Recently I’ve been doing quite a bit of commuting so hey… more podcast listening time. Here’s a bumper crop of recommendations for your listening pleasure.
Georgia Catt, Jamie Bartlett and team at the BBC have made a stunning journalistic podcast. It’s made even better thanks to the wonderful sound design by Phil Channel, who also worked on the masterful ‘Death in Ice Valley‘.
They masterfully investigate OneCoin, a multi-level marketing scam which purports to be a cryptocurrency ‘Bitcoin killer’. Yet the currency can’t be traded and can only be purchased through ‘educational packages’. The founder disappears (the Cryptoqueen they are searching for) and the story gets weird and weirder as more people come forward through the series – a OneCoin beauty pageant, a OneCoin OneLife church in Uganda and so on. That OneCoin was able to reach globally, from Amsterdam to a farming village in Uganda, is remarkable. But also how the hype around technology, getting rich quick and regulatory failures all played their part in letting a few get enormously rich at the expense of so many people who couldn’t afford to lose a penny. Go listen, it’s absolutely superb.
This is a heartfelt memoir written and narrated by Michelle Parise covering her marriage, its collapse and her life after divorce as a part-time mother trying to find love in Toronto. Ethnically Italian it’s also about identity as a second generation immigrant, about what relationships can and should be in the age of app-based dating and so much more. It’s beautiful, moving and searingly honest. Don’t miss the accompanying website which has lots of lovely extra details.
This is a fun journalistic romp through a bizarre US story of a feud between a petting zoo owner specialising in big cats and an animal rights activist which escalates to hitmen being hired, fires being set and more.
BBC Radio 4 continue their Intrigue series with this fairly short series into the story of how a small team of students dug tunnels to help people escape from East Berlin. The series is filled with powerful personal testimony from participants, who suffered tunnel floods, Stasi spies and all sorts of other challenges. It is well paced, with lots of interesting detail. Well worth a listen.
This podcast, from the excellent New Hampshire Public Radio team who produced Bear Brook, is all about disease. Specifically it’s about Lyme Disease: The story of how it was discovered in… yes Lyme, New Hampshire… and the challenges early sufferers had in being listened to by medical professionals. The series patiently explains epidemiology, how ticks were found to be key to transmission, unpacking why vaccines have been hard to develop for the disease, through to various attempts to control the disease. It stops off on the way to why and how lots of dubious treatments persist at great cost to patients, and why doctors don’t agree on how to treat some patients. So yes, this is about Lyme disease, but it’s also about the modern medical model and how we don’t know as much as we think we do, which leaves us vulnerable in times of illness to quacks. A very well produced and thought provoking series.
Sex Power Money with Sara Pascoe
Sara Pascoe has a book to promote, also called ‘Sex Power Money’. So rather brilliantly she decided to produce a podcast interviewing people on the topics her book explores. And through word of mouth I heard it was rather good. One of the topics I explored in my aborted PhD on government policy consultations was a Home Office one on sex work. The literature review I did on this took me into a world I had previously known absolutely nothing on, but it soon became stark that the evidence on what works to reduce harm (decriminalisation etc) was rather different to the policy options being debated in the political space (Nordic model, criminalisation etc). Sara Pascoe proves to be an excellent interlocutor talking to sex workers and campaigners to open up the many complex issues we as a society face when trying to explore how we handle the intersection of sex, power and money. I felt much better informed through listening to this short series. Give it a go.
Jason Kitcat 