Out of Focus

PAUSE FOR PODCASTS: An Introduction, and Goodbye to "It's All Politics"

I once loved to drive. During my eight years living in Los Angeles, I regularly drove myself home to San Francisco to see my family. It didn't take much longer than flying onec I accounted for getting to the airport early, the flight itself, and then the drive to my mom's house in Marin County. I also consider driving way less stressful. In fact, I found it relaxing.

I sometimes enjoyed driving around L.A. too, but I hated having to drive. After spending my first four years carless, once I had the ability, I never considered not I felt driving anywhere more than a few blocks. While I wasn't quite as bad, Steve Martin's half-block journey by car in L.A. Story wasn't too far from my reality, but that was in large part due to the atrocious transportation options available in early 1990s Los Angeles. My one saving grace of being in the car so often was the radio: Howard Stern, Jim Rome, and the early days of Loveline. (Hey, I was in my early 20s!)

After I moved to New York in 1996 and no longer drove with regularity, I rarely listened to the radio other than when I was in the shower or falling asleep. My portable CD player had a radio, which of course was useless in the subway. And so, I found myself listening to much more album-based music and significantly less talk.

Podcasts changed all of that. Suddenly, I could take NPR/PRI with me, and at first, my podcast rotation was limited to shows from those distributors. I wrote about This American Life and Radiolab in 2007, but my obsession with the medium has exploded especially over the last three years as I continued discovering phenomenal shows of all varieties. I have such a backlog of podcasts; I know I will never listen to them all, but when I'm riding the subway, walking around the city, doing dishes or cooking, I'm usually playing one.

I listen to some shows without fail on a weekly basis; others stare back at me from my iPhone and iTunes, wondering when I'll visit, and periodically, I'll have a little binge session. Still others – like the how-had-I-not-discovered-it-before Professor Blastoff -- have become major addictions. I listen to new episodes each week while also working my way through the archives from the beginning so I may belatedly witness the show's development. (To date, I'm up to episode 38.)

As part political-junkie, my weekly must-listens include a few political podcasts, and I was sad to learn that one will end its seven-year run this week. NPR's It's All Politics has been one of the most entertaining and informative political podcasts I've found, but the episode released later tonight - assuming it's on schedule – will be its last.

NPR's decision to cancel the long-running Talk of the Nation, announced a couple months ago, also produced the demise of this weekly conversation between Ron Elving and Ken Rudin as the latter is leaving the network. The show frequently utilized guests hosts when in Elving or Rudin's absence, but it makes sense for them not to continue with a permanent replacement. Although the fill-ins were always engaging and informative, the bad-pun, Borscht Belt-like shtick and chemistry between Elving and Rudin is the primary ingredient that made this podcast such a blast.

Both hosts are seasoned political reporters, and their commentary included a level of thoughtful, usually non-partisan analysis frequently absent from some of the louder shouting matches among the media. Their discussions possessed a wonderful sense of glee allowing even their dumbest jokes – and wow, were some dumb! – to consistently elicit chuckles and even the occasional guffaw.

The most frequently recurring joke involved repeated references to "the listener," as if the podcast's audience totaled one. As the show regularly ranked among the top 30 political podcasts on iTunes - competing with podcast versions 60 Minutes, PBS Newshour and The Rachel Maddow Show among other mainstream TV and radio programs people choose to experience in podcast form during commutes or because they've otherwise cut the cable cord - I'm sure they had a relatively large listening audience, certainly allowing them to add an "s" to "listener." However, if I ever was, in fact, the sole listener to NPR's It's All Politics podcast, I am very grateful to Ron and Ken for doing their show just for me. This listener will miss them and their banter a great deal.

Miscellaneous Miscellany: Don't call it a comeback; but here's an abstract – Part 1

I'm still hedging my bets. This habit stuff is hard. (That's been my motto all year: THSIH. It rolls off the tongue.) As I mentioned yesterday, barely a day passes that I don't encounter at least one thing prompting my internal voices to say, "I'm going to write about that." In fact, I generally keep a running list—one that enjoys running without stopping much more than I do; it obviously just keeps going and going even as I ignore it.

Some ideas I deem too old to use now. Some are relatively evergreen, and sooner or later, I will certainly focus on them. Some are extremely timely; if I don't get to them soon, I will disappoint myself and leave them be, but then hopefully they will also drift away and and stop cluttering my brain.

When I began writing this post, I intended it to be a relatively brief, disorganized annotated table-of-likely-contents, describing subject matter that I hope to address in the coming days and weeks. Some may disappear, making an appearance here before fading away and not requiring another word. Others will demand my attention further. No promises either way, and the order that follows barely even signifies any preferences.

As I started writing, though, some things required more description than a a title and two-sentence summary, and the next thing I knew, this post was way too long. So I've broken it into parts—at least two, maybe three. We'll see where we end up.

For now, assuming the habit holds, the following offers a taste of what's clogging my brain:

Pausing for Podcasts: Radiolab Digs Through the Dirt

As I've discussed before, I'm addicted to Podcasts. In an era where polemical talk radio dominates the airwaves and in a city like New York where most of us barely listen to radio because we don't drive to work each day, for me, the "Podcast" as an entity has had quite an impact. I've always listened to NPR here and there, but I've never had the chance to listen to some programs (and discover others) as regularly as since discovering podcasts two or three years ago.

One of the best radio shows around is WNYC's Radiolab. If absence truly does make the heart grow fonder, people should be fondest of Radiolab. The hour-long program which uses science to look at a variety of interesting subjects is produced in seasons of only five episodes each. Maybe the amount of time and care taken to produce each hour is why the show is so damn fascinating and phenomenal. I have yet to listen to an episode that hasn't kept me riveted. As I only discovered the show a few months ago, everything is still new to me.

The episodes are rebroadcast on WNYC every two weeks, and then posted as podcasts . I just got around to listening to one episode that was posted at the end of September but originally aired in April 2006. The episode is called "Detective Stories". The episode is summarized on their web site as follows:

Forensics, archeology, genealogy, and genetics are devoted to figuring out what really happened. In this hour, we hear surprising stories of playing detective and finding that what really happened in the past is not at all what you’d expected. We start at a trash dump in Egypt, where we find Jesus, Satan, sissies, and porn. Next, the mystery of why hundreds of old letters written to the same woman were discovered on the side of Route 101. And lastly, a blood sampling tour of Asia reveals a prolific baby-maker and potentially a world conqueror.

The final two stories are particularly fascinating. I found myself laughing out loud in the grocery store last night during parts of "Goat on a Cow," only minutes after being saddened by the central events in the story. And the implications presented in "Genghis Kahn" are no less jaw dropping.

Give Radiolab a try. It's another one of those radio shows that proves why at one time even television was considered to possibly be simply nothing more than a fad that could never completely replace radio. Just like talkies!

PAUSING FOR PODCASTS: DIVORCE GIVING ME CHILLS

There was a new episode of This American Life this weekend, and the theme was "Break-up." As usual, the entire episode is excellent, but nothing stuck me quite as powerfully as the second act called "But why?"

During a very tight 10 minutes, they first played an interview from 1987 when Noah Adams -- then host of All Things Considered -- talked to eight-year-old ("Nine, next month") Betsy Walters, a young girl trying to deal with her parents' recent divorce. She had written a letter to then-NYC mayor Ed Koch, asking for some advice on how to handle things. She figured since he was the mayor, he must be smart and might have an idea on how to help. Of course she wanted her parents to get back together, but all she was looking for was an answer as to why? The second half of the This American Life piece was another interview between Betsy -- now an elementary school teacher -- and Adams today, as she's almost 29.

I'm a child of divorce. My parents got married quite young -- Dad was 22, Mom not yet 20 -- and by the time I was four, they had been married 10 years ... but that was more than enough. I'll be 36 in just over three weeks. By this time in my father's life, he had an eight-year-old son and my parents had already been apart for four years. It was only once I reached my very late 20s and really early 30s that I even started to realize how growing up in this environment affected me. Don't get me wrong: my parents' divorce was probably the best thing possible in terms of me and my upbringing, and as far as divorced couples go, my parents handled it very well, never arguing in front of me; always making sure that I had a home with and knew I was wanted by both of them; and always making sure that every child's fear -- What did I do? -- was definitely not the case. Being a child of the '70s, I don't think my story is all that unique, and I think in lots of ways, I was likely luckier than many.

But this experience of mine certainly played a part in me finding myself virtually stopped cold on 42nd Street tonight, walking back to the subway after a show at Signature Theatre Company, and hearing this little, eight-year-old voice full of pain and confusion asking why? Why did her parents have to split up? Why couldn't or wouldn't they get back together? They tell me it's not my fault, and I don't think it's my fault? But ... why? At one point, Adams asks her if she now understands her parents divorce better, and she answered no. He then asked what she still doesn't understand. Transcribing the following doesn't have the proper impact, but even so:

Why did they have to go off and do it? Because, see, the most painful part was when I saw my dad packing up, and I really don't understand because ... it's hard because they won't tell me what happened to them, and I really want them back together and I don't understand why they can't.

When Adams and Walters begin their modern-day chat, it was fascinating to hear Walters describe how even though she remembers the 20 year old experience vividly, hearing it now as an adult with a greater understanding of what did actually happen was painful in an entirely different way. In her own words:

Then recently, I heard it as an adult, and it was so heartbreaking. I didn't think it was so sad when it was me. It was just what was going on. It made me sad to hear the pain in my voice, confusion, and now I hear it even differently as an educator.

There are certain things that certain media do quite well -- often better than others. There is a reason why This American Life is such a successful show -- because it uses the format of radio the best way possible. The juxtaposition of these two interviews, I would bet, is much stronger happening without a visual accompaniment. The emotion -- whether we would recognize it or not -- comes from the sound and tone of this little girl in a way that is likely far more effective -- and focused -- than had it been accompanied by her sad face. That may seem hard to believe, and yet, I'd still argue it to be true. I didn't give it all away: go listen for yourself.