St. not just the painful legacy of the system, but the traditions—gathering in Parisian lodges, picking sweet grass for medicine—that have helped survivors heal.
6. “Interesting Articles: American Ivy”
The independently produced third season of Avery Truffelman’s fashion design podcast, about so-called ready-to-wear, asks big questions – What is democracy? Which is cool? – that resonate far beyond the realm of the stand-up collar. “American Ivy” explores how collegiate style eventually became mainstream style, through imaginary journeys not only to Brooks Brothers, Princeton and J. Press, but also to mid-century Japan, where photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida cleaned up the 1965 bible .’Take Ivy’ filmed on American college campuses codified international tailoring language; the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where polo shirts and khakis became part of the effort to normalize white supremacy; and the burgeoning New York Lo-heads scene of the Dinkins era, where Ralph Lauren clothing was “remixed.” Truffelman has a gift for turning complex narratives into surprising, entertaining fare. Further enhancing the aesthetic are the series’ theme songs performed a cappella by Tufts University’s Beelzebubs.
5. “Valley of Bones”
In the tradition of investigative podcasts like “In the Dark” and “Suspect,” Gilbert King’s series, which he hosts and reports with researcher Kelsey Decker, uses the story of a murder and its aftermath to shine a light on institutional failings in criminal justice. system. King, who won a Pulitzer for his 2013 book The Devil in the Grove, draws us in with an intriguing hook: a sitting Florida district court judge, Scott Cupp, enlists his help in correcting a miscarriage of justice. “Technically, I shouldn’t be doing this,” Coop tells him: he could lose his seat or even be disbarred. “But it’s like, if I don’t do it, who the hell is going to do it?” He asks King to read the court records in the case of his former client Leo Scofield, who has been in prison for decades after being convicted of the 1987 murder of his wife, Michelle Scofield, who was found stabbed to death in a phosphate pit in Florida when she was eighteen and Leo was twenty-one. King read the transcripts, then devoted the next three and a half years to reporting. The state’s case was fragile, and forensic evidence strongly pointed to another suspect, Jeremy Scott. King and Decker flesh out the story, set in a working-class Florida community, in intricate detail—including in the final episode, where they visit Scott in prison, with unforgettable results.
4. “Fiasco: The AIDS crisis”
Leon Neyfak’s previous podcasts have explored stories like the Clinton impeachment saga, Watergate, and Boston’s struggle with school desegregation with great care. Their focus is the experience of history, often in eras threatening to fade from memory. Neyfak’s extraordinary new series about the dawn of AIDS the epidemic and the forces that came together to fight it brings sweeping political and health narratives to life through unforgettable character detail: a doctor haunted by memories of a dying man in a Manhattan brownstone, surrounded by birds in his home aviary; a San Francisco neighborhood where people, like the muscular mailman who always wore shorts, keep disappearing; an elegiac song about the closing of baths. As always, these stories resonate in the present, though Neyfak avoids making the connections explicit; here, the presence of a young Anthony Fauci helps him to do so.
3. Will Be Wild
This series from the crackerjack team of Ilya Maritz and Andrea Bernstein, who produced the outstanding “Trump, Inc.” for WNYC, explores the January 6 uprising and its context with fascinating vibrancy and detail. We hear from a Texas teenager who reported his Three Percent father to the FBI; by a federal intelligence officer receiving an emergency alert while driving at Panera Bread; by a Capitol Police officer. Maritz and Bernstein’s ability to zoom in on interesting characters and create vivid scenes is uncanny, and as with their previous series about Trump’s shady business dealings, the result shines a light on a subject that might otherwise retain a stubborn shroud of incomprehensibility.
2. “The Prince”
The Economist’s the masterful eight-volume biography of Xi Jinping, released around the start of Xi’s third term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, functions as a cultural and political history of modern China, and is astonishing not only for its novelistic storytelling but also for its sheer journalistic courage. The series’ Australian host, the economist writer Sue-Lin Wong draws on an array of experts, locals, fellow reporters, and archival interviews to build her narrative. She interviewed Xi’s American hosts since his visit to Iowa in 1985, a persecuted Uyghur language teacher now living in Norway, a former Weibo censor living in Los Angeles. She begins with Xi’s childhood as the son of a party official, then carefully illustrates how this “milk toast” became an autocrat who believed that stability and control justified repression. Wong is an engaging lead, and her boundless curiosity serves as a refreshing counterpoint to a sometimes crushing narrative. In a bonus episode, she explains that the series’ title refers not only to Xi’s upbringing, but also to Machiavelli, who wrote that it is better to be feared than loved—and to the even more sobering idea that Si is not yet at the peak of his power.
1. The Rumble Strip
For more than a decade, Erica Heilman has created an endlessly inventive, independently produced podcast for her Vermont community, revealing, through an almost miraculous level of attention, what life is all about. Heilman talks to people close to her – road workers, barbers, interesting children, deer hunters, the owner of an eccentric museum in an unheated barn – and learns what they do and how they live. Some episodes have titles like “Forrest Foster, Independent Dairyman” and “Helena Goes American”; some are funny little satires; some are chapters in an ambitious multi-part series. Heilman has a sharp eye and a good sense of humor, but her narrative tone is quietly serious, always focused on the subject; episodes create a sense of deep, barely interrupted listening. Without sentimentalizing Vermont or her fellow citizens, Heilman captures both who we are and the best of what we try to be. As she says of Forrest Foster, “He’s always practical and always generous, and those things are always the same thing.” ♦
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