Two more for the road: My new favorite podcasts
As commuting to work resumes again for many and summer driving vacations are in the offing, I have a pair of podcasts to recommend for making the time and the miles slip by more pleasantly.
“You’re Wrong About” meticulously and often hilariously analyzes recent history
— a current example being a 90-minute deep dive into the country band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks and what happened before and after 2003 when lead singer Natalie Maines infuriated fans by telling a concert audience that the band was ashamed of their fellow Texan, President George W. Bush.
The title “You’re Wrong About” isn’t quite accurate, as the show doesn’t so much debunk as it does illuminate and clarify. A more precise title would be “What You Have Probably Forgotten or Never Knew About” given the amount of fine detail, background information and related context that the hosts offer as they refresh and enhance the listener’s memory about topics that were once top of mind.
The idea for the podcast originated when journalist Michael Hobbes, then with the Huffington Post, wrote something of a fan letter to independent Oregonbased journalist Sarah Marshall. Hobbes had admired Marshall’s obsessively detailed articles looking back at the stories of Tonya Harding, JonBenét Ramsey and others and proposed re-creating such presentations for audio.
The first episode, launched in May 2018, was an analysis of the so-called satanic panic of the 1980s, when a contagious hysteria about deviant behavior linked to devil worship gripped a dismayingly large segment of the population. The 124 episodes that have followed have covered Tipper Gore, Disco Demolition
Night, the Stanford prison experiment, Yoko Ono, the Y2K bug, O.J. Simpson, Princess Diana and many similar topics.
Both hosts are in their 30s. One of them, usually Hobbes lately, does a voluminous amount of advance research and then presents it more or less cold to the other, who reacts, interjects and reflects, asking questions the listener might have. Marshall is as dry and insightful as Hobbes is voluble and sharp. Their on-pod chemistry is exquisite and is the secret ingredient that makes every episode I’ve listened to well worth the time.
I’m right about “You’re Wrong About,” trust me.
“Blocked and Reported” is also hosted by a male-female team of journalists in their 30s with great podcast chemistry, Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal.
Their show deals almost exclusively with dumpster fires currently raging on the internet — controversies in which people have said or written something that has cost them their jobs or reputations as the performative social media mob piles on.
Herzog, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, and Singal, a resident of Brooklyn, are both politically liberal and both found themselves
at the bottom of such piles after independently publishing lengthy articles several years ago focusing on people who identify as transgender but who then transition back to the gender identity they were assigned at birth.
I don’t have the space nor the inclination to referee the balance and accuracy of their respective articles — Herzog’s in 2017 for the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger and Singal’s in 2018 for the Atlantic — but both writers were quickly and roundly denounced as transphobic.
Herzog, who is a lesbian, said she was called a neo-Nazi after her article came out and that protesters burned stacks of The Stranger to underscore their contempt for her. Singal remains the object of intense scorn among trans activists who will no doubt object to me promoting and platforming him here. Google them if you’d like to decide for yourself if they are monstrous.
But “Blocked and Reported,” which launched in March 2020, doesn’t often deal with transgender issues. There’s hardly time. Our culture of umbrage and outrage serves up so many fresh backlashes — firings, suspensions, shunnings and other so-called cancellations — that even weekly episodes aren’t enough to give the stories a thorough look. Herzog and Singal record at least two bonus episodes a month exclusively for the more than 5,000 listeners who fund them through Patreon.
Fair warning: Their breezy banter and commitment to defending heterodox thinkers across the political spectrum will not appeal to everyone. Those who consider deviations from rigid ideology to be tantamount to heresy and who prefer throwing rhetorical rocks in 256-characterchunks to nuanced conversation should avoid this podcast. If being challenged and provoked isn’t your thing, by all means do not stream this one!
In honor of persistence
Speaking of transphobia, I am in total awe of the man who has been peppering me for months with at least one email a day challenging old columns I’ve written that were generally supportive of trans rights. Now, yes, it’s not unusual for people to try to inundate me with contrary screeds, usually mass mailed, but I flag their addresses so their salvos land unseen and unread in my spam folder.
This fellow is wise to that trick. Every email he sends comes from a different address and different pseudonym, meaning that at least his bumper sticker subject lines — “Gender identity is an empty concept,” for example, or “The Transmafia is so bonkers that it makes crazy alt-right white supremacists look sane” — hit my eyeballs. His mission, endlessly reiterated, is to challenge my assessment of him as a “seething bigot” when I once made the mistake of replying to him.
I hereby amend my assessment to “determined bigot.”
Meanwhile, no online group appears more determined these days than the crooks behind the Norton Antivirus automatic subscription renewal scam. I received eight emails from them Thursday, each from a different name and address, each one beginning something like “Dear Customer, your yearly subscription for Norton Total Security has been successfully renewed & updated. The debit amount will be shown within the next 24 to 48 hours on your account statement.”
What follows is an invoice number, a startling amount due usually in the $300 to $400 range, and a toll-free number to call to challenge the charges.
The easily duped will think “Hey! I didn’t sign up for this!” and call, at which point an apologetic operator will try to get their credit card information and other data used for identity theft and other cybercrimes — the process is called “phishing.” Sometimes, according to the Federal Trade Commission, they will try to remote into the caller’s computer, ostensibly to remove the antivirus program but actually to install malware or work other forms of expensive mischief.
Norton is aware of the prevalence of this scam and has posted a statement that reads in part, “Unfortunately, hackers and scammers want to take advantage of the trust we’ve built and fraudulently use our name and branding to try to trick and defraud consumers . ... scammers are always coming up with creative new ways to defraud people. It’s important that you are aware of these common types of scams.”
Spread the word.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s reader poll to select the funniest tweet was “An FYI for people who are rude to retail and customer service workers: When you say ‘I won’t be back,’ that’s not a bad thing,” by @rsf788.
The poll appears at chicagotribune.com/zorn where you can read all the finalists. For an early alert when each new poll is posted, sign up for the Change of Subject email newsletter at chicagotribune.com/newsletters.