lirazel | Entries tagged with podcasts

Highly recommend this podcast from CBC and NPR about the history of women having to "prove" they're women to compete in sports. It's equal parts interesting and infuriating--actually, no, it's very interesting, but it's exponentially more infuriating. It balances the history with the current (earlier this year) stories of a few athletes who have to deal with this injustice. "Testing" for gender is a whack-a-mole game: every time people finally manage to put a stop to one unfair kind of testing, the establishment comes up with another one.

Warnings for the kinds of transphobia, misogyny (especially misogynoir) and persecution of intersex people you'd expect to find in this story. A lot of you will probably want to avoid it for that reason, and I respect that. Take care of yourself! But if you are up to wading through that, it will help you understand this narrative of "protecting" women's sports and how the current transphobic panic is nothing new.

If you're podcast-ly inclined, do listen to this episode of The Last Archive about Ursula K. Le Guin, Ishi, and the relationship between scifi and anthropology.

I knew the story of the man English-speakers called Ishi and Le Guin's relationship to his story (and I've read Theodora Kroeber's book), but this was such a good exploration of it and well worth an hour of your time.

I recently listened to a (very interesting, recommended) 6-episode podcast called Sold a Story about why so many USAmerican kids (and Kiwi kids, too, apparently!) can't read. Long story short: a lady from New Zealand came up with this theory that kids don't learn by sounding out the words but by paying attention to context and stuff like this ("three-cueing"). Her ideas took off and schools stopped teaching phonics. There's a big publisher and some superstar reading pedagogy authors who have made an empire from teaching this weird theory despite the fact that neuroscience is very clear that, actually, yes kids do indeed learn phonetically. This is accompanied by a theory that if you just give kids books on topics they're interested in, they will learn to read automatically? I guess? The idea is to make them "passionate" readers but not actually, you know, worry about whether they understand the mechanics of reading. Which, as a lifelong passionate reader, seems wrong-headed.

It's a depressing story (mostly because it appears that upper and upper-middle class families have papered over this problem by hiring private tutors, while poorer and working class kids just suffer), but what I kept getting hung up on was that this has to be an English-language problem, right? The root of this thing has to come down to the fact that English has such weird and quirky spelling for so many words. A language like, say, Spanish that uses an alphabet or syllabic system for phonetic spelling--in which you always, always know how to pronounce the word just by looking at it--could never give rise to such a theory, right?

So the fact that this took off in the Anglophone world has got to be just another manifestation of the way that Anglocentrism bites us in the butt--if any of these people had looked at how kids learn to read Korean or whatever, they would have realized that their theory can't be right?

Or am I missing something?

A thing I have discovered about myself lately: I hate sports, but I really enjoy sports documentaries.

This surprised me, but I guess it shouldn't. My lack of interest in sports has always been about a) my completely disinterest in--actually, often it's stronger than that and becomes outright antipathy towards--competition (I just want everyone to win! Why can't everyone win???) and b) I find it boring to watch people do physical things--even things I can admit are very very impressive--unless those things are artistically-driven (think rhythmic gymnastics and figure skating, both of which are about artistic expression even more than they are about what bodies can accomplish).

If you don't care about competition or watching people do impressive things with their bodies...of course you're going to be uninterested in sports. Add to that the fact that sports are essentially narrative-less until they're over and you know who won (and which point people will construct a narrative around them) and I just get bored.

But sports documentaries are about people! Their relationships to each other! Their relationships to themselves! What you're willing to sacrifice to accomplish something extreme! (Even if I often think that they're crazy to sacrifice what they do, it's an interesting part of the human experience.) They're about society! And what things are important to us! And who we admire! And who we turn on!

All that to say I have watched a few sports documentaries lately and enjoyed the heck out of them.

Untold: Malice at the Palace is about...a riot at a basketball game? I guess? But it's about what caused that riot and how the narrative about it was constructed by the media and how the players involved ended up suffering for it even though they were far less culpable than the fans. I don't even remember this situation though I think it was back in 2004 and presumably it was all over the media at the time. Goes to show you how much I block out sports-related stuff from my mind.

Untold is apparently a 30-for-30 style sports documentary series on Netflix, and I've started one about a mob boss who bought his teenage son a minor-league hockey team (I don't think that's how they describe it? but that's essentially what it is) to run after he hurt himself and couldn't play hockey anymore. It's wild. I haven't finished that one yet, but I'll get around to at some point.

Last night during my dinner (the only time I really watch TV these days except when I'm on my treadmill) I started The Last Dance about the last season where the Chicago Bulls were any good. THE DRAMA, Y'ALL. This is like imperial palace level drama. At least the characters in this one I've heard of--as a kid growing up in the 90s, I of course could not escape Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman and the Bulls' omnipresence. I had no interest in anything but Space Jam and its soundtrack at the time, but it's interesting revisiting that era.

And then there's Athlete A which is only...kind of a sports documentary. It's much more a systemic sexual harassment/fighting for justice documentary as it's about the girls/women who were abused by Larry Nasser, but it does involve sports. I can't say that I enjoyed it, because it's harrowing. But I appreciate it and was deeply moved by it. I cried a lot while I watched it, is what I'm saying. I do recommend it if you're in a mental space where you can handle something so deeply upsetting.

Here's where my post splits off in two directions.

Direction 1: Rachael Denhollander is prominent in the film as she was the first woman to come forward and accuse Nasser. She's also been making occasional appearances in a podcast I'm listening to called The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. If you were evangelical or evangelical-adjacent in the early 2000s, you instantly know what that podcast is about just by the title. If you weren't, it's about how a sexist, homophobic, egotistical, combative guy started a megachurch in Seattle, became one of the most famous Christians in the world, and then was "brought down" when people came forward and said, "You know what? That whole church culture was really abusive."

I knew a lot of the stuff in this podcast because we were all watching it happen via blogs (the late, great Rachel Held Evans was a major voice pushing back against Driscoll. In essence, it was blogs that held Driscoll responsible and resulted in the pushback against him). But the scope of this podcast is compelling. It's as much analysis of What's Wrong with White Evangelical Culture as it is about this specific church. If you're at all curious about evangelical Christianity, I think it's a great podcast to listen to.

It's also sometimes very frustrating because it's created by Christianity Today, which used to be THE big respected centrist evangelical magazine (think Billy Graham) but, as evangelical culture has shifted so far to the right, it's become increasingly under attack for being too liberal. Even though they are in no way liberal. So sometimes the approach in this podcast could be off-putting to someone who isn't an evangelical Christian. The criticisms from the left are legitimate and understandable. I still think it's worthwhile, and I'm glad it exists.

I'm so glad that CT is tackling this. I'm heartened by how willing they are to say, "Abusive dynamics are really common in evangelical culture today, and we absolutely have to understand why that is and do something about that." What I worry is that no one's going to learn anything from the story they're telling because progressive Christians will say it's too conservative and conservative evangelicals will say it's too liberal (compromised by the world, influenced by the culture, etc.). Which is a shame because I do think that most of the time the reporting is really good. There are moments, as I mentioned, that frustrate me, but the reporters are talking even to people who've left the church entirely and explicitly saying, "We can learn from these people's experiences." Which I so appreciate.

And I want to mention Rachael Denhollander again. I find her fascinating. She's still firmly in the evangelical tradition, but she has become a lawyer and committed herself completely to rooting out institutional abuse wherever she can find it including in churches (which is why she's often interviewed in the podcast). I admire the heck out of her work even if I wish she didn't still believe some of the things she does. I don't really understand how she can be so completely committed to protecting women and children the way she is and not go full-on feminist, but people are complicated. Her relentless work will save lives, and white evangelicalism desperately, desperately needs voices like hers. I'm sure she gets unbelievable amounts of hate and death threats, but I think she will make at least some kind of difference.

Direction 2: To pivot back to problems with sports and especially children in sports, I've been thinking a lot over the last couple of months about how absolutely gross it is that we let children participate in high-level and even professional sports. FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLDS SHOULD NOT BE AT THE OLYMPICS OMG. Part of my thoughts about this were prompted by Athlete A, which is a pretty compelling argument that this level of intensity in children's sports is always going to result in abuse. (Why did this go on for as long as it did? Because parents were so desperately for their children to succeed in the world of gymnastics that they trusted an institution they never should have trusted, and that institution was so committed to protecting itself that it was incapable of rooting out abuse.) The other thing that's got this on my mind is all the teenagers winning in tennis lately and also how frank all of them (and older athletes, too, Naomi Osaka in particular) are about the incredible pressure they're under and how their mental health is affected.

I have long, long believed that sports in the US should be severed from education. Schools from kindergarten through university should only have intramural-type sports. The sports complex in our culture is absolutely insane and I hatehatehatehatehatehate the way it warps education, especially higher education. I hate the way all these horrible white dudes are making millions of the work of teenagers (many of whom are black and/or from poor backgrounds). It's disgusting.

But I'm becoming even more radical re: sports and I think that there just shouldn't be these intensely organized sports for kids. They just shouldn't exist. You should have to be 18 to compete at the Olympics or go professional or anything like that. Children should only be playing loosely organized kinds of sports like your municipal soccer program that practices like an hour or two a week and is mostly about having fun.

So I really appreciated Anne Helen Petersen's article against youth sports. There are a bunch of negative things about the professionalization of children's sports that she doesn't even touch on, but what she has to say is good.

I don't know. Maybe elsewhere in the world other cultures have healthy relationships with sports for kids. Maybe it's possible for kids to compete at high levels without it turning abusive. But we certainly haven't figured that out here in the US.

I really started listening to podcasts when I had a long-ish commute and wanted to feel like I wasn't wasting my time in the car. These days, I listen when I go on walks, cook or clean, or make icons. I have different levels of commitment (for instance, if I'm listening to something I really need to pay attention to, like, say, the Revolutions podcast, I only listen while I walk. But if I'm making icons and am only half-listening, I listen to something like You're Wrong About, which is more like having cool friends telling interesting stories while I'm in the room). I'm always on the lookout for new ones, though.

I had a number of things I wanted to recommend and also solicit some requests, so I thought I'd just lump it all into one post.

Recs:

+ I love the History Extra podcast in general--BBC History magazine staff interviews people, usually historians out with a new book or documentary series. What I like about this show is that they don't focus on any one particular era or topic, but instead will discuss anything history related. It does skew a bit British and frankly at this point I skip most episodes related to the Tudors or WWI because I'm just so sick of those. But you can easily do that--listen to the episodes that are of interest to you, ignore the ones that aren't. (Though I often find that the ones I think I'm not going to be interested in end up being more interesting than I thought.) Sometimes the people they interview are well-established or even famous (I was delighted by an episode a few weeks ago with Mary Beard), but they often interview historians who have just published their first book based on their dissertation, and these tend to be weird and niche and are some of my special favorites. They've got a big back catalogue so you can spend a lot of time with this show. If you like listening to knowledgeable people talk about things they're passionate about, this is the show for you.

This week I'm especially recommending this very odd episode about the United States' relationship with Shakespeare, written by a Shakespeare professor who wrote it as a way of getting to know his own country better. It's all fascinating, but I was especially delighted by the story of Ulysses S. Grant playing Juliet and looking fantastic in a dress and the fact that mid-19th century US was the golden age of women playing Romeo. DID YOU KNOW? Because I did not.

A few other recent episodes:

* William Dalrymple on the East India Company
* Resistance in the British empire
* The Holocaust orphans
* The woman who gave birth to rabbits

+ When I say that Reply All is probably the best podcast ever, I do not make that statement lightly. They market themselves as "a show about the internet," though usually they're talking about parts of the internet that are very unfamiliar to me. But really what they do is investigate interesting people and stories that are at least loosely internet-related. That sounds really generic, but they're so good at it! Every single episode is funny and interesting and I look forward to new episodes the way I do to a new episode of a great tv show. If you are interested in podcasts at all, you should at least check this one out.

Some recent episodes:

* The Case of the Missing Hit: "A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet. PJ takes on the Super Tech Support case." I definitely saw an article calling this the greatest podcast episode ever, which I do not think is true because I think this show has even better episodes than this one. But it is so good!
* part one of The Real Enemy: A three-parter. "The Alabama Democrats fight an unlikely foe in a struggle for Alabama’s future: themselves."
* 30-50 Feral Hogs: "A legit question from a rural American."
* part one of The Crime Machine: A two-parter. "New York City cops are in a fight against their own police department. They say it’s under the control of a broken computer system that punishes cops who refuse to engage in racist, corrupt policing. The story of their fight, and the story of the grouchy idealist who originally built the machine they’re fighting."
* And now I'm stopping because I could literally recommend a hundred episodes of this show.

+ You Must Remember This is so well-made that I legit judge all other podcasts by this show. If you have even the slightest bit of interest in classic Hollywood (and more recent Hollywood, for that matter), this show is without parallel. When we weren't sure for a while if it was going to continue, I mourned like when a favorite TV show got canceled. Thankfully, it's back!

You kind of have two options with this show: you can dive into one of the many multi-part series she does (on the Disney film The South of the South, on the Blacklist, on Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda, on dead blondes in Hollywood, on the Manson family's ties to Hollywood, on fact-checking Hollywood Babylon, on women who were romantically involved with Howard Hughes) or you can dip into the earlier days where she mostly did one-ofs and find one about Audrey Hepburn or Judy Garland or Elizabeth Taylor or more obscure figures like Gloria Graham or Eddie Mannix or Billy Haines. I'm not even going to bother recommending individual episodes because the best thing to do is scroll through the archive, find something that sounds interesting, and listen to it.

+ I also listen to a bunch of true crime podcasts that are usually self-contained seasons. Other favorites include Revisionist History, Against the Rules, RadioLab, Revolutions, Mobituaries, and You're Wrong About. Oh and a favorite limited series was Wild Thing, about Bigfoot which was so great and Heaven's Gate, about the cult.

Requests:

Does anyone have any recs for me? I am mostly interested in nonfiction stuff (the only fictional one I'm listening to is the Magnus Archives, and I am going very slowly with it) and not really comedy stuff. I have enough of white guys making other white guys life.

I love podcasts about history, psychology, social history/culture, forgotten stories, cults. I don't really have much interest in current events podcasts unless they're like Reply All, where they're delving into dark corners and other stuff that gets overlooked. The deeper the dive, the better. I will listen to true crime, but only if it doesn't feel salacious.