25 reviews. Seems like these are getting longer. Got to do something about that. Maybe? Nah.

Television

American Gods: “Head Full of Snow” — Wonder if Scott Thompson begrudged Bryan Fuller for not giving him a gruesome death in Hannibal? Anyway, this episode finds the main plot in “taking care of business” mode, so we get a bit more than usual of the shorter vignettes about gods in the supporting cast. The sequence about the Djinn who drives a cab is a particular highlight, and I was struck by how closely they kept to the way it plays out in the book. Nice to know that this show, while always willing to riff on Gaiman’s central premise, is also willing to adapt him straightforwardly. The newly-invented sequence introducing Jacquel/Anubis highlights the other side of that coin. Also, wow, they left it later than I thought they would to introduce Dead Laura. I was really starting to wonder if they’d completely written her plotline out of the show and relegated her to dreams and flashbacks. Glad they didn’t. I also want to highlight one of my favourite lines in the show so far: “Delusions feel real, okay? That’s why it’s a delusion. None of this feels real. It feels like a dream.” What a magnificent observation, Shadow! If only Will Graham had been so insightful, he might have saved himself some serious psychosis. My favourite way to describe the tone of Hannibal is that it took place in a viscous jelly. At least, when it got really good it did. The police procedural elements of that show look like a police procedural, but as soon as Hannibal starts messing with Will’s head, the show goes gothic and the air gets thick. Fuller’s (and Green’s) approach here is becoming similar. Everything moves weirdly in American Gods and the light doesn’t work like it should. Shadow’s journey into the world of the gods is depicted in a similar way to Will’s dissociative states. It’s working. Also, the top-hatted shadow figure in the security footage is maybe the creepiest thing this show has done so far.

The Office (UK): “Interview” — I go back to this episode from time to time to remind myself why this is my favourite television comedy ever and that Ricky Gervais wasn’t always insufferable. I always come back to this primarily for the slow build to the “don’t make me redundant” scene, which is still Gervais’s best onscreen moment. I’m not sure any actor has even had a more intuitive understanding of a character than Ricky Gervais had of David Brent. Initially, anyway. When he revived the character on YouTube years later it really didn’t ring true. But that’s doesn’t reduce his achievement in the initial series. Throughout the whole series, David Brent is a man who is trying to hide his complete desperation and he’s only succeeding in hiding it from himself. The thing that makes his last few scenes in this episode so extraordinary (starting with the one where he doesn’t get the job as a motivational speaker, moving onto the silent one where he lashes out at his office furniture, and culminating in “don’t make me redundant”) is that we get to see the moment where he finally fails to fool himself. It is maybe the saddest thing ever shown on television. And it is so brilliant that it makes me forget about the other amazing element of this episode, which is Martin Freeman as Tim. Freeman’s performance as the only guy in the office who recognizes that he’s playing a role in a farce comes to a head here in a scene I had entirely forgotten about, where he tries to convince his boss’s boss to hire Gareth as acting manager instead of him — while Gareth’s Dirtie Bertie doll is making lewd noises in the background. It’s perfect. Tim’s arc in this episode is so flawless. We see him act like a normal human in an office full of insufferable people, reminding us why we root for him. We see him make the decision to stay where he is in life, and not “roll the dice” hoping to upgrade his three to a six at the risk of rolling a one. The complacency sets in mid-episode, and just as he’s explaining it direct to the camera with his dice metaphor, we see him change his mind. That whole sequence where Tim stands up from his mockumentary interview to finally tell Dawn how he feels, breaking the format of the show in the process, is such a thrill. And it makes the moment when he turns his lapel mike back on to say “she said no” into another of the saddest moments ever on television. This is a staggeringly sad, beautiful, wonderful masterpiece of television. I should really watch the whole series again. Pick of the week.

Better Call Saul: “Off Brand” — The most satisfying part of Better Call Saul is going to be when Jimmy quits his job at the Cinnabon and gets reunited with Kim, putting an end to two television series’ worth of misfortune. Too optimistic? Okay. Well, the most gutting part of Better Call Saul is going to be when Jimmy parts ways with Kim. It’s going to be even more gutting than when more conventional fictional couples are torn asunder, because their relationship is so complex and with so much unspoken. I mean what even are they???? Anyway, this is necessarily a come down after last week. But it has a bunch of smaller moments in it that make it still a lot of fun. Howard Hamlin continues to be my second favourite person in the Sauliverse, next to Kim Wexler. The moment where he sits down on Chuck’s doorstep and waits for him to open up is one of the most straightforwardly decent things anybody has ever done on this show. I love that he was originally made out to be the villain and now we’re seeing this side of him. And I love how Bob Odenkirk plays Jimmy’s refusal to help Rebecca rouse Chuck from his despondency. This is exactly how the last straw is supposed to look. And Rhea Seehorn plays Kim as admirably non-judgemental of Jimmy in that moment. It’s those moments that make this episode, though I’m sure many will remember it for the moments that carry the weight of continuity — most notably the first invocation of the name “Saul Goodman,” but also Gus’s investigation of the familiar laundromat that will come to be Walter White and Jesse Pinkman’s torture chamber. This is fun in the “ooh look!” way that continuity is always fun. But I continue to appreciate that this show isn’t primarily about that. I’m toying with the idea that Better Call Saul is the best prequel ever made. And if I decide that’s true, then it will largely be because it managed to avoid leaning too heavily on Breaking Bad’s canon of stories and imagery. Future prequel makers take note.

Twin Peaks: “Pilot — Northwest Passage”  — (This one’s so long I actually employed paragraph breaks over on Tumblr. But not here. Never here.) I’m both excited and apprehensive about the imminent return of Twin Peaks. Excited because the entire new series is being co-written and directed by David Lynch, who we haven’t seen any substantial screen-based output from since Inland Empire in 2006. Apprehensive because my recollection of Twin Peaks from when I watched it a few years ago is that it’s a massively innovative, intermittently brilliant, but deeply flawed and often infuriating piece of television that doesn’t quite live up to its reputation. And I don’t really understand how Twin Peaks in 2017 is going to work. Because Twin Peaks is very much a thing from 1990. But I’m definitely going to watch it. So I’d best refamiliarize myself with the gigantically convoluted and inconsistent canon of the original show. I’m not going to commit to rewatching the full series because frankly Twin Peaks tries my patience even before it gets to the inarguably terrible second half of season two. The AV Club was decent enough to provide a recommended five-episode crash course for those who need a refresher. I’ve decided to do as they recommend, but I’m going to add every other episode that has either a writing or directing credit for David Lynch. It was always the Lynchian element that I most appreciated in this show, so that’s what I’m going to return to. I recall that the year I watched Twin Peaks was also the year that I watched Lynch’s entire filmography. I like them all. Even Dune. The stuff that pisses me off about Twin Peaks isn’t the David Lynchiness of it — the creamed corn/garmonbozia free associative stuff that lots of people stumble on. Nor is it the staginess of some of the writing and the performances. (I recall actually quite liking Fire Walk With Me, if that tells you anything, though we’ll see whether I agree with my younger self on that soon enough.) What I can’t get into is the soap opera that those classic Lynchian elements are stuck in. I don’t care half as much about the inhabitants of Twin Peaks and the ins and outs of their daily lives as I do about Agent Dale Cooper (still one of television’s greatest protagonists) and his unorthodox investigation into the occult secrets that the townsfolk aren’t aware of. This pilot, for all its virtues and idiosyncrasies — and they are numerous on both counts — only begins to hint at the elements of this show that I love. At times it’s hard to decide whether the inauthenticity of some of the performances here is the result of bad acting or if it’s just David Lynch casting and directing this show for maximum alienation. On one hand, early 90s television wasn’t a utopia of acting competency. On the other, sometimes Lynch’s stories and themes require deliberately inauthentic performances (this is why Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive is one of my very favourite screen performances). But here, it’s hard to say whether that’s what he’s going for or not. Bobby Briggs, for instance does not work at all for most of this episode’s duration. But when he starts barking maniacally like a dog in his prison cell, he’s suddenly compelling and the rest of that actor’s performance makes more sense. And in the cases where the actors clearly know what they’re doing (for instance, Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie), they’re often undermined by Angelo Badalamenti’s score. Badalamenti’s music is still praised as one of the show’s major accomplishments, but it has aged very poorly, and not just because of the bad synth sounds. The music almost never stops, it’s made up of three or four recognizable cues used over and over, and it’s enormously overbearing. The theme music in particular tends to crop up in especially emotional scenes, and it doesn’t allow the performances to speak for themselves. Badalamenti is back for the new season, and I really don’t know whether to be happy about that or not. This is probably one of my more heretical opinions about Twin Peaks, but I really think Badalamenti’s score is horrible. On the other hand, like the acting, it’s sometimes hard to discern whether the score, too, is trying to keep us at arm’s length. So I’ll give Badalamenti the benefit of a doubt and see if I feel the same after hearing what he does with (I hope, oh god I hope) access to an orchestra, or at least a more modern set of electronic instruments. But for everything here that doesn’t work or hasn’t held up over time, there’s something staggeringly brilliant and unique, that couldn’t happen on any other show. Some of these are subtle things, like the way in the first episode that everybody close to Laura seems to intuit that she’s died before they’re even told. It happens first with her parents — note that Sheriff Truman never actually tells Leland what happened to Laura in that scene at the Great Northern. He just knows. Same with Sarah Palmer, and with James and Donna in the scene at the school. Bobby, not so much. That’s super Lynchy. Remember, this is a man who is known to intuit screenplays, rather than actually thinking them through. Stands to reason that his most sympathetic characters would demonstrate that same trait. Speaking of which, we should talk about Cooper. First off, we don’t actually meet him until 34 minutes in, which is an interesting choice. Agent Cooper is the outsider in this show: the first and always the most significant character we meet who doesn’t actually reside in Twin Peaks. Most storytellers’ instinct would be to introduce this character at the start and use him as an audience surrogate: he learns about the town along with the viewer. But Twin Peaks shows us the town’s response to Laura Palmer’s death without the benefit of a surrogate. We get to see the citizens of the town acting like they do when they’re among their own and nobody’s watching. And while my interest in this show is really tied up with the element of weirdness that Cooper introduces (and unearths) in the town, I appreciate the languid, contemplative pacing of this. Nobody’s willing to take their time like this today. Still, it’s hard to deny that things really take off when Coop arrives. Lynch and Frost immediately knew how to write for this character. “Gotta find out what kind of trees these are.” Also, this is maybe a personal connection that most people wouldn’t make, but I can’t help seeing in Coop a prototype for the way that modern showrunners have characterized Doctor Who — especially the Eleventh Doctor. The juxtaposition of his outsiderness and esotericism with his friendliness and enthusiasm for the mundane is something that I can’t think of a precedent for, but which Matt Smith seems to have channelled as surely as he did Patrick Troughton. We won’t really get to know Coop until the next couple of episodes. But Lynch has other ways of pointing out the strangeness of Twin Peaks without diving straight into the lore about Bob and the Black Lodge and the Man From Another Place. A kid in high school dances away from his locker, out of frame. He isn’t even with anybody. The hotel concierge will not stop shouting “the Norwegians are leaving! The Norwegians are leaving! The Norwegians are leaving!” The lights in the morgue flicker creepily: “I think it’s a bad transformer.” There’s a deer head sitting on the table: “Oh, it fell down.” There’s a lady who carries a log: “We call her the log lady.” These are the moments where Twin Peaks really anticipates modern television: small moments, derived as much from the framing of shots and direction of performances as from the script, that convey a distinct mood and sense of place. There are many things about Twin Peaks that are not good. But it’s worth a watch for that alone. Lovely to be back to a place both wonderful and strange.

Doctor Who: “Extremis” — These are the sorts of Doctor Who episodes I usually love: Steven Moffat complicated clockwork stories. In my view, the following stories belong to this subgenre: “The Girl in the Fireplace,” “Blink,” “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead,” “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang,” “A Christmas Carol,” “The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon,” “Listen,” “Heaven Sent/Hell Bent,” and now “Extremis.” Of the previous, “Extremis” is the only one not to blow my mind. The other eight stories I listed are basically the reason I love Doctor Who. Episodes like “Blink “ and “The Big Bang” are why I’m willing to sit through episodes like “Fear Her” and “Knock Knock.” So it’s not a good sign that this episode by the Doctor Who writer I love most, in which he does the thing I love him best for, didn’t work for me. The premise of “Extremis,” that an alien civilization has created a perfect simulation of Earth to practice conquering it, and that the versions of our main characters we see after the title card are AIs in that simulation, is not anywhere close to as imaginative as the premise of “Heaven Sent” — to pick one of many possible excellent examples — when you consider that this episode’s plot is something that Elon Musk actually believes. I kept waiting for the other thing to happen. Waiting for another twist that never came. When “we’ve been in a simulation this whole episode” turned out to be the extent of it, I was more disappointed in Moffat than I’ve been since series seven. But this is a broad critique. There’s much to love in the details, here. Firstly, the Veritas and the way that the drunk CERN employee explains it to Bill and Nardole is brilliant and fairly chilling. The actual mechanics of the simulation, with projectors arranged in a circle, projecting a whole reality out onto a wall, is magnificent. The simulation-Doctor’s resolution of the problem — sending the real Doctor an email — is a properly great way to finish the story. And the bit with the Pope in Bill’s bedroom is one of the funniest scenes Moffat has ever written. So, this definitely did what Doctor Who almost never fails to do: entertain me. But given Moffat’s legacy, I don’t think I was wrong to expect more from this episode. And it didn’t deliver. Still, it’s a promising setup for next week, when Moffat teams up with Peter Harness who, along with Sarah Dollard, is maybe my second-favourite person writing for Doctor Who right now.

Literature, etc.

Alex Tizon: “My Family’s Slave” — This is the story of how the author’s family kept a woman as a slave in America for decades. It is the most appalling, viscerally upsetting thing I’ve read in some time. Tizon (who died recently, it seems) outlines how Lola came to be his mother’s slave, how he grew up not entirely understanding what that relationship was, and the rift that grew in the family when he finally realized it was an atrocity. It’s a quick read and an incredible story. Also worth taking note of: the backlash against Tizon’s actions in this story and the backlash against that backlash. This is not simple.

Games

This War of Mine — I had a sudden recollection that I’d never actually beaten this, and with it came the urge to play it again. It speaks volumes that such an urge can exist, given that this is a mighty dark game. It’s dark to the point of almost not being fun. But it is dramatic, and that offers its own kind of satisfaction. If I describe this as The Sims in wartime, it’ll probably sound like I’m being glib. But I actually think that’s a pretty damn promising premise, and This War of Mine delivers on it. It’s punishingly hard, as it should be, because it is a simulation of civilian life during civil war. Your characters can become hungry, tired, sick, wounded or, perhaps most dangerously, depressed depending on the choices that you make on their behalf and your efficiency and proactivity in managing their resources. I did in fact make it to the “good” ceasefire ending on this playthrough, and it felt like an accomplishment. I was busy being proud of myself for the way I’d managed the late phase of the game, with my two remaining characters cruising past the finish line with a surplus of scavenged food and valuable medicine, and a profitable cigarette manufacturing operation going on in the basement of the shelter. But in the epilogue, I was reminded of some of the things that had happened throughout the 40-odd days of the war: the neighbors in need that my characters decided not to help, the characters who died from wounds they had no bandages for, and the one character who committed suicide after a brief period of grief-stricken catatonia. It’s a rare thing for a successful game ending to be so sobering. This belongs alongside Papers, Please in the ranks of games that make you understand things better. Play this.

Music

Buffalo Springfield: Buffalo Springfield Again — I really wasn’t expecting to love any of these Buffalo Springfield albums, but this was a pleasant surprise. First off, and most relevant for our purposes, this album features the first great songs by Neil Young. None of them were new to me, since they’re all on the Decade comp. But they’re more fun in context, since Stephen Stills is also quickly maturing into the musician who’d bring us “Carry On.” His acoustic guitar performance on “Bluebird” is properly astonishing. Richie Furay’s contributions are less effective, but they do rise to the level of the lesser Stills tracks on the previous album. (Except “Good Time Boy,” which is unintentionally hilarious enough that I love it anyway.) I’m not sure if this has actually aged better than the first Buffalo Springfield album or if it’s just more straightforwardly in my musical wheelhouse, i.e. it’s waaaay more psychedelic. Fantastic record. “Mr. Soul” is an enduring Neil Young classic. “Expecting to Fly” and “Broken Arrow” point the way towards the sort of maximalism he would embrace on his debut solo album and immediately abandon. But they’re a bit weirder and thus better than most of that album. “Bluebird” and “Everydays” mark a material progression forward from “For What it’s Worth” for Stills. (Though I prefer the version of the latter on the second Yes album.)

Buffalo Springfield: Last Time Around — Ooh, just listen to that contractual obligation! The weakest Buffalo Springfield album by a country-rock mile, this contains the most tepid Neil Young contributions out of any of them — one’s a collaboration with Richie Furay, one’s credited solely to Neil but sung by Furay and the other is “I Am A Child,” which is the first in a long line of gentle, liltingly country-tinged Neil Young songs that most fans like but I don’t. And considering that Furay has never been a major songwriting asset to the band, we’re left relying on Stephen Stills. And he’s not sounding quite as inspired on balance as he was on the last record. “Uno Mundo,” in particular, might be the worst track on any of the three Buffalo Springfield studio albums. It’s interesting to hear the seeds of “Carry On” in “Questions,” though. The relationship between those two songs demonstrates the extent to which Stills matured in the time between Buffalo Springfield and Déjà Vu. This isn’t a great way to go out. I’ll save my final appraisal of this band for after I’ve heard all of the outtakes, which, yes I am going to do. We’re aiming for completion, remember. Total completion. Accept no compromises.

Buffalo Springfield: Odds and sods from various compilations — Specifically, everything previously unreleased on the four-disc Buffalo Springfield box set and the long version of “Bluebird” on the Buffalo Springfield two-record set from 1973. The latter really proves that Stephen Stills was the real deal on guitar. Hearing him play with such precision and Neil Young play with such abandon makes me wish we had more tape of them playing together in a more instrumental-focussed setting than CSNY. Here’s something interesting: this band’s demos and outtakes make for better listening than two of their actual albums. This highlights two things that are I think are crucial to note about Buffalo Springfield. One, that they never really give a solid impression of being a band so much as a petri dish for three nascent songwriting talents to mix stuff into. And two, that Buffalo Springfield is first and foremost of archival interest. Given that Neil Young is rock and roll’s most compulsive self-archivist, it makes sense that he compiled this set. I really enjoyed the Buffalo Springfield box set. It’s like a document of a scene as much as a document of a band. Having heard the entire Buffalo Springfield corpus now, I feel like the first Neil Young album (which I listened to for the first time a couple weeks ago) makes more sense. Neil started off as Buffalo Springfield’s resident maximalist. It’s fascinating to hear different versions of “Down, Down, Down,” which would eventually morph into the extremely complex, multi-part soundscape “Broken Arrow.” What’s really interesting is that the early, stripped-down versions are way more satisfying. The same applies to the early acoustic rendition of “The Old Laughing Lady” that’s featured here. I feel like I understand the moment of clarity that Neil must have had between his debut and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere now. Maybe it wasn’t that he radically changed his musical goals, but that he just realized his songs were becoming less rather than more effective the more he fussed with them. The Buffalo Springfield demos are a document of that. Marvellous listening. This might be the first collection of demos that I actively return to.

Soundgarden: Superunknown — I hate being that guy who checks out an artist for the first time right when they die but I’ve got a couple of friends who are distressed enough about Chris Cornell’s death, which is objectively heartbreaking given the circumstances, that I figured I should try and learn something about why he was such a beloved figure. I went into this knowing next to nothing about Cornell’s music or Soundgarden. I think maybe “Black Hole Sun” was the only song of theirs that I knew. But it is a really fantastic song. I’m a sucker for the sound of a guitar run through a Leslie speaker. (Check out the Stones’ “Let It Loose” for maybe the archetypal example.) And the way the song transitions in and out of the solo is really smart. Given the ingenious construction of “Black Hole Sun,” I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by how elaborate Superunknown is. I was expecting something that sounds kind of like Nirvana, and what I got was halfway between that and Tool. Check out “My Wave,” which starts off in four, transitions ostentatiously to five when the band comes in, and somehow ends up in three. And Cornell’s voice has many more facets to it than “Black Hole Sun” can accommodate. “Like Suicide” is an unsettling track to listen to this week, clearly, but it’s the best demonstration of Cornell’s vocal virtuosity on this record. Hard to say whether I’ll check out more Soundgarden, or maybe look into Audioslave, but listening to this makes it clearer why Cornell’s death is such a devastating loss.

Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell — It strikes me that I’m only now discovering the artists I should have been listening to when I was in high school. In the last month or two alone, I’ve discovered the Mountain Goats, the huge bulk of the Decemberists catalogue that I hadn’t heard before, and now Sufjan Stevens. Illinois came out when I was 15, but I was too suspicious of anything new (let alone anything bearing the label “indie”) to actually listen to it. I have a physical copy here in my apartment. It’s one of the rare ones with Superman on it, because it was a promo copy sent to a radio network into whose employ I came some ten years later. When they were ditching their physical music library I made off with some choice selections. But I still haven’t listened to it. I’m glad I didn’t listen to it before I heard Carrie & Lowell. This album is two years old, as opposed to twelve. Its recent live release came up in my YouTube suggestions and reminded me I had meant to check this out ever since being gobsmacked by “Fourth of July” and “Blue Bucket of Gold” on All Songs Considered. “Blue Bucket of Gold” has actually become one of my go-to songs when I sit down at the piano in the evening, and still I hadn’t heard the whole album. If I’m regretting abstractly that my 15-year-old self didn’t hear Illinois, I am very glad that my 26-year-old self heard this. Carrie & Lowell finds Sufjan Stevens looking back, semi-woundedly, at a childhood that sounds far worse than mine ever was. It’s a delicate, raw album, but not a haphazard one. Parts of it were recorded on an iPhone, but those tracks are layered with gossamer ambience and close-miked multi-tracked vocals. It feels like flipping through a water-damaged old photo album. The album is at times desperately sad: Stevens’ mother was devastatingly afflicted with a number of mental illnesses. But there’s something about the conversion of past trauma into present beauty that makes art like this cathartic rather than oppressive. In any case, it must be good. I’m writing like I’m drunk and I haven’t been drinking at all. Next stop, Illinois.

Podcasts

99% Invisible: “The Modern Necropolis” — There is a city in the United States that is primarily full of cemeteries. More than one, I would imagine. This is the sort of thing you’d think you’d know. The town that this episode focusses on has the most darkly self-aware town motto ever: “It’s great to be alive in Colma!” I LOVE that.

The Heart: “The Real Tom Banks” — Listening to this ABC production from a few years back (which The Heart played as part of its off-season), it’s hard to believe this was made by somebody other than The Heart’s team. The resemblance to their aesthetic and subject matter is uncanny. It’s a lovely story about a guy with cerebral palsy trying to get a date on Grindr. It’s sad, hopeful, and beautifully produced, with several voice actors being used to make Tom’s speech more intelligible — and more crucially, to convey the multiple identities he can inhabit online that he’s cut off from in real life.

You Must Remember This: “Dorothy Stratten (Dead Blondes Part 13)” — I can’t shake the feeling that Karina Longworth never quite managed to connect her narratives to her themes in this season. “Dead Blondes” started off with a discussion of what blondeness represents in American culture. That discussion basically only paid off in that first episode, the one about Barbara Payton, and this final one. But Longworth does manage to do something subtler here, which is to demonstrate how the long shadow cast by Marilyn Monroe (and earlier movie blondes like Carole Landis, but Monroe is significant enough to justify three episodes) brought Hollywood to a point where it ate up and spat out women who looked something like her at an alarming rate. And Longworth does this just by telling their stories. This episode brings that narrative to its logical conclusion by introducing the infuriating, self-righteous, toxic masculinity of Hugh Hefner into the mix. Hefner is ostensibly the secondary villain in this story, given that it was Stratten’s shitsack ex-husband who actually murdered her. But Hefner’s the one who got to go on being a shitsack afterwards. This episode is fantastic; this series as a whole has been good.

The Heart: “Advance” — The new season of The Heart is not what I expected it to be: it’s a mini-series that is specifically autobiographical. It’s Kaitlin Prest’s coming-of-age story. Like every story that promises to involve consent in some way, this has dark moments. But this episode basically tells the story of high school-aged Prest learning how to say no — as in, what’s actually involved in doing that. I wonder where this is going.

Crimetown: “The Prince of Providence” — This season of Crimetown has been frustrating and unfocused most of the time. But it when it has managed to stick with Buddy Cianci, it has been completely transfixing. This final episode brings that story together with a tidy little thematic bow that makes Cianci a synecdoche for Providence in general. I daresay it’s the best episode Crimetown has done, though its impact is dulled slightly by how far afield the show went between Cianci episodes. This is still amazing radio in itself.

Radiolab: “Henrietta Lacks” — This is classic Radiolab. It’s Jad Abumrad before he learned restraint. Sometimes I like him better that way. The story of Henrietta Lacks and the impact that her immortalized cell line had on her family is an incredible one, and I’d bank on this being a better way to experience it than the upcoming HBO movie.  

The Gist: “Chasing the Bauble With Brooke Gladstone” — I am dying to read Gladstone’s new book, and I will do that as soon as the ebook is available in Canada. Meanwhile, it provided an excuse for her to go on The Gist and talk to maybe the only radio presenter who thinks as fast as she does. I remember hearing her refer to Mike Pesca as the smartest person she ever worked with (or something close to that) on her Longform interview. Nice to hear this mentor/mentee pair reunited for some ruminative radio magin.

Radiolab: “Funky Hand Jive” — If the Henrietta Lacks rerun was classic Radiolab, this new episode is vintage Radiolab. It seems different from other recent episodes because it stems from Robert Krulwich’s childlike curiosity, which isn’t as much in evidence as it once was. The question he poses is whether it’s possible that he still has some bacteria on his hand from the time he shook hands with J.F.K. as a kid. And he takes part in an experiment to try and determine whether it’s possible. In the process, he wins the award for “most gratuitous use of Neil Degrasse Tyson’s time.” This is a lot of fun.

On the Media: “Shiny Objects” — This is particularly worthwhile for a fantastic interview with NYT White House reporter Glenn Thrush. It’s a follow-up to an interview with Jay Rosen, who cleverly and somewhat mischievously (one suspects) suggested that certain basic phrases used in federal politics reporting don’t apply in the Trump era. Like, for instance “the White House” as a synecdoche for the executive branch. Thrush agrees on that point, saying that in every story written about federal politics, “the subject is the proper noun Donald Trump.” But he diverges with Rosen on other points, and is open about his uncertainty about how to reach people who don’t consider factual reporting on Trump credible. It’s really compelling radio, and also helps make sense of the world. OTM at its best. Pick of the week.

Radiolab: “Null and Void” — Here we are in Jad Abumrad’s legal period. (I.e. like Picasso’s blue period.) While I’ve been generally dissatisfied with the direction Radiolab has taken in the last couple of years, because it now sounds basically the same as many other public radio shows and podcasts (some of which predate it), I actually think that legal stories are a good way for Abumrad to channel his ability to unpack very complicated concepts without resorting to the sorts of sound design gimmicks that he used to do, which I liked so much. This listens like More Perfect, except without explicit involvement of the SCOTUS. It’s great. These days, I like More Perfect better than Radiolab.

Theory of Everything: “Droning for Dollars” — I love these conspiracy theory episodes of TOE. This episode manages to, within fifteen minutes, shoehorn in two of Benjamen Walker’s greatest anxieties (the gig economy, Trumpism) and one of his favourite satire targets (“the deep state”). Very nice.

On the Media: “The Trouble With Reality” — Oh god I need to read this book. It’s short, so I might put aside October for it, once the ebook is out. I read physical books slower. That won’t do.

Reply All: “What Kind of Idiot Gets Phished?” — In which Phia Bennin decides to phish the entire staff of Reply All, plus Alex Blumberg. And in which, when Alex Blumberg subsequently gets very mad, she phishes Matt Lieber. This is glorious, though I wonder if Blumberg’s mounting discomfort with being portrayed as credulous and tech-unsavvy will lead to the end of Yes Yes No. But maybe he’s just had a bad week. Did you see that ABC trailer where he’s played by Zach Braff? Good LORD I’d die of shame.