PODCASTS — LISTEN AT YOUR LEISURE

This is Love www.thisislovepodcast.com

From the makers of popular true crime podcast Criminal, this is an unexpected departure. Or, as they put it themselves, they “surprised everyone when they turned their attention to an investigation of a very different kind. This is Love explores perseverance, obsession, and what happens when we risk betting it all”.

Season two has just been released, hosted by Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer. This is a look at the stranger side of love, but without sneering or sniggering. There’s the story of Karen Liebreich, who found a glass bottle containing an unsigned love letter and two curls of hair washed up on an English beach in March 2002 and spent the next seven years searching for the author of the letter; a woman who became a bestselling novelist by writing 120 books about her first romance; David Alexander who went for a run in Central Park in 1971, started talking to a stranger, and took the gamble of a lifetime; and Jeremy, a snail who’s having trouble finding a mate.

Everyday Americans 1-3 www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nq0lx/episodes/downloads

There’s been much talk about the ‘opioid epidemic’ in America, the addiction to prescription and non-prescription opioid painkillers that is impacting the health and wellbeing of the population at a terrifying rate, with 130 deaths a day from opioid-related drug overdoses. Here, part of the BBC World Service Documentary strand, is a three-part investigation of the daily impact on people in one city, Louisville, Kentucky, where drug overdose-related deaths are twice the national average. Episode two explores how the epidemic affects the criminal justice system, while episode three covers the fate of the next generation, with babies born to addict mothers, and schoolkids caught up in the crisis.