Each month, Podcast Review’s staff offers recommendations on the best new podcasts to listen to. Here are our favorites for November:
When Serial Productions drops a new podcast, we pay attention. The latest four-episode series is a story of structural injustice, told with the spare narrative style we’ve come to expect from this team. But The Kids of Rutherford County departs from previous series in a few ways. There are no dead bodies, no murdered women. What persists is the issue of false imprisonment, this time concerning a group of children illegally detained for obscure reasons. In collaboration with ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio, the show investigates a decade of dubious imprisonments involving hundreds of children, and the former juvenile delinquents who attempt to put it right.
Land of the Giants: The Twitter Fantasy
One of our favorite tech podcasts is back with a new season about the social media company formerly known as Twitter. Hosted by Vox’s Peter Kafka, the season includes interviews with former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and its first VP of Product, Jason Goldman, setting it apart from the slew of Musk-related content circulating through our RSS feeds. Land of the Giants typically covers large tech companies, but as is noted in episode one, Twitter wasn’t a big player when it became embroiled in the Iranian protests in 2009. We all have an opinion about Twitter. But do any of us really know the full story behind its rise and ongoing fall? By figuring out what we got wrong, we might glimpse where Twitter (sorry, X) will go next.
Investigative podcasts usually involve crimes, not books. Especially not books that began as fan fiction. But Missing Pages, an original podcast from The Podglomerate, returns with a quirky second season that delves into a world of copyright law, ghostwriters, and self-publishing. The promo for the show promises high stakes: “Book bans are on the rise across America. With the rise of social media, book publishers are losing their power as the industry gatekeepers.” But you don’t need to listen long before arriving at werewolf smut. The show is all the better for it. And while it seems a bit audacious to compare Shakespeare’s referencing of Jupiter and Diana to the practice of adapting existing content into commercial fan fiction, Missing Pages is an engaging, educational listen for those curious about the future of publishing.
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