Remember self-destructing DVDs? Water Cooled Potato examines the biggest tech failures in recent history
Aux Features Podmass
70 Million
Marching Toward Reform In New Orleans
While season one of 70 Million examined the roadblocks impeding criminal justice reform, season two opens with a focus on the work toward solutions within local communities. The season premiere takes place in New Orleans as reporter Eve Abrams investigates a prison system largely funded by the impoverished, their inability to pay bail the only thing keeping them behind bars. A New Orleans cook named Albert shares his story with Abrams about how a minor traffic violation caused an outstanding warrant for drug possession to catch up with him. Although he couldn’t post bail, his time was reduced thanks to the New Orleans Safety And Freedom Fund, a group that has been able to use anonymous donations and revolving bail funds to free more than 200 people. It’s a noble effort, but one that pales in comparison to the number of yearly arrests in the city. Between interviews with former judge Calvin Johnson and Operation Restoration founder Syrita Steib-Martin, it becomes clear that last year’s federal cases against the New Orleans criminal court couldn’t force judges to turn away from a bail-money-based system. 70 Million offers a fascinating and sobering look at the slow-turning wheels of justice. [Jason Randall Smith]
Bellwether
Autopilot Off
Somewhere in the distant future, a human and an AI team up to trawl through artifacts of late-2000s news reports for answers about why their world’s networked information technology failed. The reports focus on “collisions between humans and complex informational systems,” and they are all real events, interviews, and facts from our modern era. Bellwether is narrative nonfiction journalism wrapped inside a science-fiction serial, composed of reporting by creator Sam Greenspan over the course of two years. Cass and Icarus are the artificial intelligence and human who serve as commentators, criticizing the reporting and the situation, taking it apart through the lens of a possible future. “Autopilot Off” tackles the 2018 death of a pedestrian in an accident involving an Uber self-driving car. Cass and Icarus call out things like autonomophobic language whenever the word “robot” is used and bias in advertising that emphasizes leisure over safety, while also sending a letter to their moms so that they don’t worry too much. Greenspan’s long-form reportage is thorough and respectful, with humor that gives it a voice that feels close to home instead of distant and clinical. This experimental speculative journalism provides a fascinating, immersive avenue for thinking about our future. [Elena Fernández Collins]
Everything Is Alive
Scott, Stethoscope
Have you ever wondered why soft-spoken NPR-style presenters are so damn chill? The answer might lie in the latest episode of Everything Is Alive, where host Ian Chillag reveals to his interview subject, a hospital stethoscope named Scott, that his resting heart rate is 30 beats per minute. Although he could be on the edge of death, the earnestness that Chillag brings to the absurd premise of interviewing inanimate objects makes Everything Is Alive a complete delight. What really makes this particular episode shine is the performance of comedy treasure Scott Adsit (30 Rock) as a stethoscope who loves the taste of earwax. Adsit’s entirely improvised interview as a piece of medical hardware is filled with insights both touching and absurd, and the high point is when Scott the stethoscope describes his idea of what a heart looks like: a fist-sized head with a human face. The existential panic he feels when he learns that the heart is just meat and has no teeth is so funny and somehow relatable that you’ll suspect Everything Is Alive is doing more than just making you laugh—it’s putting you under its spell. [Anthony D. Herrera]
Feeling My Flo
Just In Time For Lola
No one really knows how to talk about periods—at least, that’s what host Kamilah Kashanie heard on the street. A few sound bites at the top of the episode reveal that the basic function and biological purpose of periods remain a mystery for people of all genders, who aren’t quite sure how periods work but feel vaguely uncomfortable discussing them. Kashanie offers a brief rundown of what listeners can expect from this new series, which will include conversations on gender, period stigma, and common misconceptions that complicate the everyday reality of being a person with a period. In this short and sweet first episode, Kashanie speaks with high schooler Lola Blackman about being a “late bloomer” and what it’s like to feel left out of this major puberty milestone. Strong cultural ties between periods and “womanhood” make it difficult for girls like Lola, who waited while her friends all started their periods and worried there was something wrong with her body. Feeling My Flo producer Mia Warren joins Kashanie for a quick look into what researchers know about “normal” development in people with periods, explaining that everyone’s timeline is different, each perfectly normal for their body. [Sofia Barrett-Ibarria]
Naked Beauty
Defining “Cool” Ft Recho Omondi
Before iPhones and Instagram, early aughts fashionistas got inspiration from random LiveJournal accounts or window displays at Abercrombie & Fitch. Designer and fashion critic Recho Omonodi joins host Brooke DeVard on this special live edition of Naked Beauty to discuss building a personal style while growing up in the Midwest and how her family’s transient nature helped her develop a strong sense of self. Omondi, whose eponymous brand is a cult favorite worn by Solange and Issa Rae, takes us back to her high school fashion roots. Cheekily describing her teen style as “white girl/black girl,” inspired by the blog Olsens Anonymous and Britney Spears’ Miss Sixty and Diesel campaigns, Omondi opens a portal to a very specific and strange time in fashion. The cute live question-and-answer portion is full of low-key advice to help you define your personal style, discover what’s cool to you, and realize that enjoying fashion doesn’t mean you only value looking pretty. [Morgan McNaught]
Noble Blood
The Second Death Of Marie Antoinette
It’s fairly common knowledge now that certain bloody scenes in George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire series are based on real historical events. But even upon learning that fact, there is a natural tendency to think Martin (and, in turn, HBO) were amping up the gore for the sake of a bigger reaction. Noble Blood, a new podcast hosted by author Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mahnke (Lore), is here to remind you that real history makes even the most stomach-churning scenes from Game Of Thrones seem tame by comparison. Schwartz spends the first episode discussing Marie Antoinette, the queen of France before and during the Reign of Terror who is best remembered for making proclamations about cake but whose grisly death at the hands of revolutionaries was anything but whimsical. The horrific executions performed at the street tribunals, the brutal reeducation forced upon the royal children, and the final months of Antionette’s prison stay in a damp, dark dungeon, are relayed in visceral detail, reminding listeners that these people were more than static images in history books. They were living, breathing, bleeding royals. [Dan Neilan]
Pop Culture Happy Hour
‘Los Espookys’ Is Good And Weird
NPR’s weekly pop culture podcast always has its finger on the pulse of what’s hot in entertainment, so of course they had to break down their thoughts on HBO’s groundbreaking series Los Espookys, featuring a group of friends who turn their love for horror into a strange business. Pop Culture Happy Hour hosts Glen Weldon and Stephen Thompson are joined by Felix Contreras and Shereen Marisol Meraji to give their take on the series, which comes from the minds of Fred Armisen, Julio Torres, and Ana Fabrega and is one of the only series on TV in Spanish with English subtitles. This is something that both Contreras and Meraji agree is revolutionary and adds to the hilarity of the series. Not only do the characters speak Spanish, but they comfortably use an exciting mix of Spanish slang, bolstered by the show’s portrayal of the beauty and culture of Mexico City. While the hosts agree that it’s not exactly gut-busting humor, it does provide consistent cleverness and delight. It’s a silly, culturally relevant show that both entertains and breaks down barriers. Los Espookys is as much of a must-watch as this podcast episode is a must-listen. [Vannessa Jackson]
Probably True Podcast
School
Scott Flashheart Elliott is a U.K.-based writer, editor, and audio producer who uses his Probably True Podcast as a means of continuing his work giving voice to the LGBTQ+ experience. In this episode, Flashheart tells of visiting his former school as a Career Day speaker. His experience returning to this world of secondary education as a now 36-year-old gay man offers him the opportunity to reflect on how times (and young people) have changed. Flashheart manages to interweave nostalgia, perspective, and wit with just enough references to masturbation and dad-screwing to merit a scolding from the school administrators and laughs from listeners. Few folks get such a chance to revisit the schools that shaped them in their youth, let alone do so with the purpose of speaking to the generation currently being shaped. With a remarkably short runtime under 10 minutes, this episode of Probably True will leave listeners wondering what sort of advice they would have for a younger version of themselves. This question can hit deep for many members of the LGBTQ+ community, considering the often fraught road to self-acceptance so many of us face. [Jose Nateras]
Solvable
Fake News Is Solvable
There’s just no other way to put it: Reading the news these days sucks. And with a contentious election on the way, online vitriol, disinformation, and blatant propaganda are only going to get worse. But take heart; Solvable is a podcast that tackles intractable problems (like homelessness and food waste) and tries to solve them. This week, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Anne Applebaum interviews internet expert Renée DiResta about fake news, discussing the ways Russian operatives, anti-vaxxers, and bots creep into our feeds and what we can do about it. DiResta’s unsettling examples show how easy it is to “manufacture consensus” in a post-truth era in just a few clicks. These manipulations have real-world consequences, influencing incidents of violence, election results, and vaccination rates. According to DiResta, the responsibility for correcting bad algorithms lies with companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, who can set up solutions akin to the spam filters we have for our email. But ultimately, it’s up to us to find trusted sources, call out the fakes, and eat a healthy media diet rich in calcium and critical thinking. [Amber Cortes]
The Amelia Project
Venerio
Have you ever thought about starting over and coming back as someone else? The secretive company the Amelia Project can help with that. Each episode of this fiction podcast focuses on a client for the company who wants to fake their death and come back as someone new. The unnamed, eccentric Interviewer speaks to each client about why they want to leave and how they want to return—clients like an amusement park owner, or a politician, or an AI who’s become sentient. The podcast is bizarre, hilarious, and energetic, but in “Venerio,” the first episode of its second season, there’s a beautiful sense of solemnity. In this episode, the last true mask maker in Venice doesn’t just want to fake his death; he wants to avoid Death altogether. What do we hold onto when our city is sinking? The conversation is strange and whimsical, but with a dash of artful philosophy. While each episode does work on its own, be sure to listen to this podcast from the beginning; it’s looking like season two will be headed to strange and exciting places. [Wil Williams]
Water Cooled Potato
Flexplay
It’s gotta be hard to invent a product and bring it to market. That being said, it’s a genuine shameless joy to laugh along with the hosts of Water Cooled Potato at some of the most ill-conceived business mishaps of recent history. Contrary to the perception that logical tinkering bestowed us with our modern space-age society, this show reveals how the technological path to the present includes many headfirst dives into a ditch. Case in point: Flexplay, an idea conjured up during the video rental era that liberated the masses from the burden of returning movies by giving them self-destructing “eZ-D’s.” The secret was a reactive dye that would render the discs unreadable 48 hours after being exposed to oxygen. Price point, environmental concerns, and general consumer disinterest doomed the endeavor, but not until after Disney and Staples had been roped in for trial runs. The podcast is a bit analog—just two guys with not the best mics cracking wise at yesterday’s follies, asking for listener mail but not really expecting any. The episode is winding down when it first dawns on them to search YouTube for hot Flexplay-in-action content. And who could find fault with the series’ cover art? [Zach Brooke]
44 Comments
Wait, were EZ-D’s different from Divx? Because somebody should do a podcast about Divx.
EZ-D was Disney’s proprietary format, which I think was a variation of the Flexplay disc. DIVX operated differently; they didn’t have the dye pack, but rather used encryption and a phone line connection to limit you to 48 hours. There’s a decent video from Oddity Archive (a YT channel that’s been covering A/V ephemera for a while now) about DIVX, as well as Flexplay and EZ-D:
All I know about divx is that a lot of porn companies used it
Divx used a phone keycode system, right?
The main thing I remember about Divx is that you had a limited number of views of the movie. Like 10 or 25 or something. I think there were even ‘silver’ and ‘gold’ tiers. But once you watched the movie a certain number of times, it wouldn’t work anymore. The tradeoff was that it was much cheaper than a DVD – might have even been as cheap as three or four bucks.
I was confused that you were referring to the codec DivX, until I looked it up and realized that there was also a “rental” concept sold by Circuit City that was also called DIVX. They sold proprietary (never a good start) disc players that played proprietary (uh oh) rental discs, and authorized purchases through a phone line connection in the player (had it not been a commercial failure, I bet someone would have hacked the authorization protocol and still ruined the business model).
The two DivX variants are actually the same trademark. It was sold and re-purposed for the codec after the rental concept flamed out.
I remember in college we got free MS Office installs but each CD only worked for like 2 or 3 before the laser burned a little tab off and they stopped working.
Did someone say “self-destructing DVDs”?
It’s interesting to look at Podmass articles from 5 or 6 years ago and contrast them with the current ones. So many of the recommendations from the past year or two feel like homework assignments.
I know right? I listen to podcasts as background noise while I work, so many in these recent articles cover really heavy topics that demand your attention.
Homework assignments that are trying to sell you Casper mattresses or Squuarespace accounts……
Anne Applebaum’s a right wing ghoul who on top of her iraq war pushing stuff is a member of multiple neo-conservative think tanks.It’s really dispiriting to see someone like her promoted here.
She’s deserving of a platform, like any serious historian. Her 2003 study of the Soviet Gulags was well-researched and harrowing; a lot of people more knowledgable on the subject than I, consider it pretty well definitive.Judith Miller, on the other hand, can burn in hell.
You have a funny way of spelling “thrilling.”
Not to defend her support of the Iraq War, but anyone who has experienced the horrors of “real, existing socialism” in Eastern Europe (as many of my own relatives did although I was fortunate enough to be raised in the US), appreciates her work in reminding the current generation about the Gulag, the artificially created Ukrainian famine engineered by Stalin, and other horrors of that system. It’s been really popular lately to bash capitalism, and while it is certainly true that the US form of it needs to be revised to have an actual safety net and public health care like every other civilized nation, the fact is that capitalism is rather like how Churchill described democracy — flawed but better than any other system out there.
i’d be content with no more gladwell joints
Ahh yes, Malcolm Gladwell, the person who thinks the plural of ‘anecdote’ is ‘data’.
oh man, preach
On the other hand, without Malcolm Gladwell, I doubt I’d have pressure-washed and then painstakingly weeded and weed-proofed so many square feet of old paving stones during a house restoration last year…
People hate Gladwell, but his podcasts are pretty damn entertaining. His music one is especially good.
Eh, I love Comedy Bang Bang, etc. but it’s nice to not have Podmass just be that every week like it used to and read about podcasts on more serious topics (that I will probably never listen to, though).
ya throw some love to Hollywood Handbook, ya goofs
When cash bail is prohibited, judges tend to deny bail more.https://theappeal.org/one-year-after-cook-countys-bail-reform-court-watchers-say-things-are-getting-worse/A possible solution to “fake news” is news accuracy bonds:http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/09/news-accuracy-bonds.htmlBut people care more about news being timely enough to talk about over the watercooler than accurate.
Someone please explain to me how bail that a defendant can’t afford is not a glaring violation of the 8th Amendment. I mean, this is basic Bill of Rights stuff. It’s not flashy, you can’t put a glowing cross or a pearl handle on it, but it’s right there in the original “shit we should make clear” FAQs.
Expensive bail might not be considered “excessive”. However, denying even the possibility of bail is effectively an infinite amount.The article I linked to discusses Chicago, and commercial bail isn’t permitted here. However, in many places people who can’t afford bail themselves get it from bondsmen, who only get paid by the court if the person released shows up for court. Alex Tabarrok writes that defendants released under commercial bail are more likely to show up for court than comparable ones otherwise released, and that bounty hunters are more effective than police in recapturing escaped defendants. He also argues that the entry in the Bill of Rights that’s really getting slighted in many of these situations is the right to a speedy trial. Many people plea guilty just to get things over with more quickly. He discusses some of the practical reasons why judges are reluctant to release defendants in a video here.
Tsk, next thing you’ll be saying that killing someone in an electric chair violates the 8th Amendment…I guess excessive bail isn’t usually interpreted as “more than you can afford”, it’s taken to mean, “more than is necessary to ensure you don’t run away or that we can hire bounty hunters if you do run away”.Some homeless guy with only a dollar to his name who violently assaulted you would have no incentive not to jump bail if they set it to an amount he could afford.
Cum Town was pretty good last week. You guys should cover it.
Speaking of the biology of reproduction, I read a fascinating discussion about the nature of human reproduction, namely cycles of ovulation. The human species is one of the few in which the female does not visibly show when she is ovulating, and therefore the act of conception is far more given to chance than certainty. There has been speculation as to how this trait gained preference, when in nearly all species it is far more preferable to know when ovulation is occurring so that conception can successfully take place. The most intriguing hypothesis has to do with the social nature of the human species, and the slow development of off spring. Species where ovulation is visible tend to exhibit less peer bonding, because the male and female mate opportunistically, and then part ways. But in homo sapiens, the invisibility of ovulation requires a more constant presence, and repeated sexual encounters to produce a fertilized embryo. This is thought to promote peer bonding and stabler, monogamous relationships which is beneficial to the off spring which takes a great deal of time longer than other species to reach full maturity, physically and intellectually. Pretty fascinating stuff!
I didn’t realize I wanted to listen to podcasts about stupid inventions until I read the Water Cooled Potato entry.
and i didn’t realise i wanted to read the Water Cooled Potato entry until i read your comment.
We need three more steps to Ouroboros ourself, and if we get Kevin Bacon in on it i hear there are perks.
My chosen brother’s grandmother is distantly related to Kevin Bacon, and I didn’t read your comment until I’d read about Water Cooled Potato.
Does anyone remember the Parks and Rec bits about Public Radio? Everything is Alive is one of those bits… but seriously.
Those self-destruct DvDs were neat. They gave you plenty of time to both watch a movie and rip it to your computer if you thought it was good enough. Good stuff.
Why not arrange the list so the thing in the headline is somewhere close to the headline?
The podcast is a bit analogSo it’s recorded on tape or vinyl and the records show up at your house? You mean the sound quality is not that great right? Why not say that?
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Hollywood Handbook celebrated their 300th episode by inviting Moshe Kasher to try to record a commentary episode over their Comic-Con episode last year.“Try” being the operative word.
Try Year in Full Effect.
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I’m a fan of Mahnke-style history storytelling so I came out a fan of Noble Blood’s premiere. I did hope for a bit more context behind everything related to the revolution, but I understand that it’s more about Antoinette’s final moments than like, the societal ramp up. It’s an affecting format and one of those podcasts that’s great for folks who don’t like podcasts. Dana Schwartz is the real deal.
Try the ‘Revolutions’ podcast if you want a detailed account of the French Revolution.It’s very complicated; there were basically half a dozen revolutions over a few decades.I can’t help feeling that the execution of royalty attracts more than enough attention already. Everyone knows about the guillotine. How many people know about the Nantes Drownings, which killed a lot more people?
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Why do I never see ‘Why I Hate this Album’ podcast in these lists?