News and politics
Probably my favourite discovery of year has been the Ballot Box. It is essentially, a tour of elections around the world hosted by a trio of political scientists. It has a number of distinct appeals. Firstly, understanding an election outcome generally means having some grasp of the place where it happened’s history, social divisions, constitutional setup and most pressing issues. So, it functions as a good introduction to many of the countries covered. As well, as going deeper on races which were heavily covered in the English language press, such as the French and Brazilian presidential races, it also explores elections in places like Angola or even the Faroe Islands which were basically ignored.
Secondly, it is far less solipsistic than much Anglophone international coverage. It recognises that elections are generally driven by domestic issues rather than international ones and avoid the terrible “Bernie Sanders of the Pacific Islands” kind of analogies unless they actually illuminate something.
The hosts’ academic backgrounds help with putting individual elections in context and connecting them to wider trends. It also makes the whole thing endearingly nerdy, featuring episodes ranking electoral systems and constitutional quirks. There is also something reassuring about their consistently analytical approach. At the best of times, consuming too much news can feel like drinking from a fire hose. Over the past few years, more like drinking from a flame thrower. Though the discussions on the Ballot Box do reflect that the stakes in some elections are incredibly high, it is primarily interested in helping you understand rather than in provoking you. Asking how and why is one of the more emotionally healthy way to approach the present state of global politics.
By contrast, If Books Could Kill is very definitely trying to provoke you. If you’ve heard co-host Michael Hobbes on Maintenance Phase or You’re Wrong About, then you will be familiar with the entertainment value of this savage approach to debunking charlatans and the intellectually lazy. The targets of this new podcast are airport bestsellers of the past. Which generally get sold to thousands, are packaged and presented as authoritative and learned, yet generally do not receive even the most basic fact checking. Hence, David Brooks can make sweeping generalisations about segments of American society based on visits to places where he walks around without even interviewing anyone. While Malcolm Gladwell can indite the whole of Korean civilisation as disastrously deferential to authority on the basis of the safety record of a single Korean airline that only had more crashes than its competitors because the ROK’s communist neighbours kept bombing or shooting down their planes.
In a similar format but with a strikingly different tone is Origin Stories.If you have heard the Remainiacs podcast, which became one of the largest in UK politics following the 2016 referendum, you might be expecting Origin Stories, which comes from the same production company and whose two hosts were both Remainiacs regulars, to follow that show in being, by design, stridently opinionated. However, itis a surprisingly different beast. An engagingly thoughtful and, though clearly coming from a particular position, exhibiting an admirable curiosity about and generosity towards opposing viewpoints. These deep dives into where taken for granted ideas in politics, like “centrism” or “freedom of speech”, come from are always illuminating and touch on interesting topics I’d never have thought to look into like how the Weimar Republic dealt with questions of freedom of speech when confronted with Hitler’s hateful rhetoric.
On a more niche but, for me endlessly fascinating front is Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast looking at the politics and international relations of the 1990s via its thrillers. This is extremely my thing. This is one of my favourite genres and a lot of the films it looks into – Hunt for Red October and The Fugitive – are ones I must have watched dozens of times. It does have a couple of drawbacks. It suffers a little from “America is the protagonist of world history” syndrome and has also left me with a prevailing nightmare that through some terrible confluence of events I might someday have to watch Steven Seagal’s 1994 film On Deadly Ground. Despite that, the 90s are an especially interesting period to have explored in 2022, because as chronologically near as it is, the prevailing assumptions of American invincibility and geopolitical stability now seem so remote.
Speaking of geopolitical instability, War on the Rocks has been indispensable this year. The invasion of Ukraine has led to a cacophony of confusing commentary on the conflict. Given this, the series of regular discussions War on the Rocks has hosted with Michael Kofman, the head of Russia affairs at CNA, have been a valuable north star for layperson looking for sober, sensible overview of an emotive, uncertain situation that everyone needs to understand.
Business and Economics
In 2022, it is somewhat artificial to separate this category from “news and politics”. This has been the year that the economy became a first order driver of both politics and news in a way it has arguably not been for a decade. A podcast that has spanned that divide admirably is Ones and Tooze. It is mostly a platform for the economic historian and author of the Wages of Destruction and Crashed to talk through one topic from the news and one more random (and usually lighthearted) one from an economist’s perspective. Tooze gives the somewhat disconcerting impression of having a well-informed, carefully considered and clearly articulated understanding of everything from the protests in Iran to the skiing industry.
Bloomberg’s Odd Lots has had a notable year. Not least because Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX – the massive crypto exchange which declared bankruptcy in November, seemingly admitted in an episode from April that he was running a Ponzi scheme.
Also, from Bloomberg and even harder to classify than Ones and Tooze is In Trust. This mix of finance, history, politics and true crime, reported and presented by journalist Rachel Adams-Heard, is essentially Killers of the Flower Moon crossed with Empire of Pain and Yellowstone. It tracks where the oil money stolen from Osage Indians during the so-called “Reign of Terror” in the 1920s is now. The answers keep leading back to the Drummonds, a large ranching family, one of whom was elected Attorney General of Oklahoma during the podcast’s run.
True Crime
It has not been a banner year for true crime podcasts. There have, however, still been some gems.
Against all the odds, Project Unabom finds new things worth saying about a case that has arguably been overcovered. For example, the story of the members Dungeons & Dragons meeting which for years was believed by the FBI to likely include the bomber amongst its members, is a bizarre yet riveting new angle to the case.
A case that is far less notorious in much of the world but apparently totemic in Ireland is covered in Obscene: the Dublin Scandal. Narrated by Adrian Dunbar no less, it tracks the events that followed a 1982 killing spree which was guaranteed to go down in history by one single fact: when the police eventually tracked down the culprit, they found him staying as an invited guest at the official residence of Ireland’s attorney general.
Suspect: Vanished in the Snow is not an easy listen, centring as it does on the disappearance and murder of a child. However, it is some of the clearest, best written, and dramatic, yet sensitive storytelling, I’ve heard in a long time.
On a far lighter note, but not without some pathos, is Stealing Superman. The story centres on the theft of a copy of Action #1, the first comic to feature the Man of Steel, now worth millions of dollars, from Nicolas Cage’s mansion. Appropriately for a podcast in which the Hollywood A-lister who describes his acting method as “nouveau shamanic” and from whom the Mongolian government seized a t-rex skeleton displayed in his house, the whole thing is pleasantly bananas. Both a heist mystery and an at times moving study of why this fictional character means so much to people. Highly recommended.
Film and TV
The hiatus between Kermode and Mayo’s BBC show and their post-BBC show pushed me to seek out other film and TV related podcasts. The Big Picture, the Watch, Empire, and Pilot TV have all been good company and helped me to find a lot of films and shows I’d otherwise have missed.
Podcast still going strong
Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales has continued to be one of the brightest lights in the podcast firmament. Though its basic format is always the same – Harford narrates the story leading up to a disaster and explores the lessons that can be learned from it – the places they go to are wildly different. There’s the tragicomic tale of the British entrepreneur who released a line of EVs decades before Tesla – and found the world wasn’t ready. But there’s also the harrowing and frankly downright grisly tale of how scurvy contributed to the failure of Scott’s expedition to the Pole, 100 years after it had been discovered the condition could easily be prevented by ingesting lemon. Most powerful of all is the story of a 1995 heatwave in Chicago. The effect of which is likened to “a 737 full of passengers exploding on the runway at O’Hare airport every day five days in a row”. At the time Harford was mostly using this as a mirror to look at COVID, but just weeks later the UK was hit by a heatwave that reached almost exactly the same temperatures.
Podcast no longer going strong (or weakly for that matter)
Finally, this year marked the end of Reply All, which I think has decent claim to be the best podcast of all time. Truth be told, its time had come. It has been a shell of its former self, ever since it lost both its long time co-host and producer to a scandal where they reported a story about high-status workers at a food magazine resisting a unionisation drive, when they had done the same in their own company. There were the odd flashes of the old show. Like an episode about a chicken appreciation FB group, which serves as a metaphor for crypto taking over the internet. However, most episodes seemed like a knock-off of the old Reply All and almost always lacked the strong driving narrative of the classic episodes. That said, the final episode was a fitting and well-judged tribute, especially given that one of the two voices which had defined the show’s long run was necessarily absent.
Photo credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EarPods_derecho.JPG
Matter Of Facts 
