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.
Audio Production Awards 2018 shortlist
Dead pleased to have been shortlisted for my work with the brilliant people at the RSA, CLASS and the New Economics Foundation. You can hear my entry here:
Podcast equipment starter list
Quite often I’m asked for advice about buying equipment for a podcast. Equipment is less important than the room, which is less important than having a good idea, format and interesting people. But with that said, here’s the list of kit I recommend.
The items on the list are neither the cheapest nor most expensive way to go, but strike a good balance in terms of value for money. It’s nearly all stuff I use myself, too.
Exploring divisions
This piece first appeared in the RSA Journal’s summer 2018 issue
Is it really true that we’ve never been more divided as a society? And if it is, how did it happen and what can be done?
Those are the big questions being investigated on Polarised, the new podcast from the RSA exploring the political and cultural forces driving us further apart. It’s presented by the RSA’s Matthew Taylor and the author of books about curiosity and lying, Ian Leslie.
The first six-part series examines some of the main political fault lines and asks whether and how they contributed to the Trump and Brexit votes. Some people blame the filter bubble and big tech, and the ways nefarious actors are using them to manipulate us. Others say it’s all about economic anxiety and inequality. Or perhaps there’s something deeper going on – something psychological – that’s bringing about a return to tribalism, wall-building and the politics of anger.
Matthew and Ian start by asking sociologist Paula Surridge whether we’re now divided into two main tribes – liberals and authoritarians – finding that both sides are becoming more entrenched. Authoritarianism may be taking hold in some parts of the US and Europe, but equally defenders of liberalism are more becoming more staunch in their views.
By now, lots of us have heard at least part of the story of the Facebook election scandal. Cambridge Analytica, the company in the eye of the storm, has closed its doors and is under investigation. But how effective were its methods? Can ‘psychographic microtargeting’ – new methods used to create personalised ads which play upon our deepest, darkest fears – really swing elections and referendums? We hear about experiments in deploying these methods in the UK, and cast the whole conspiracy theory in considerable doubt.
Online campaigning tactics might not be the primary cause of division – but has the internet poisoned our politics in other ways? Is it inevitable that the internet and social media drive us to the extremes, or do they just hold up a mirror to an already divided culture? Ian and Matthew explore the dark side of the internet – trolls, racist memes, hate-filled comment sections and increasingly virulent culture wars – and ask whether it hijacked the White House. Their guide is Whitney Phillips, author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture.
Perhaps the real key to understanding polarised societies is the issue that’s defined economic life in Britain since the late seventies: rising inequality. Meanwhile, in the US, some people put ‘economic anxiety’ at the root of the Trump votes. But what does that phrase really mean, and is it masking racial undercurrents? Ian and Matthew speak to Faiza Shaheen, director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS). And we hear from the Emmy-winning director and photographer Lauren Greenfield, whose new documentary Generation Wealth tells the story of how the American Dream came to be corrupted.
The final two parts of the series deal with the way we construct our realities and talk about politics. Silvia Majo-Vazquez from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism busts some myths about echo chambers, filter bubbles and fake news. And Claire Fox from the Academy of Ideas makes the case for the politics of anger and passionate debate.
The first series of Polarised is available for free on Google Podcasts and Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts
Cymbals strapped to my knees
I talked to Caroline Crampton about my work and chronic imposter syndrome for her PodMail newsletter.
Music for CLASS on Class
I’m producing a new podcast miniseries for a think tank, the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (or CLASS for short), with Huw Jordan and the presenter Dr Faiza Shaheen. It’s an attempt to move past the superficial discussion of class politics we’ve had in Britain since the Brexit vote. We’re calling it CLASS on Class.
One of the constraints of the relatively low-budget projects I work on – and of podcasts in general, for dull and annoying licencing reasons – is that the obvious commercial music choices are difficult or costly to use. Otherwise I’d probably be using wall-to-wall Philip Glass, though I’m sure the world doesn’t particuarly need more of that.
Another affordable and more straightforward option would be royalty-free music libraries, which contain music often produced specifically to be used as generic music beds for video. Let me know if you find a good one. I’m still looking.
Big public Creative Commons libraries, then (like Free Music Archive) end up being essential, both for the simplicity of the licencing and the sheer breadth of weird stuff they contain.
Lots of the top-ranked tracks are either unsuitable for the kind of podcasts I make, or overused by other producers. So I end up spending a lot of time searching random keywords, hoping to find something usable, and adding tracks to my own production library with tags that inevitably make no sense to me when I eventually use the track for something 9 months later. There are a few big artists with Creative Commons releases, like Nine Inch Nails, but a fair bit of the music I use isn’t on Spotify or Apple Music or even for sale anywhere. I’ve used tracks that have had fewer than 100 plays, including a bunch of stuff by Ecuadorian artists for our Weekly Economics Podcast episode on then-leader Rafael Correa’s radical economic policies.
Maybe I still make choices that sound clichéd to fit with my idea of what a modern, post-Radiolab podcast should sound like. Who knows. My sense though is that these constraints mean I have to make more unusual music decisions at least some of the time, which is no bad thing.
In summary: Philip Glass is good, but so are constraints.
Weekly Economics Podcast takes bronze at the British Podcast Awards
A huge thank you to everyone we’ve had on the Weekly Economics Podcast over the years - we were pleased to take bronze in the current affairs category at the British Podcast Awards last week. And congratulations to BBC World Service, who won gold for The Inquiry, and The Economist, who won silver for The Economist Asks. Pretty good company to be in.
What the Five Year Forward View update means for people with cancer
There are some reasons to be optimistic, but the NHS and government still need to deal with the health service’s biggest problems
My take on the NHS chief’s updated plan to get the service through a period of financial drought. For Macmillan Cancer Support’s new Think, Improve, Change blog – the new home of all our policy analysis, research and commentary.
British Podcast Awards
Dead pleased that the podcast I produce for the New Economics Foundation is nominated alongside BBC World Service, The Economist and the New Statesman in the best current affairs category at the British Podcast Awards. And congratulations to friends at the New Statesman, whose podcasts I edit and mix occasionally.
Audio Production Awards 2016
I’m delighted and still quite shocked to say that I won best newcomer and best podcast producer at the Audio Production Awards last night. I owe a debt to Huw Jordan, Kirsty Styles and everyone who’s appeared or worked on the Weekly Economics Podcast. And thanks to the Radio Independents Group for running such a brilliant evening.
The judges said:
James Shield’s work is as fun and engaging as it is heavy-hitting. James’s production brought slick, flavoursome storytelling to complex and (usually rather dry) economic issues. The listener is lightly and painlessly drawn in to high-concepts and alternative slants on ‘There-is-no-alternative’ mainstream economic dogma. Highly diverting and entertaining. Millennials, look no further for a quirky, humane and compelling introduction to numbers and politics.
My entry is here: