podcast rec: You're Wrong About
Aug. 6th, 2021 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaI spent a lot of the last month sitting in cars, buses, and/or feeling ill, which is generally when my peak podcast consumption happens—and I found a pretty fun new one!
You're Wrong About features a dynamic duo of reporters who dig up some big news story/headline/controversy from a while back (generally in the 1980s-2000s range), pick apart the facts, and hone in on what the popular imagination misremembers, distorted, or just got plain wrong.
The two of them have pleasant chemistry, a laid-back, good-humored, and left-leaning style, and their ratio of banter-versus-fact-spewing really works for me. And the time period they cover is especially interesting to me, personally—it's usually stuff I'm old enough to have some memory of, but was also too young to really remember very much, beyond whatever vague impression I got from the adults around me or from Time magazine or whatever. So I always learn a lot!
Here's a few of my favorite episodes I've listened to, for a preview, if you're into this sort of thing:
Teri Schiavo. My memories of the whole Schiavo affair are, like... a South Park episode, lol. I was pretty young, and mostly remember thinking, "damn this sure seems like some private personal shit that the American public at large should NOT be chiming in on."
Well. I was right, insofar as, WOW it should not have become such a media shitshow—turns out the legal issues at hand were very clear! and the only reason it became a whole protracted thing was when one side of the dispute got a whole bunch of funding and letter-writing campaigns from... sigh... the religious right, which was really starting to flex its muscles, and whipped the whole thing into a media frenzy.
But the story of all the lead-up before it became a frenzy is what was really interesting to me here, and really tragic. Before the media and the legislature steps in, it's mostly a story of Lots Of Nice People Trying Extremely Hard To Do The Right Thing. Teri's fascinating, her husband is fascinating, the family is fascinating... it's a good story, just not AT ALL the one we were told in the press at the time.
Anita Hill. I'd always gotten the impression that Hill saw that Clarence Thomas was nominated, was like "shit guess I gotta whistleblow on my shitty ex-boss," and spoke out. Which, like, would've been a perfectly valid thing for her to do. But, no! Turns out she gave a private interview to the FBI, because the FBI goes around and background checks people who are gonna go sit on the Supreme Court, and someone leaked that (secret! subponea'd!) interview to the press, and then Congress was like okay fine shit I guess we need you to testify or something. Had that not happened, it's not clear she would've spoken out.
Which, uh, I'd definitely heard the annoying "wow if her boss sucked why didn't she speak up earlier hur dur" thing before, which is annoying regardless, but even moreso in light of bro this was literally not her choice; how did that detail slip through the press coverage???
(I mean, the answer is "look neither party was really happy about this whole thing and just wanted to close the hearing with the absolute bare minimum of drama because it was gonna be real #awk if they didn't confirm Thomas for various annoying reasons that the podcast goes into," etc.)
Though, note, Hill's also a total badass and stoic as shit under pressure and stands by everything she says. The episode also features some commentary from other women who were harassed by Thomas, including one who's such a total character that she's kind of one of my new heroes. It's all on the 'cast; give it a listen~
Kitty Genovese and "Bystander Apathy". W h e w. This episode was... a lot. tl;dr, it turns out that the "classic" case of so-called "bystander apathy", the thing where someone gets murdered and no one tries to intervene? Yeah, turns out the allegedly protoypical case of that was more about things like "911 literally didn't exist yet; do you have your police department's number memorized," and also "turns out 1960s NYC cops were corrupt as shit (and super-homophobic to boot)", and also "someone did call the police you fuckwits; NYT reporters get your shit together." So. Yeah. There's a really beautiful queer love story at the heart of it, though it, yeah, gets cut short by random awful violence before the end.
"Yoko Ono Broke Up The Beatles." I think the whole blame-Yoko argument was largely dismissed as shitty and misogynistic a good while ago (like, even my not-particularly-woke dad, who introduced me to The Beatles, scowls and mutters something about people being too mean to Yoko if you ask him about it), so that aspect of the story wasn't a surprise to me. But Lennon's whole deal, psychologically, is SUCH a fascinating goddamn messy suitcase to unpack, and some of the associated background on 60s rock culture and the contemporary art scene were really interesting & new to me.
Sex Offenders, mostly because I'm amused how cohost Sarah came out swinging on this one with, "Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we don't care if people accuse us of loving pedophiles!" Like damn girl, work it. (In particular, the episode's about how the extremely heavy-handed laws the US has around sex offenders—regardless of the severity of their crime, regardless of whether they've finished serving their sentence, etc—often make it quite literally impossible for them to simply be alive—e.g., in Miami the laws around "cannot live within [x] feet of [random thing]" make it where the only place sex offenders can legally live is basically, uh, under this one big bridge, and by the airport. So there's a huge homeless encampment under that bridge, full of dudes who literally can't live anywhere else. Great job, team. That's just one example; the episode has plenty more. This is an issue that's underreported on and imho really important; I walked away from the episode with the impression that the state won't literally kill sex offenders, but, they'll do their damndest to make it impossible for them to live, and... yeah. That's not okay, no matter how bad of a crime someone's committed. Find another fucking way.)
ETA: The Duke Lacrosse Rape Case: If you are the kind of person who browses /r/AmItheAsshole specifically to relish those threads where the overwhelming consensus is ESH, i.e. "EVERYONE SUCKS HERE," damn, have I got the podcast episode for you. Literally everyone in this case sucks! There wasn't any particular debunking in this episode; the basic facts as I remembered them were correct; but the more detail you get, the more you realize that everyone sucks so hard oh my God.
You're Wrong About features a dynamic duo of reporters who dig up some big news story/headline/controversy from a while back (generally in the 1980s-2000s range), pick apart the facts, and hone in on what the popular imagination misremembers, distorted, or just got plain wrong.
The two of them have pleasant chemistry, a laid-back, good-humored, and left-leaning style, and their ratio of banter-versus-fact-spewing really works for me. And the time period they cover is especially interesting to me, personally—it's usually stuff I'm old enough to have some memory of, but was also too young to really remember very much, beyond whatever vague impression I got from the adults around me or from Time magazine or whatever. So I always learn a lot!
Here's a few of my favorite episodes I've listened to, for a preview, if you're into this sort of thing:
Teri Schiavo. My memories of the whole Schiavo affair are, like... a South Park episode, lol. I was pretty young, and mostly remember thinking, "damn this sure seems like some private personal shit that the American public at large should NOT be chiming in on."
Well. I was right, insofar as, WOW it should not have become such a media shitshow—turns out the legal issues at hand were very clear! and the only reason it became a whole protracted thing was when one side of the dispute got a whole bunch of funding and letter-writing campaigns from... sigh... the religious right, which was really starting to flex its muscles, and whipped the whole thing into a media frenzy.
But the story of all the lead-up before it became a frenzy is what was really interesting to me here, and really tragic. Before the media and the legislature steps in, it's mostly a story of Lots Of Nice People Trying Extremely Hard To Do The Right Thing. Teri's fascinating, her husband is fascinating, the family is fascinating... it's a good story, just not AT ALL the one we were told in the press at the time.
Anita Hill. I'd always gotten the impression that Hill saw that Clarence Thomas was nominated, was like "shit guess I gotta whistleblow on my shitty ex-boss," and spoke out. Which, like, would've been a perfectly valid thing for her to do. But, no! Turns out she gave a private interview to the FBI, because the FBI goes around and background checks people who are gonna go sit on the Supreme Court, and someone leaked that (secret! subponea'd!) interview to the press, and then Congress was like okay fine shit I guess we need you to testify or something. Had that not happened, it's not clear she would've spoken out.
Which, uh, I'd definitely heard the annoying "wow if her boss sucked why didn't she speak up earlier hur dur" thing before, which is annoying regardless, but even moreso in light of bro this was literally not her choice; how did that detail slip through the press coverage???
(I mean, the answer is "look neither party was really happy about this whole thing and just wanted to close the hearing with the absolute bare minimum of drama because it was gonna be real #awk if they didn't confirm Thomas for various annoying reasons that the podcast goes into," etc.)
Though, note, Hill's also a total badass and stoic as shit under pressure and stands by everything she says. The episode also features some commentary from other women who were harassed by Thomas, including one who's such a total character that she's kind of one of my new heroes. It's all on the 'cast; give it a listen~
Kitty Genovese and "Bystander Apathy". W h e w. This episode was... a lot. tl;dr, it turns out that the "classic" case of so-called "bystander apathy", the thing where someone gets murdered and no one tries to intervene? Yeah, turns out the allegedly protoypical case of that was more about things like "911 literally didn't exist yet; do you have your police department's number memorized," and also "turns out 1960s NYC cops were corrupt as shit (and super-homophobic to boot)", and also "someone did call the police you fuckwits; NYT reporters get your shit together." So. Yeah. There's a really beautiful queer love story at the heart of it, though it, yeah, gets cut short by random awful violence before the end.
"Yoko Ono Broke Up The Beatles." I think the whole blame-Yoko argument was largely dismissed as shitty and misogynistic a good while ago (like, even my not-particularly-woke dad, who introduced me to The Beatles, scowls and mutters something about people being too mean to Yoko if you ask him about it), so that aspect of the story wasn't a surprise to me. But Lennon's whole deal, psychologically, is SUCH a fascinating goddamn messy suitcase to unpack, and some of the associated background on 60s rock culture and the contemporary art scene were really interesting & new to me.
Sex Offenders, mostly because I'm amused how cohost Sarah came out swinging on this one with, "Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we don't care if people accuse us of loving pedophiles!" Like damn girl, work it. (In particular, the episode's about how the extremely heavy-handed laws the US has around sex offenders—regardless of the severity of their crime, regardless of whether they've finished serving their sentence, etc—often make it quite literally impossible for them to simply be alive—e.g., in Miami the laws around "cannot live within [x] feet of [random thing]" make it where the only place sex offenders can legally live is basically, uh, under this one big bridge, and by the airport. So there's a huge homeless encampment under that bridge, full of dudes who literally can't live anywhere else. Great job, team. That's just one example; the episode has plenty more. This is an issue that's underreported on and imho really important; I walked away from the episode with the impression that the state won't literally kill sex offenders, but, they'll do their damndest to make it impossible for them to live, and... yeah. That's not okay, no matter how bad of a crime someone's committed. Find another fucking way.)
ETA: The Duke Lacrosse Rape Case: If you are the kind of person who browses /r/AmItheAsshole specifically to relish those threads where the overwhelming consensus is ESH, i.e. "EVERYONE SUCKS HERE," damn, have I got the podcast episode for you. Literally everyone in this case sucks! There wasn't any particular debunking in this episode; the basic facts as I remembered them were correct; but the more detail you get, the more you realize that everyone sucks so hard oh my God.
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Date: 2021-08-08 09:03 am (UTC)