Each month, Podcast Review’s staff offers recommendations on the best new podcasts to listen to. Here are our favorites for July:
In The 13th Step, Lauren Chooljian of New Hampshire Public Radio investigates Eric Spofford, the founder of an addiction treatment network across the state, for multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. As Chooljian explains in the series’ premiere, the podcast’s title refers to a term common in treatment circles, implying that many men who complete the 12 steps target women just entering treatment. Chooljian uses the allegations against Spofford as a jumping off point toward understanding the power dynamics that allows for sexual abuse within addiction treatment culture. The first episode features the stories of two women who report that Spofford targeted them when they were most vulnerable.
Who shat on the floor at my wedding?
Fresh buzz around this hilarious mystery podcast means that Who shat on the floor of my wedding? is back on our radar. It doesn’t take a detective to figure out what crime was committed. Just as well, since the only sleuth on this show is delightfully amateur. In case you missed it the first time around, brides Helen Mclaughlin and Karen Whitehouse are shocked to discover that one of their wedding guests has violated their big day with excrement, and so recruit their friend, the under-qualified ‘Detective’ Lauren Kilby, to help them track down the culprit. One of the funniest podcasts to have emerged in the last few years, the laughs are not forced, nor are they particularly juvenile, given the subject matter. Who shat on the floor of my wedding? is cosy crime with a healthy dose of double entendre.
The latest from Serial Productions and the New York Times shares the horrifying experiences of several patients of the Yale Fertility Clinic. Host Susan Burton interviews women who underwent egg retrieval procedures at the clinic and experienced immense, medically-unexpected pain. The podcast goes on to reveal what went wrong in these procedures, and attempts to understand why these women were met with such disbelief when they reported their experiences to the clinic. Burton spends time exploring the dissonance each woman encountered between their own pain and what they were told was within the realm of possibility.
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