Podcast Review - January 2019
06 Feb 2019 Tweet podcasts · podcasts-reviewHappy New Year! Let’s jump right in!
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This American Life - The Walls - 5/5
A fascinating episode! This American Life is one of those podcasts that I listen to rarely, but every time I do I end up with an episode that is absolute gold! This episode came out at the top of the “Trump shut down the government for a wall” news story and debates some of the amazing walls around the world. The conclusion is simple: Walls make us feel safe, irrespective of how big they are, whether there’s another wall on the other side of the wall on our side, whether it actually even exists or has been conjured out of nowhere just to pacify us. This episode also follows the story of a man who has lived all his life with a wall in his home country; A wall that has made his relatives strangers to him and how he reconciles with that. Once a wall is built, it becomes a fact of life and affects the way life is lived around it When put like that, we really see how much power walls have! An absolutely amazing episode!
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The Slow Burn - Season 1: Watergate
The Watergate scandal is something that was shrouded in a lot of mystery for me before I heard the first season of this podcast. The scandal is mentioned so often no matter which country’s news channel you turn on. It’s this daring attempt at covering up something that so many people knew that anyone who must have looked at it from the outside, in the aftermath, would have said: “AH! That could never have been kept under wraps” and yet the truth is, that it was kept under wraps for quite a long time. Listening to this podcast really makes you think about what would be discussed as history 50 years from now when other people are analyzing the choices that were made by us. A rivetting story that tries to get to the scandal from as many angles as possible!
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Modern Love - What The Sea Took Away
This episode talks about how to deal with loss, loss that is inexplicable. Loss that doesn’t come with the elusive concept of eventual closure.
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Modern Love - A Young Man’s Game
An episode about how bearing children is a young man’s game. It’s funny and evocative. One of the quotes that stayed with me after I finished listening to the episode: “I traveled and I wrote books, and I loved that life. But I truly regret that Larkin hasn’t gotten to know to know my mother, other than through our stories”
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Modern Love - How To Break Up With a 2 Year-old
Another amazing Modern Love episode! I have really been sucked into this podcast, it’s amazing essays and narations! This episode is about how babies attach so easily and so effortlessly with adults and even as they grow up to forget these adults and how important they were to them as babies, the adults keep getting older and realizing more and more how insignificant a part they were of this young human being’s life! Heart warming and heart breaking, in just a few paragraphs. If you can’t listen to the episode, definitely read the essay.
This is end of post 4 in this series!