Some listening recommendations
This piece first appeared in Folded Wing’s Listening Post blog series
1. Recode Decode with Kara Swisher
You need to be paying attention to Kara Swisher. Whether on this podcast or in the New York Times (she’s just been given her own column), she’s the sharpest journalist covering Silicon Valley and its politics right now. I started listening around the time of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to a hopelessly inept Congress. Their tech illiteracy was an embarrassment, leaving it to Swisher to hold him accountable. Relentlessly. Last week she told Hillary Clinton: “Every time Mark Zuckerberg talks to me it ends in disaster and tears for Mark Zuckerberg. You’re welcome.”
This Slate interview in which she runs down her old newspaper bosses (“I’m so glad he’s dead. Seriously, I’m glad he’s dead. He was a jackass”) is also solid gold from start to finish.
2. Fresh Air
Listening to Terry Gross’s interviews makes me want to be a better listener and a better person. I can’t improve on the appreciation Ira Glass wrote in 2015 so I’ll just point you there and pick out this observation:
“I’ve always admired how well she imagines herself into the mind of the person she’s interviewing. Like she once asked the magician Ricky Jay something like ‘Is there ever a trick where the behind-the-scenes stuff – the secret stuff we don’t see – is actually more interesting than what we DO see?’ Inventing a question like that is such a pure imaginative act of empathy.”
(I’ve been thinking a lot about interviews and interviewing lately, and I want to make two bonus mentions here: one for Here’s The Thing with Alec Baldwin who on paper is, by contrast, a terrible interviewer – always interrupting to tell his own showbiz anecdotes – except that he makes it work and is terrifically entertaining; and another for The Turnaround, Jesse Thorn’s series for the Columbia Journalism Review about the greatest living interviewers, one of whom is Terry Gross.)
3. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast with Eddie Mair
Since its launch in May, the BBC’s Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast has been making a huge volume of evidence easy to follow and understand. Public service journalism at its best. Mair introduced the series with these words in its first episode:
“It will not be entertaining. Some of it will be grueling and harrowing. I can think of many reasons why you would not want to listen.”
And yet there is an odd form of comfort in listening to the truth being methodically uncovered. In near-daily episodes from the first phase of the inquiry, we hear from firefighters who risked their lives despite faulty equipment, residents who raised concerns years ago, neighbours who helped one another through the smoke.
I put it off for ages because of the tough subject matter, but I’ve now gone back and listened all the way through. Episode 48, ‘the story so far’, is a good starting point.
4. Mystery Show
I completely ignored Gimlet and Starlee Kine’s Mystery Show during its short run in 2015. I listened to the trailer and thought it sounded twee, and I wasn’t completely wrong: one episode’s mystery is provided by “David, who runs an artisanal pencil sharpening company”. But if you did the same, it’s worth reappraising.
Yes, it’s a show about solving everyday mysteries that can’t be solved by googling, but it’s really a show about curiosity and people’s willingness – their craving, even – to share their deepest thoughts with a curious stranger. It also doesn’t induce the kind of anxiety you get from listening to true crime; the stakes are low, nobody dies, and every mystery gets solved unambiguously.
In an on-stage interview at King’s Place last month with Caroline Crampton, Kine talked about how the show came to be cancelled and how she was treated by Gimlet. I hope she makes those remarks public at some point, and that one way or another we get another Kine podcast project soon.
5. Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonald’s?
Pound-for-pound, few other podcasts have given me as many laugh-out-loud moments as Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonald’s. This show is very stupid, I love it dearly, and I tell people about it at every opportunity without shame.
The plot: self-styled investigative journalist Brian Thompson wants to know whatever happened to the pizza served at McDonald’s between the late 1980s and the early 1990s. That’s it.
I have a theory that a medium hasn’t really come of age until someone has satirised its clichés and tropes, and here podcasting gets its wings as Brian Thompson nails the more ridiculous aspects of the true crime genre and Big Podcasting.
A few bonus recommendations from my colleagues at the RSA:
We’re enjoying the new season of Heavyweight
Adanna Shallowe in our RSA Global team got me listening to The World Next Week from the Council on Foreign Relations, which does a great roundup of world news
The RSA’s resident historian Dr Anton Howes endorses Revisionist History, which is high praise indeed
The Ezra Klein Show is well worth a listen if you – like us – are an unabashed policy wonk.