Podcasts of the week: culture wars, cops and cooking

“For those of us

“For those of us who have tried (and doubtless failed) to write
about the culture wars in a spirit of honest, open-minded good
faith”, Jon Ronson is “something of an icon”, said James Marriott
in The Times^[1]. His 2015
book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed remains the
“definitive” account of online cancellation, and its warnings of
ever more rancour to come have proved “depressingly prescient”.

Now he is back with Things Fell Apart^[2], a superb BBC
Sounds podcast about the genesis of the culture wars. Ronson starts
by looking for their “pre-Twitter history”, and finds it in the
battles the US’s religious Right fought against abortion and gay
rights in the 1970s and 1980s. He identifies this conflict as the
“first important intersection of moral fury and new technology”,
when Evangelical Christians took to the new mass medium of
satellite TV to try to ban books and stir moral panic. It’s a bleak
but riveting listen.

Aimed at adults and older children (it includes bad language and
“uncensored” accounts of gruesome and violent
events), Let’s Talk About Myths,
Baby!^[3] is
a millennial’s take on Greek and Roman mythology, said Charlotte
Runcie in Prospect^[4]. This is first-class
educational entertainment: witty and sarcastic commentary from a
modern-day perspective is mixed with rigorous scholarly
research.

On a completely different subject, I’d recommend Bad Cops^[5], a BBC World Service
series in which Jessica Lussenhop, of This American
Life, looks at one of the US’s most corrupt police units, the
Gun Trace Task Force in Baltimore, in an effort to find out why
good cops go bad.

The world is awash with cookbooks, but “milestone recipes – the
true keepers” – are rare indeed, said Dale Berning Sawa in
The Guardian^[6]. The Genius Recipe Tapes^[7], a weekly pod by Kristen
Miglore of the website Food52, explores one such recipe per
episode, and talks to its creator. Listening to her descriptions of
what she loves about these recipes – from the way “Rachel Roddy
slow-cooks her beans in the oven, to the whole lemon Ruth Rogers
puts in a startling strawberry sorbet” – is a lip-smacking pleasure
in itself.

Another great podcast for home cooks is Recipe
Club^[8], from the American chef
David Chang and the journalist Chris Ying. The fun of this one is
that many of the recipes discussed are “sourced the way most of us
decide what to cook for dinner: by Googling”. It’s “a bit
millennial, a bit punk, very entertaining”.

Less recipe-focused – and more discursive – is Honey & Co: The Food
Sessions^[9]. London restaurateurs
and columnists Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer talk to guests
drawn from the food scene, mostly in Britain, ranging freely across
food-related anecdotes, tips and experiences.