The West Wing: is it to blame for everything? Podcasts of the week
a live performance?Phil Harrison
Picks of the week
PrimetimeWith TV companion pods and rewatch shows on the up, this new series from US news site Vox aims to take things a bit deeper, by looking back at the cultural impact of selected television successes. First up, Aaron Sorkin’s walking, talking White House drama The West Wing, which was not only a major hit but also left many with utopian expectations about the future of the US presidency, and – as host Todd VanDerWerff explores – failed to represent the United States’ long history of racial inequality. Hannah J Davies
MeatA new episode of Jonathan Zenti’s podcast about how people’s bodies affect their lives is always a rare treat. In the latest, Stella’s Cut, Zenti goes to Nairobi to run a workshop on FGM. Not only does he challenge whether he’s qualified, but through telling the story of a young Kenyan woman he questions his whole attitude to gender, intimacy and whether he’s really “a good feminist dude”. Zenti always brings a refreshing voice to storytelling, and there is power in his story about what he calls his “growingup process”. Hannah Verdier
Guardian pick: Books podcast
When it comes to controversy, author Bret Easton Ellis is certainly no stranger. You need only look at his debut novel, Less Than Zero, or, arguably, his pièce de résistance American Psycho, to see why. Unsurprisingly, his new collection of essays White sees the US author continue that trend, with the 10-year interlude since his last book doing nothing to soften him.
Sitting down with the Guardian’s arts editor, Alex Needham, he explained
why he is not interested in attention – or shock for that matter – his theory of “post-empire” culture in the US and why, despite branding them ‘generation wuss’, he is “deeply sympathetic” to millennials. Max Sanderson
Producer’s pick: Brains On!
Chosen bySusannah Tresilian
Did you know that we have 100bn neurons-worth of memory space in our brains? Neither did I. And also, how reassuring it is to discover that, unlike my smartphone, I am not going to run out of memory space for all my fantastic thoughts and memories – unless I somehow live to be 300 years old! Slightly disconcertingly, it was a sevenyear-old boy that informed me of this, but then that is what you sign up for when you’re listening to the brilliant Brains On! podcast.
The concept is simple: kids are inexhaustibly curious, and are happy to abide by the ‘no question is a stupid question’ rule. They are also extremely good at sniffing out if they’re being patronised. So Brains On! decided to bring the kids in, take their questions about science seriously, but produce it in a way that they can respond to.
There is a downside though; either you find peppy American kids cute or you find them pretentious. And every once in a while I do find myself ruing the day that children’s drama schools were invented. However, I’m perfectly aware that I am not the target audience (nor, I wager, are you) – I’m merely a grown woman clinging on to their audio coat-tails. And do you know what? I’m learning things. Things like how spiders walk on walls, where the air we breathe comes from, and the allimportant whether dogs know they’re dogs. Now those are things worth dedicating a few neurons to …