The kind of home-and-away podcast series we* need to notice more
In a media landscape awash in insincerity, the people "doing the work" of culture-bridging are overwhelmed by grifters and slacktivists reaping the sour fruits of endless manufactured discord
Over a year ago, Lize Brittin posted a piece on her blog Training on Empty about a runner friend’s protracted travails with a predatory health system. She had pitched versions of it to Women’s Running, which in typical fashion didn’t respond at all, and to a few other places that basically said “Great, just not a good fit.” Lize is rightly as pleased with her work on this piece as she is with anything, and was somewhat perplexed about the lack of reception by other women runners, especially those in editorial positions (she has since become more sanguine about the people operating in that environment).
In 2017, I authored an article for Boulder Weekly about the use in the “recovery community” of the useless intramuscular drug Vivitrol, the effective forcing of which on Americans across the country represents government-certified, national-scale medical malpractice and fraud. It was a challenging story to assemble; I knew that the clinicians and administrators at Mental Health Partners who agreed to talk to me were clearly aware of Vivitrol’s lack of effectiveness, but also knew that none of them would admit as much. Each of them held a position allowing him or her to conveniently disavow any significant personal role in the implementation of Vivitrol in MHP’s programs.
Despite knowing the piece would hardly resonate with regional, let alone national, importance, I was still disappointed to see the local drunk-tank—and such “detox centers” are usually staffed and managed by incurious, lazy people looking for a sinecure—continue a policy that benefits no one other than Alkermes Pharmaceuticals. Surprisingly, one guy shouting in a local publication, however meticulous his research and earnest his intent, rarely moves the world’s dirtbag needle one angstrom. (About five months after the article was published, the CEO of Mental Health Partners left the organization without notice or explanation. I retain the grounding and humility to be certain of having just described two wholly unrelated events.)
I had to settle for being happy with having done a determined and thorough job and asking mutually discomfort-inducing questions of multiple people offering the same pre-packaged nonsense claims. Most people working journalism jobs today, being terminally gelatinous as well as intellectually unprepared for pretty much any discursive task, will manage to go their entire shoddy careers without experiencing this bittersweet but empowering feeling a single time.
Lize and I are among the many people who like to write things and, while hastening to acknowledge that we’re not undiscovered Shakespearean or Dickensian talents, often wonder about the bizarre mismatch between the work we’d like to see most strongly recognized and the stuff people gravitate toward most. Those of us who are incapable of simply inventing ad hoc realities and spewing whatever else is necessary to gain attention at all costs are especially discouraged by how many media types have leveraged the easy marketing of bullshit and drama, and any efforts to either present alternatives or address the bullshit and drama directly are shouted down as spoiling the party or ignored outright.
Because of this phenomenon, I often wonder if even high-profile content producers don’t see some of their best work go virtually unnoticed, in comparison to both their own other work and the competing clamor from content creators whose sole and continual stick is pressing the rage button, not even bothering to find legitimate sources of rage because they know any blaze of butthurt will do in today’s emotionally overcharged and fact-starved media environment. Even as the monthly Patreon donations faithfully roll in, I often wonder if a lot of people who subscribe to given creators even expose themselves to the best of what those creators produce, because selling an important concept—even a necessarily disruptive one—without coupling it to a middle-school-level, unresolvable screaming match is no easy feat anymore.
For this reason, I wanted to call attention to a set of exchanges I found especially meaningful and hopefully have found as many ears as my more optimistic side hopes. They are a matched set, as my title, kind of a misnomer given the six-month gap between “games” in this case, implies. The first is Mario Fraioli interviewing Dinée Dorame in January for his Morning Shakeout podcast, which has existed since Christ was in diapers, and the second is Dorame interviewing Fraioli this month for her Grounded podcast, which she launched this year. If you listen to these, which you should do because I’m saving my own reactions to both for another post anyway, you’ll see why this wasn’t merely an instance of “Hey. maybe we should be on each other’s shows because that beats no content at all.”
I myself rarely listen to podcasts or recorded conversations of any kind. And even if I didn’t do most of my running with a dog, I wouldn’t want to listen to a podcast while running, especially a running-related podcast. At least not regularly. I understand why people see this as an efficient use of their time, but in my experience, most of what human beings say is bullshit or otherwise unhelpful. At least when listening to music, you know the deal.
I am, in fact, a chronically bad listener in general. For whatever reason—I imagine my parents inculcating in me, with no apparent effort, an obsessive reading habit at an early age has something to do with it—I’ve always preferred to process information in written and symbolic form even when spoken versions are available. At every level of learning, whenever a course syllabus handed out at the start of a term included all of the material needed for the exams, I never went to the lectures unless I was bored, because by then I had read the stuff the professor was now reading at least three times. Some people, however, are inveterate note-takers and prefer to attend lectures to get the full flavor of the material, though I contend in most cases this really arises more from a moral obligation.
So that’s my excuse for not listening to many podcasts, at least about topics with the potential to annoy me, a category that has recently expanded to include almost everything. (I do listen to almost all of Sam Harris’s Making Sense episodes. But I’m glad I set aside the time for these.) One of the reasons I’m tabling an in-depth review of these two is that the subject matter provoked me to read two hundred pages or so of a comprehensive history of my hometown—comprehensive, but published in 1896. I grew up a couple of miles from a village within Concord, New Hampshire called Penacook, but not until last week did I dive into the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dealings between English settlers and indigenous. More, I admit, out of a lifelong fascination with maps than from a conscious desire to acknowledge the people who lived in and cared for the spaces I came to inhabit hundreds of years later, I often find myself imagining populated places here in the wide-open West as they might have been over two hundred years ago, when “no one” was here. No bridges, glass, pavement or smokestacks, just whatever trails animals and scattered human wanderers had made.
That reading exercise took up more time than I expected, which is nice because I really don’t feel like monitoring “the sport” the people who report on it anymore. I expect this to be the case going forward because for the most part, “the sport” has become almost as much of a joke as the people who cover it most enthusiastically. I’ve had a website up for over twenty years, and I took most of it down recently while I decide to either replace it with something that reduces or eliminates the distance-running angle or simply not spend over $100 a year on a pointless Internet presence. I’m tired of advertising, in effect, “Hey! I never did any real writing, but here’s some stupid shit I submitted to magazines for obsessives with ample free time.” I would rather be known for nothing than dedicating so much of my attention to something the average human rightly perceives as a niche now occupied primarily by the lazy and the brain-dead.