Podcasts I've Listened To and Liked Lately: Serial Documentaries

Matt and Will came back from Will's graduation trip to Peru last week, and they brought home with them some artisanal pottery, coca candy, a copy of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief translated into Spanish, two stuffed llamas, several bars of chocolate, a T-shirt with an unlicensed Game of Thrones reference, a 60-dollar bottle of pisco, and COVID.

The good news is that they took their rapid COVID tests out on the driveway as soon as they pulled in, so they went straight from the car to isolation in a separate part of the house (here's a chance to be grateful for our house's super weird layout!) without exposing me or Syd. And they both feel fine now, although they both definitely felt puny for the first couple of days.

The bad news is that now it's been SOOOOO long since I've gotten to hug half my family! We've been spending a ton of time hanging out in camp chairs in the front yard, gossiping from six feet apart. I dragged over a six-foot picnic table so Will could bring her LEGOs out and I could do fun stuff like edit Syd's final paper for her Intro to Serial Killers class (do YOU think that Gilles de Rais is guilty?). We managed to all eat ice cream together, with the help of bleach wipes and tossing things to each other from a distance. But it's not the family reunion I'd been looking forwards to, so instead of hanging out on the couch with my kids and husband, I've been continuing to entertain myself with all the projects and all the podcasts.

Like seriously, ALL the projects. Will's quilt top and my niece's quilt top and substitute teacher certification and organizing the bathroom closet and Pumpkin+Bear orders and lessons plans for teaching Girl Scouts how to make cold-process soap and poured container candles and then making my own cold-process soap and poured container candle to make sure I didn't miss anything and creating a slide deck for a workshop proposal and mowing the scary steep hill with the riding lawnmower and baking two different kinds of cobbler to decide which is more delicious but actually they're both equally delicious because, you know, it's cobbler.

And podcasts for all of that, interspersed with the entire Arctic Monkeys' discography and the occasional run-through of the Neil Patrick Harris Hedwig and the Angry Inch cast recording. 

I listen to all kinds of podcasts, but I really love serial documentaries when I'm doing these kinds of long projects. A five-hour podcast about the school group that got lost at the top of Mount Hood makes the five hours that I spend basting a dragon quilt top absolutely fly by! Here are some of my favorites of the serial documentaries I've been listening to.

This season of 30 for 30, Heavy Medals, is pretty intense, and all the trigger warnings because it does include the sexual assault scandal in USA gymnastics, but if you are approximately my age and you, too, watched the Olympics during the Bela Karolyi years, then you, too, might be as interested as I was to listen to this in-depth history of the Karolyi duo:

I also recommend Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, which covers the related topic of body image and abuses in the training of child gymnasts and figure skaters:

Caving disasters is one of my Special Interests, and I think I've read and watched just about everything available concerning the soccer team that got trapped in that cave in Thailand a few years ago. If you don't want to read and watch EVERYTHING about it, I thought that this season of Against the Odds, Thai Cave Rescue, is a really good consolidation of several sources. It feels very thorough, while also staying interesting and exciting:

If you want to read more about the cave rescue, I really liked Miracle in the Cave, written by a journalist who was on-site during the rescue:

Reading along in the textbook for Syd's Intro to Serial Killers class has *almost* broke me of my love of true crime... almost... but I actually listened to this season of Cold, about Susan Powell, quite a while ago, and it has really stuck with me:

Like, I bring it up in conversation a LOT. It's not terribly graphic, so it doesn't feel as exploitative as some true crime documentaries can, and the Susan Powell case has the added interest that all of the main characters--Susan Powell, her husband, and her father-in-law--were avid journalers! As in, audio and video journals! So there is SO MUCH evidence that's in their own words and voices, which is by turns sad and terrifying, but absolutely makes the experience of listening to the documentary feel so much more engaging and true.

I also bring up that 911 operator a lot as an example about what the hell is wrong with people. 

I've listened to a few different seasons of Even the Rich. It's really good for getting, say, a medium dive into a celebrity or scandal that you'd be interested to know more about than you've picked up via random news tidbits, but that you're not necessarily interested in knowing every obsessive detail about. This season on Britney Spears really was a revelation to me, and got me firmly on the #FreeBritney bandwagon:

After you listen to that season, I highly recommend listening to the Celebrity Memoir Book Club episode covering Jamie Spears' memoir:

Britney's mother also has a memoir that they also discuss on this podcast, and they're both so interesting because they're literally telling you in their own words how they abused Britney and took advantage of her for their own gain and they 100% do not see anything wrong with it at all. Yikes!

If you love a serial documentary podcast that I don't know about yet, please let me know. I still have Will's quilt to bind and quilt, and my baby niece's quilt to applique and back and bind and quilt, and the rest of that slide deck to create, and I think I need to figure out how to teach seven teenagers how to press flowers in the microwave in the same kitchen in which I'm teaching them how to make cold-process soap...

Podcasts I've Listened To and Liked Lately: Postmodern Fiction, Plot Summaries, and Serial Documentaries

 

OMG that llama puzzle. I was sooo excited when I found it at the thrift store, because Will is visiting Peru this summer and also loves llamas.

But see how the llamas are assembled, and the edges, and then there's just... empty space? Yeah, those spaces are green. Just green. Green in subtle different shades, sure, but mostly just green. This is the WORST puzzle. We all absolutely loathe it. After this, I am putting a temporary ban on puzzles that are over 300 pieces until I can forget the misery of literally holding every single puzzle piece to every single empty spot because that is the absolute only way to find its match.

BUT sitting together at that table, putting together a puzzle or working crosswords or coloring, is what Will and I do while listening to Welcome to Night Vale, our collective favorite podcast:

I am a HUGE fan of serialized horror podcasts, and I have several favorites that I've listened to the entire run of:

Here are the ones that I've also introduced to the kids, and that we listen to together:

You've got to start each of these from the first episode, and they're very bingeable, because there's always a story arc and an overarching mystery and often details that don't seem relevant but turn out to BE, in fact, relevant! Seriously, I think the kids and I listened to, like, eight Magnus Archives in a row on that long drive home from Michigan last month. My favorite favorites are all postmodern fiction pieces that incorporate elements of pseudo-science/pseudo-history or paranoid fiction that incorporates that same kind of pseudo-knowledge of the world.

So that's what I've been listening to when I really want to LISTEN to something. I also have a whole genre of podcasts that I listen to at times when I want to listen to something, but I don't want to expend absolutely any intellectual labor on the listening. This is usually while I'm gardening or walking, times when I might want to get lost in my thoughts for a few minutes and then zone back in without feeling like I've got to rewind. For those times, I really like a few podcasts in which the hosts talk through the plot of movies or a book series, with commentary OF COURSE. Every now and then I'll try a new one, but these are the ones that I'm devoutly faithful to:

Here are a couple more where I like the hosts a lot, but I pick and choose only the episodes that interest me:

Two recent episodes of Celebrity Memoir Book Club that I really liked are the one on the Jamie Spears memoir and the one on the Naya Rivera memoir. Those are good examples of their podcast, because they HATED the Jamie Spears memoir (for lots of very good reasons!) and loved the Naya River memoir (for lots of very good reasons!). 

This is the only one that the kids like, too, if I pick a good episode:

We listened to the Hereditary episode all together on a road trip one time, and we were basically all freaking out simultaneously. It's so good!

Y'all know how I'm obsessed with people dying or going missing in national parks? I LOVE this podcast:

I love what a deep dive the hosts go into in every episode. Sometimes, information is discovered about a missing person or their remains are found, and the hosts will do an update episode. 

When I'm doing handwork, sewing or crafting orders for my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, I like to listen to something a little more engaging. I really like long-form serial documentaries, although I feel like I must be super picky about them, because good ones are so hard to find! Here are my favorites:

I just realized that Stolen has a new season out, which is awesome, because I loved their first season, The Search for Jermaine. Now I've got something to listen to when I sew the car play mat that I've been thinking about making for my niece's upcoming birthday!