Five-Day: Podcasts I Like
From five songs about vampires, to five terrible-amazing book title puns, Five-Day is the Friday-specific post series where I bring you five items on a theme. What’s the theme this week? Podcasts I Like!
Reveal
Reveal is the podcast for The Center for Investigative Reporting, where once a week they release a multi-segmented report on an important issue. This can range from missing persons to politics, to poisons in schools to poisons in water. Even if you don’t think yourself an investigative journalism reader, I do suggest you try an episode. They touch on so many topics that I’m sure you’ll find something to capture you.
Suggested Episodes
- Inside America’s Coldest Cases, about missing persons and the identification of remains. Also includes the amateur sleuths who spend their time trying to find potential matches between missing persons and found remains.
- A Mountain Of Misconduct, about the neuro-rehab center industry and the abuses within.
- Decoding Discrimination in America’s Temp Industry, about how large companies use temp agencies to break anti-discrimination laws.
- Do Not Drink:The Water Crisis In Flint, Michigan, about, well, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
- Pumped On Trump, about the Reveal team trying to find out why do people support Trump.
Good Job, Brain!
Even if you’re not part of a pub quiz team like these guys, if you’re into trivia this is definitely the place to be. For four weeks the GJB team pick a topic then go off and research one thing connected to it and come back to share with the group – and the listeners. Then every fifth episode is a free-for-all of quizes and trivia of their own picking.
Plus you’ll learn more about beaver butts than you ever thought possible.
Suggested Episodes
- 02: Once Upon A Gruesome Time
- 13: It’s A Monster Mash!
- 31: Color Me Bad
- 52:Trivia About Trivia
- 53:Take A Bite Out of Crime
Criminal
Criminal is a podcast about crime, or as they put it on their website: “Stories of people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle.” Some of the stories are what you might expect from a podcast about crimes, others are certainly more strange and off-beat.
Suggested Episodes
- Call Your Mom, about a mother and daughter who are both in the business of death (and crime).
- Dropping Like Flies, about the venus fly trap black market.
- No Place Like Home, about a minimum security prison that shared a location with the home of the ‘secret people’ of a leprosarium.
- Pen and Paper, about a courtroom sketch artist.
- Jolly Jane, about a woman who just might be “the most notorious woman poisoner of modern times.”
Detective
Detective is a podcast from Investigation Discovery featuring true stories from a career in law enforcement from the detectives themselves. Season one starred Joe Kenda (aka Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda), a retired Colorado Springs detective who solved 387 homicides during his career. Season two is currently underway and stars Gary McFadden, of Investigation Discovery’s I Am Homicide.
Suggested Episodes
Because of the serial nature of this podcast, which starts at the beginning of Kenda’s career and builds on that, I highly recommend starting at the very first episode, Murder in the First.
However I do suggest episode 9, Married To The Job, which has Kathy Kenda as the special guest, talking about not just what it was like for her as a detective’s wife, but how that role impacted and collided with her job as a nurse.
Survivor Historians
This is easily the most niche of the five podcasts here, but whatever, I’m including it. Survivor Historians recaps and analyzes Survivor seasons, puts them into their historical context and shares secrets and details you might otherwise miss. The Historians include Mario Lanza, most famous for The Funny 115, as well as other Survivor experts and influential people in the Survivor fandom.
Favourite Episodes
My suggestion for getting into the Historians is to pick a season you enjoyed and start there. That’s what I did, starting with Pearl Islands and then working my way through the rest.
- #16 Lovin’ Pearl Islands, In a Sexual Way
- #17 Outcasts, Jerks Dying, and Big Jon
- #18 Death and Rot. And Grandma
So that’s it, five of the many podcasts I listen to. What podcasts do you listen to regularly? And do you have any to recommend?
This is an unexpected collection of recs! Especially about Reveal!
Anyone who knows me knows that true crime isn’t a surprise (I debated adding “My Favourite Murder” to the list) but Reveal was a surprise to me too. I started off on the missing persons/unidentified remains episodes and started going through the backlist from there. A very very good podcast.