Tag Archives: podcast

Podcasts on Building People up or Tearing them Down

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it.

– Love’s Labour’s Lost

I’ve talked about podcasts before, and I hope you don’t mind me recommending a few in the way of writing about what I’m listening to now. And I’d rather do that than play with the cat.

World News Group is releasing the third season of their podcast Effective Compassion, a set of features reporting on ministries to the homeless or other at-risk populations. This season, debuting in a few days, will focus on prison ministries. You can hear a preview today.

Dr. Anthony Bradley is posting a new set of episodes on a variety of topics, but his main focus has been manhood and the making of men. His first episode this season is a talk about the benefits of college fraternities with the president of Chi Psi fraternity at Clemson.

I recently learned of a podcast dedicated to reading books the two hosts will probably hate, called 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back. The most recent show discusses at great length a marvelously atrocious fantasy that one could easily assume, they suggest, was written by an eight-year-old. There’s no way to overstate how bad this story is, even after hearing of the assault by sword-wielding octopuses and sharks with teeth and noses as sharp as swords. How could it be bad with all of that? I listened to about 90 minutes of it before giving up and trying another episode about a much older novel with very manly men who cried a lot. Yes, I laughed. I’ll probably listen more, but I can’t take too much mockery of really bad writing. It wears me out. (Maybe I’ve seen too much of bad writing; that’s not something I want to say out loud.)

Another new podcast focuses on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. The MLK Tapes questions the official narrative of who killed Dr. King and points to the many strange details that also occurred that day. It’s significant that the King family do not believe James Earl Ray murdered Dr. King, and since he was not put on trial at the time, a jury was not presented with evidence either.

Let me end this post by noting an upcoming book from the three men behind the enjoyable, long-running podcast The Happy Rant. Releasing this August will be a book that purportedly reads much like the podcast listens (wait, much like listening to the podcast … reads–nevermind). Ted Kluck, Ronnie Martin, and Barnabas Piper chat about Christian cultural topics and generally poke fun at themselves. It should be a fun read.

Photo: Mother Goose Market, Hazard, Kentucky 1979. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

The Fight for North Koreans

Part two of The World and Everything in It’s story on North Korea is out, and it’s explosive. I haven’t heard these details before. It gives you hope that the regime cannot continue.

However, the current president of South Korea Moon Jae-in works against that hope. From the transcript:

Gordon G. Chang is a China analyst and author of The Coming Collapse of China. He thinks that Moon’s hard-left economic policies and his history suggest that he really wants to establish socialism in a unified Korea. He’s limited because South Korea has a democratic government.

CHANG: But if he could do what he wants to do he would formally merge South Korea and North Korea and I think he would impose a strict socialism in the South so it would be a very different South Korea. It wouldn’t be a democracy, it wouldn’t be a free market society, it would resemble in many respects what we see today in North Korea.

What’s more, Chang says, Moon hopes to align this unified Korea with China.

CHANG: Moon Jae-in, if it were up to him, he would end the alliance with United States, throw out American troops, and essentially become a satellite of China.

Legal Docket from World Radio

World News Group has released the second season of its Legal Docket podcast with a compelling story of James King who was beaten up in 2014 by federal and state agents who assumed he was someone else.

The agents were unidentified in a black vehicle. According to King, they called him over as he was crossing the street and asked him about his wallet to see some ID. He says he thought they were going to mug him. He ran. They assaulted him, and when street cops arrived, he said, “Please God! Be real police.”

He says he would have complied with officers, had they identified themselves. The agents say they did. And they arrested him for resisting arrest.

King refused to plea bargain, which is a common tactic to avoid tying up the courts. I’m told defense lawyers have encouraged their clients to plea bargain, even though they believe in their clients’ innocence, because juries are unpredictable. King wouldn’t bargain. He wasn’t going to plead guilty to something he didn’t do, and the jury believed him.

King followed up by suing the FBI and the federal government for damages. His lawyers filed under a variety of laws, amendments, and legal rationale, which they said is standard procedure. That’s where the sticky legal issues come in. King’s suit has gone all the way to the Supreme Court, not due to the merits of his claims, but due to technical questions over his ability to sue law enforcement officers.

This isn’t the pressing news of the day, but it’s a good podcast and may take you away from the pressing news for an appropriate amount of time. All of World’s podcasts are well-produced and well-written. Not glitzy, melodramatic, or boring.

Getting Away with Murdering a State Official

Michael Francke made a new for himself as a clear-headed director of New Mexico’s Department of Corrections. The governor of Oregon appeared to have wanted his clear thinking for his state’s department of correction when he offered him the position in 1987, but as the excellent podcast Murder in Oregon reports, nothing was it appeared in the Beaver State.

The day before Francke was scheduled to present evidence of corruption within his department and his recommendations for resolving it, he was murdered in the parking lot of his government office. Exactly what happened on January 17, 1989, remains a mystery. What’s known is that he was stabbed in the chest and bled out on the steps of an unused office doorway.

A guard says he saw two men standing by Francke’s car, and when the left each other, one of them ran across the parking lot, the other walked back toward the office in no particular rush. The guard did not stick by that testimony in trial, but why he changed his mind is only one of a thousand odd details about the Francke’s murder and the sorry investigation that followed it.

Listen the podcast trailer here or through your podcast app, and you’ll hear a bit of their great storytelling. A columnist who has written about this story for years is one of the show’s producers, so we get full accounts of the events in 1989 in light of evidence hidden from the public or ignored by authorities at the time.

Every episode is engaging, unlike some true crime; the most recent one, number nine, exposed the horrific, manipulative nature of one of the suspected officials. Considering they convicted an innocent man, put him away for almost 30 years, and avoided prosecution themselves, I’d say they got away with it, even if it catching up to the living next year.

Does Free Speech Protect a Book for Hitmen?

This would have been a great topic for Banned Books Week, but, alas, I’ve had a long, sad year with a variety of responsibilities I haven’t wanted to work through. But now is as good a time as any to talk about the extent of free speech and the free press, isn’t it?

A 1983 book called Hit Man by Rex Feral purports to be a manual for contract killers with practical instructions on how to eliminate your targets without getting caught. The author says it is for entertainment purposes only, and you can see from GoodReads many contemporary readers think the book is too simple, dated, and even silly.

But things have changed a bit over 35 years.

In 1993 James Perry snuck into a Maryland home and murdered a disabled eight-year-old, his nurse, and his mother, following many of the details recommended in this book. A podcast from iHeart Radio and Hit Home Media, also called Hit Man, opens with an exploration of this murder and the man who hired Perry to carry it out. Later the families of the victims filed a lawsuit against the publisher, claiming the book was intended to be real-world advice that could be acted upon by anyone wanting to murder someone for a fee, and in doing so the publisher aided and abetted in murder.

The publisher argued that it did not intend for anyone to murder or be murdered based on what they read and that it has the freedom to publish whatever it wants.

In a style that may be a bit over-earnest, Hit Man the podcast tells the stories of the murder, this lawsuit, other crimes connected to the book, the identity of the pseudonymous author, and the possible inspiration for the book.

Should our country allow a book like this (and others like it which are still in print)? Is this the kind of abhorrent speech we say we would argue against but fight for the rights of others to use? You would need to know what’s in the book to make that decision; the podcast offers some details, and you can read the whole book by searching for the text file. It’s possible it doesn’t say anymore about pulling off contract killing than many other books, fiction and non.

The bulk of the legal argument against it was about intent. Is the book what it claims to be, “a technical manual for independent contractors,” or is it an imaginative book on crime? I think there should be a line that we don’t cross, but ours is a society originally suited for a religious people who actively submit to the governor of the universe, so that line will have to be a moral one. If we live with a morality that is only defined by the law, then we will not live happily for long.

Hit Man is a real banned book, by the way, so I hope it makes the big list one of these years.

Photo by Skitterphoto from Pexels

Go Podcast, young man

Everyone is podcasting these days. Your aunt is probably planning one if she can only get Clippy and Bob to show her how to record it. There are over 630,000 podcasts available today on just about everything. True crime is a popular topic. For months I’ve daydreamed about the details of a mock crime podcast that could use the song above as a theme, present itself in the tone and rhythm of true crime shows, but actually tell a story about nothing at all. If I could find one or more colorful Southerners who tell jokes and funny stories for hours, I would have material for a great recurring segment. I’d probably be the only one who thought it was funny though.

Podcasting has been taken up by both professionals and amateurs, like anything on the Internet. A couple of my favorites are “The World and Everything in It,” the news show from World News Group. It is the best news out there. I recommend playing the show from your desktop, if you don’t do podcasts in a mobile-like devicy kind of way. (You might ask Alexa to play “The World and Everything in It” and see what you get. I have no idea.) Also I’m new to a show that has been around since 2009, “The Sporkful,” a show about food for the rest of us. It’s a ton of fun. A recent episode on southern BBQ in Chicago made me want to get out and try things (which I won’t do, of course, because budgets mean something in my house.)

That may lead you to ask, has podcasting been around ten years already? Yes, it began in 2004. The first how-to book came out in 2005. Even before that, we had audioblogging in some capacity.

The way I listen to my handful of shows is through one ear while driving. I don’t want to plug both ears in case I need to hear something, so with road and wind noise in the background I need podcast audio to be clear with a steady volume. I know I’m usually behind the tech curve, so I wonder if my listening experience is typical, but I encourage the podcasters out there who are recording their conference calls in hopes of landing a better book contract to listen to those recordings with plenty of outside background noise. If you can’t hear what’s been said, neither will I.

Reading Encourages Virtue

World News Group’s Listening In podcast interviews Professor Karen Swallow Prior today on how reading broadly and deeply enriches our lives and encourages moral virtue. The talk anticipates the release of Prior’s book, coming out in a few days, called On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books.

The talk begins by describing the classic understanding of the “good life” and spends some time on courage as a measure of how much good would be preserved over the risk of the action.

‘Where have the words gone?’

My wife is beginning to write a book. Her editor is the son of a Nobel laureate, but that is Oldthink. Because he is a clever man who keeps his finger on the pulse, he has my wife recording podcasts even before the book is begun.

Richard Brookhiser of National Review writes about his wife podcasting the subject of her book as she writes it, giving a glimpse perhaps of the future of words. (via Prufrock News)

New Podcast Is Both Curious, Repulsive

S-Town is the to-rave podcast of the month. It comes from the people who make This American Life and the podcast that spawned 100 imitations, Serial. I heard about Serial at some point in the middle of the run, I think. Maybe it was at the end of its first season. I heard many good things from many people, but I never listened to it. Podcasting, developed in 2000, just hasn’t been my thing, because portable tech hasn’t really been my thing. Whenever I heard a podcast, it was through my PC, kind of like the cans-and-string method. Only in the last few weeks have I begun to use a loaner iPad for something it’s actually good at.

So I was ready when I caught word of the new S-Town, which released all seven episodes on March 28. That initial word described a true crime podcast, but S-Town is a different story. (spoilers)

It begins with the wildly colorful, possibly genius John B. McLemore reaching out to Brian Reed about a murder that happened in his home town, Woodstock, Alabama, about which he needed a barrel of venom to describe. Everyone, including himself at times, was a loser, a failure, an idiot, and many more vulgar labels. His old school was Auschwitz. The police were corrupt. The county had one of the highest rates of child abuse and molestation anywhere. At least a couple people asked John why he didn’t move away since he hated the place so much.

John B. can work himself into a fit by thinking of how no one is outraged over countless liberal talking points, and this murder is a prime example. Everyone knows who did it. The man himself has bragged about it. Why doesn’t anyone give a rat’s rear-end?

The story shifts from that question to focus on John B., which isn’t a selling point. He’s a babbling brook of liberal outrage and profanity. He can’t tell Brian about the many flowers and butterflies on his property without worrying that they’re dying off. By episode two, I was already telling him to shut up. Two of the people who may have cared about him the most pushed him away because they couldn’t bear up under the weight of his poisonous worldview. Continue reading New Podcast Is Both Curious, Repulsive

True Crime Podcasts That Catch Your Ear

I don’t listen to podcasts much, mostly because of technical limitations. My commutes haven’t been long. My iPod probably qualifies as a vintage edition, and I’m not a regular iTunes user. When I listen to podcasts, it’s through a computer, sometimes while washing dishes, usually while doing things that don’t require my full attention. I’ve heard a few episodes of Crime Writers On, which has put me onto two other true crime podcasts.

via GIPHY

Both series talk through a current criminal case, but that’s where their similarity ends. The first series is out of Hawaii. “Offshore,” produced by Honolulu Civil Beat, focuses on 2011 incident in which an off-duty federal officer shot and killed a young Hawaiian man. Here’s the preview.

Many on the island see the case as a tangible symbol of powerful Americans running over native Hawaiians, which some have said it how the island kingdom became a US state in the first place. This abuse of privilege dramatically unfolded in an 80-year-old case remarkably similar to the current one. Reporter Jessica Terrell draws the parallels between the two cases and gives an ear to the hearts of Hawaiians who want justice and respect. Continue reading True Crime Podcasts That Catch Your Ear