I listen to a lot of podcasts. I’m a lab technician who works primarily by myself doing repetitive tasks, so podcasts are my friend.
I listen to so many that I don’t do a very good job at keeping up-to-date with any. Every few weeks I fill up my MP3 player with as many shows as I can fit on it- not really caring too much exactly which shows were on it. I like them all just fine.
Until now. A new podcast called Serial is the first podcast to make me want to update my MP3 player weekly. If there is a new episode, I add it to my MP3 player immediately, and it is usually the first thing I listen to the following day. Sometimes I try to wait and save it to entertain me during my least favorite task of the day.
Serial combines the true storytelling of This American Life with a mystery (I love mysteries) and expands a story out over the course of an entire season.
Here’s how they describe themselves: “Serial is a podcast where we unfold one nonfiction story, week by week, over the course of a season. We’ll stay with each story for as long as it takes to get to the bottom of it.”
Here is what this season is about (again, from their website):
“On January 13, 1999, a girl named Hae Min Lee, a senior at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, disappeared. A month later, her body turned up in a city park. She’d been strangled. Her 17-year-old ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was arrested for the crime, and within a year, he was convicted and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. The case against him was largely based on the story of one witness, Adnan’s friend Jay, who testified that he helped Adnan bury Hae’s body. But Adnan has always maintained he had nothing to do with Hae’s death. Some people believe he’s telling the truth. Many others don’t.
Sarah Koenig, who hosts Serial, first learned about this case more than a year ago. In the months since, she’s been sorting through box after box (after box) of legal documents and investigators’ notes, listening to trial testimony and police interrogations, and talking to everyone she can find who remembers what happened between Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee fifteen years ago. What she realized is that the trial covered up a far more complicated story, which neither the jury nor the public got to hear. The high school scene, the shifting statements to police, the prejudices, the sketchy alibis, the scant forensic evidence – all of it leads back to the most basic questions: How can you know a person’s character? How can you tell what they’re capable of? In Season One of Serial, she looks for answers.”
Check out Serial.
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