After too long of a delay, Rabia Chaudry and I will hold our final Serial-related conversation today at 12pm EST and discuss plans for a…
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Rabia Chaudry and I had originally arranged to have one final Serial Hangout today with some folks who’ve been regular viewers/commenters on our Conversations series…
My conversation with Rabia Chaudry on the final episode of Serial’s first season. During the conversation we discussed Rabia’s recent article on Serial in Time and…
My weekly conversation with Rabia Chaudry on the metanarrative aspects of Serial below in which we’re joined by Chris Flohr who served as Adnan Syed’s legal counsel…
My post-Thanksgiving Serial break conversation with Rabia Chaudry in which we discuss Rabia’s release of the Jay/Jenn interviews, Muslim community response to Serial, and ideas…
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed
ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,” Esquire, February 1936
Serial has become gut-wrenching to me, in the way that every good novel I’ve ever read feels like it’s re-organizing my thinking with fire. It is instructive, artful, and intricately organized. It is also a painful path to walk, but the million-odd folks who are listening to it together are embracing that complex ambivalence. Most of us know by now that there will be no smoking gun or creaking prison door swinging open. However Serial ends, it leaves a wake of pain. Whether Adnan is innocent or guilty, two horrible things have happened: the lives of two potentially vibrant, intelligent, kind people were lost. Their families grieve them.
Today on “Conversations” we discussed the emotional impact of Serial’s Episode 9: “To Be Suspected” along with white privilege and gender bias. See Rabia’s post…
Serial is more than halfway complete at this point. I’ve waited until now to focus on one of the three most central topics for my study of the podcast: ethics. It is a happy coincidence that our guest on today’s Hangout is Adam Bonnifield (/u/quickredditaccount), one of the four moderators of the Serial subreddit; Reddit serves as a massive laboratory for media ethics because users operate without journalists’ professional boundaries.
My conversation with Rabia Chaudry and special guest Adam Bonnifield today:
My weekly discussion “Conversations on the Serial Podcast” with Rabia Chaudry will happen Mon, Nov. 17, at 2pm EST instead of 1pm EST. You can watch…
The episodes of Serial continue to get crunchy with metanarrative detail. By that I mean that the podcast serves as a catalyst for other narrative strands. Reddit, Twitter, WordPress, Split the Moon (Rabia Chaudry’s blog), and Slate’s “Serial Spoiler Special” podcast (begun the same week that our Conversations did), along with dozens of media reviews of the the project — all of these provide regular outlets for dynamic discussion. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel that sends you off to systems of other novels, Serial inspires further reflection and creation. Consider how “How People Obsess Over Serial” by Sal Gentile and John Purcell, could be viewed as a comedic attempt to probe the same issue I’m exploring in a much more eggheaded way — metanarrative.
