The sun has gone, the war hasn’t, and I’ve had a weekend that I would generously describe as sub par. And what do we do when things are sad? Sit and silently reflect on the contents of our soul? No. Wrong. Block out the thoughts with podcasts. Have some podcasts.
Series
The Butterfly Effect (Jon Ronson, Audible Original)
Ugh I know. This is an Audible original so you can only get it if you sign up to hand over your cash to Jeff Bezos. The good news is, Audible is free for the first month. The other good news is that if you are better organised than me you can cancel your membership before the free trial ends. Anyway, tune in next week for more top tips on how to beat The Man.
On to the podcast. The Butterfly Effect is Jon Ronson’s exploration of the many different consequences of the wide availability of free internet porn (It feels strangely quaint to describe it thus. Saying free porn is widely available is a bit like saying Oxygen is). The stories he finds are simultaneously moving and also completely and utterly mad. This is not part of the ‘oh no there’s porn everywhere and now nobody is having sex any more’ industrial complex. It is far more human and humane than that. Ronson is the absolute king of cause and effect - he sees stories where nobody else does (see further his more recent series Things Fell Apart, about the culture war). This is also - as far as I can remember - the only podcast I have cried listening to. Ronson is A Good Thing. Take my money, Jeff. All is forgiven.
https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Butterfly-Effect-Podcast/B08DDC8DNH
Episode
Long Distance, Reply All (Gimlet)
The cool thing about podcasting is that it is really an industry still in its infancy. In recent years, the great and the good (read: eyewateringly rich) have noticed they may be able to cash in on this and have started to invest heavily in audio. This is good news for us as listeners. It is also good news for producers, who currently have a lot of money sloshing around to pursue completely madcap projects with mega budgets. (Mega budgets by audio standards obviously, in TV they would basically get you half an on-set lunch buffet).
This episode of Reply All is as good an example of this as any. Host Alex Goldman gets a scam telephone call. He decides to chat to the person on the other end of the phone, and to establish who he is and what the nature of the scam is. The journey eventually takes him all the way to India to find the call centre itself. Just a great romp. If this sort of high budget fun is up your street I would also recommend Thank You for Noticing and The Case of The Missing Hit from the same series. Plus We Want Plates from Endless Thread (a months long investigation to find a pile of plates which was posted on reddit). Any industry that produces something like that is in great shape imo.
Something Topical
Tom Tugendhat MP on Matt Forde’s Political Party
Bit of an unusual one for me. I don’t really listen to podcasts about politics because thinking about politics is my day job and I’d rather not do it on my own time as well. The Political Party is my one exception to this. Forde is a stand up comedian and former Labour advisor, and he interviews politicians in a funny and entertaining manner, often causing the politicians themselves to appear funny and entertaining too which is often no mean feat.
Tugendhat is the chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and is actually funny and entertaining. The interview is thoughtful about foreign policy and about the state of the government (Tugendhat is a Tory MP, but no fan of Johnson). It starts 10 mins into the podcast. There’s a bit of stand up at the start which you may also enjoy (again, jokes about politics are my day job so I find them quite hard to get on with in a personal capacity, but thats a me problem not a problem with the podcast).