Week ending Nov 3, 2019
Welcome to the first ListenJay Podcasts of the Week — Your source for finding the best in Podcasting, based on the interests of our listeners and the judgment of our editors.

Topic of the Week
The topic that generated the most amount of traffic on Listenjay this week was the California wildfires. The wildfires exploded across the state this week and even as they are coming under control in the northern part of the state, the fires in Southern California have reignited and are spreading.

Today, Explained delivered a fantastic podcast on the subject, that captured the terror of the situation, and the depressing prospect that it may take up to ten years to fix the electric grid so that it doesn’t spark fires.

The Impeachment vote in the House of Representatives also received a lot of attention from Listenjay listeners this week, in particular this podcast from The Daily:
Business Podcast of the Week

There was a lot happening in business this week: Testimony from Facebook and Boeing before Congress; earnings from Microsoft; Google acquires Fitbit; Deadspin loses its editorial staff. But the story that attracted the most attention from listeners this week was the earnings failures at GrubHub. Their stock price dropped 45% in the course of the week, and coming off the WeWork disaster, the failure also called to question Door Dash and other gig economy food suppliers. The Pivot podcast, with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, had a lot of listeners around Door Dash, in particular. But for our money, the hot take was from Motley Fool:
Best New Podcast

Wondery’s new podcast “Mysterious Mr. Epstein” takes on Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex criminal with friends in high places who committed suicide while in federal custody. Like many a crime podcast, not easy to listen to, but gripping if for no other reason than all the conspiracies made possible by his rise.
Could Be Better

Another new Wondery podcast, The Next Big Idea, suffers for a want of big ideas. Hosted by Rufus Griscom, and featuring Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink, it’s a panel of “thought-leaders” discussing ideas that are ostensibly capable of changing the way you live, work, and think. In practice, it feels a little middle-brow, and kind of boring. I found myself drifting off quite a bit, and not because the material was too arcane, but because some of these ideas either don’t have real depth, or are handled in such a superficial fashion that it obscures the fascinating and insightful. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t live up to its name.
You Should Be Listening To

With all the wildfires in California, we went back to Amy Westervelt’s Drilled podcast. If you haven’t heard it, you should. Drilled bills itself as a forensic investigation of the crime of thirty years of climate denialism — thirty years where the problem could have been addressed if not for the efforts of fossil fuel companies to obfuscate the problem and promote climate denialism. While the podcast moves ahead at a brisk pace, it is meticulously detailed, and the archival clips of Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George Bush discussing the need to take on climate change will have you angry over the missed opportunities we had to address the problem. Here’s a great clip where science historian Naomi Oreskes describes the problem with the false equivalence often behind reporting on global warming.
