George Seibold

A (very) inchoate list of podcast ideas:

• Some derivation of what I wrote my feature about.

My feature article focused on the value that college has for its students. Perhaps a compelling podcast could be made focusing in on why different students are in college, and what obstacles—both expected and otherwise—they found along the way. Pretty applicable to the people here and anyone that undertook something like college.

• Something about the Cynic?

Not sure of what the story could be but lord knows it occupies too much space in my mind to not be worth mentioning here. A larger idea this could tie into could be accountability or teamwork

• Current drama going on in the English department

Apparently there are some faculty or funding cuts going on? I don’t know too much about the issue, but sounds like it could make for a good investigative story. Funding as a concept is pretty much at the forefront of a lot of issues in America today.

The overarching “story” for This American Life episode 583: “It’ll Make Sense When You’re Older” is about how some things could only be understood by getting older. The story is presented in different ways throughout the different acts, but generally it’s about people who think they understand something, and then they grow older and change, and see that thing in a new light. Sometimes, in the case of the first act, it may seem that the person knows about the thing the less they understand it; whereas other times, like the second act, there may be more to the topic than the person realizes, and they only find out by getting older. This lead neatly to the episode’s topic sentence: somebody does (or in the case of most of the episode, believes) something because they feel like they understand it, but they only truly realize what it is after they get older. In the third act, this is seen by the man who originally believes that the Alzheimer’s tests were a waste of time, until he eventually loses his ability to read a clock. It’s then that he realizes the importance of the tests, and also the mechanics went into his ability to how he lost his ability to read a clock.

The Alex Blumberg formula for this episode would be “I’m doing a story about getting older, and what’s interesting about it is that it looks into how our understanding of things we think we know seems to change as we age.” An additional aspect to this is the term “it’ll make sense when you’re older,” which, as explained in the introduction, is often told to children who already think they have the understanding required to make sense of these kinds of things. It is quite convenient that a common phrase fits so perfectly with the theme, otherwise I’m sure it would be much more difficult to find such a punchy title.

As for the specific acts, I feel as though the Blumberg template is most applicable to the different stories since it offers more flexibility than the focus sentence and the Wheeler template. For the first act, the filled Blumberg template would be “I’m doing a story about a boy’s relationships to high school parties, which is interesting because his perspective completely changes.” Another element to the story that makes it interesting, but isn’t a major theme of the piece, is that the boy didn’t seem to realize how much of a switch his perspective took until he was actually being interviewed. For the second act, the filled template would be “I’m doing a story about a woman’s experience confronting racism, which is interesting because it ties into her family history and her relationship with her mother.” This act is the most different from the rest, because it seems to have more to do with Sasheer Zamata’s family and the cultural context in which she and her mother were brought up. It still manages to fit into the larger story of the episode because it revolves around Zamata’s understanding being shifted after her perspective on the topic was changed. Additionally, the interplay between her narrative and her mom’s was an interesting take on the “when you’re older” part of the theme. For the final act, the template would be completed as “I’m doing a story about this man’s experience with Alzheimer’s, which is interesting because he has a unique take on how to deal with his memory loss.” This one is fairly straightforward, as most of the act is devoted to explaining who the man is and how he went about deconstructing analog clock notation.

All of these acts tie into the larger story of understanding and perception because they showed different ways in which people change as they grow into different stages of their lives. To borrow the final element of Wheeler’s template, these stories are relatable to every human on the face of the planet because everyone grows old, and pretty much everyone has had an experience where they thought they understood something until they grew older and realized that their perspective had changed. The stories themselves somewhat resist being categorized in these templates because mostly they’re based more off explaining a change rather than following a narrative, yet they still all contain a topic and a reason for being interesting.

The podcasts I chose for this blog post were three episodes of This American Life: listened to back-to-back in the airplane back home for spring break. They were episode 636: “I Thought It Would Be Easier,” episode 638: “Rom-Com,” and episode 635: “Chip in My Brain.” All of these podcasts have elements that reflect the notes we took on the podcasting process, especially in terms of story structure and the way the respective themes are presented. While This American Life is a relatively by-the-book inquiry-based podcast (quite literally, in fact, since it is one of the podcasts featured in Out on the Wire), two of these three episodes have a somewhat unconventional format. While the typical This American Life episode has three or four acts that focus on different aspects or interpretations of an overlying theme, episode 636 only has two acts, with each one focusing on how politicians from both of the primary American political parties are getting by a year into Trump’s presidency. Episode 635 forgoes the multiple-act structure and spends the entire run of the podcast detailing the story of a boy’s indoctrination into a two-person cult. Despite the variant structures of these podcasts, they still demonstrate the core organizational elements we outlined in class. They begin their narratives by introducing characters, framing a conflict, and detailing an event or issue that leads to action. Episode 638 goes about this in a fairly conventional way for the podcast, in that it has several stories all based around the concept of romantic comedy; each act is a different take on the “rom-com” that involves simple but dynamic characters engaging in activities motivated by issues that arise in their lives. Episode 635 does this in an even simpler way, since there are fewer characters and inciting incidents given by the fact that it is only one story instead of several. That being said, the narrative is much more dynamic, since it has the entire hour to grow and develop. Regardless, it still follows the basic podcast structure.

The music in all the podcasts also follows the guidelines we laid out in class, in that they appear as “white space” to give the listener a break, while also acting as a way to orient our emotions. The music in all three of the podcasts is relatively minor, to the extent that I have trouble remembering any specific song or clip they used in any of the podcasts. This is likely intentional; the music is there to punctuate the stories, not overshadow them. While I do not remember any of the songs, I remember vividly the emotions I felt listening to the different stories. I am actually quite curious as to how much thought went in to choosing the music and sound clips, since they seem to perfectly thread the needle between effectively amplifying the mood while being forgettable enough to not weigh down the podcast or get in the way of the narrative. That being said, having a really great song in the middle of a podcast does not seem like the kind of thing that could take away from the story. I guess the work they put in to finding music is secondary to crafting the story though, so having good music is not much of a concern. One thing I often pick up on while listening to This American Life is that the songs they put at the end of the podcast always have lyrics that relate in some way to the theme, and are almost always lighthearted regardless of how serious or depressing the last act is. I see the value of ending the podcast on a good note, though.

As far as how these stories must have been pitched, I can easily envision how each one must have been presented. For 636, there must be countless stories of politicians having trouble with seemingly simple things, so getting a few stories from across the aisle and presenting them as emulating Trump’s famous “I thought it would be easier” quote seems like a no-brainer. With 638, they often do a romance-themed episode for Valentine’s day, so compiling romance stories and spinning them so that they are reminiscent of rom-com movies also seems pretty intuitive. As for 635, the story itself is so outrageous that it almost seems to have written itself. It has a clear timeline, a compelling cast of characters, and an intriguing conflict. Best of all, it lends itself to larger themes of growing up and dealing with the past. All of the questions that I had as a listener were asked at one point or another in interviews, and it ultimately led to a satisfying conclusion.