Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

http://serialpodcast.org/

So, did Adnan do it? Or was it Jay?

Blog by Rabia, the relative of Adnan's who brought the story to the This American Life producer: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/splitthemoon/2014/10/life-plus-30-murder-lies-the-anatomy-of-a-wrongful-conviction/

I'm just letting the story go where it goes without anticipating the conclusion.

I wonder what other kinds of things Serial is going to explore once this series is over. It might not always be true crime.

I know it's way early to speculate, but I really wonder if there's more to the case against Adnan that we haven't heard yet. The teaser says next week will be about how the cops corroborated Jay's story. I wonder if there's something solid there. Today's episode really seemed to suggest that Jay should have been taken more seriously as a suspect. Will be really interesting if they get Jay to talk.

Looks like Reddit is all over this: http://www.reddit.com/r/serialpodcast/

Makes me a little nervous, given the Reddit community sleuthing stuff that's gone sideways in the past. I wonder if people will start badgering the people in the story. Looks like Jay's current Facebook page has already been posted.

Within the first few threads I see "Should we respect the privacy of Hae?"

Ugh, fucking reddit.

I mean, DUH. Yes.

Yep. The thing about this format, especially if the podcast stays at #1, is that it's going to be irresistible to Reddit/bloggers/clickbaity websites/ even legit journalists to try to scoop the show itself, and potentially being pretty insensitive to the real people involved. I imagine there will be a round of think-pieces on the ethics of Serial in Slate etc. soon enough. If I was Jay, and I was innocent, I'd be pretty pissed off right now - especially if they're holding back on info that supports his story for dramatic effect.

yeah; it didn't occur to me during the first ep how much our response to the existence or omission of something tantalising has changed, recently, like from savoring to feeling insatiable, but i think there are so many points that would compel interest - like, say, the guy who found the body refusing an interview, which sarah koenig accepts - & people are for sure going to start true detectiving all over it.

think this is really interesting so far, for a bunch of reasons (it feels like a lil step forward even just in sound-accessorising podcasts, too, like the music's really well judged, & the quality of the recorded period sound is super evocative -- i actually thought they were purposefully distorting the voice of a cop, this week, but it's just cassette artefact, afaict). will be super interesting to reach the end & see what the kind of map of what we were given looks like, whether it was satisfying, whether it's a beginning or an ending.

They're really going through the timeline this week, and it's hard to listen to and do work at the same time, because I'm getting lost.

the reddit discussion of this seems p good actually or maybe I just had low expectations of what'd be there

the bit about the phone likely being in Leakin Park at a time when Adnan has no reason NOT to have been with his phone seems like pretty bad news for Adnan apologists

Really starting to fear that this story has no satisfying conclusion now that I'm so invested in it.

have they said how many shows they're planning to take to tell this story? is this like 20 shows or something?

I can't imagine it's 20. Was guessing it's probably 8-10.

Like this show a lot. Wish they hadn't used such a cheap plinky keyboard sound for the theme song though. I know, minor gripe.

Didn't Sarah says she has been working on this story for a year? I feel there has to be some kind of momentum in this story to stick with it for so long. Something worthy of starting a podcast, not just a series of stories that we follow until the trail goes cold/remains unsolved.

The altered voice for "Kathy" sounds a lot like regular-voiced Stevie Nicks.

Anyone else going super hardcore and listening to the Slate spoiler podcast? Last one was good.

I don't want spoilers!

it's actually not spoilery - unless you haven't heard the episode they're discussing. they vowed not to bring Reddit or other outside info into their conversation

Oh, listening to the latest one now and it's just a catch-up roundtable. Not pulling facts from the actual case in that haven't been disclosed yet.

New one didn't blow me away.

Listening to Maron first, will get to this next.

I'm unexpectedly excited to hear her talk about this shit with an actual attorney.

don't be too excited, this ep was p much a waste but I expect the innocence proj & those student's involvement might come back up @ the end of this, like their added research was particularly important

yeah - i felt like we'll be hearing more about that fibre analysis down the line, but most of this show was padding and an attempt to re-introduce a lot of pro-Adnan stuff from the lawyer to counter last week's doubts and keep us hooked

Based purely on how serialpodcast.org is designed, there's either going to be 9 or 12 episodes (or maybe 15?). I just realized this and probably no one cares.

I thought they said we were at or past the halfway point on the slate spoiler episode last week, maybe I'm wrong. even that feels like a lot more episodes.

But the general thrust of the lawyer's advice - at least as Sarah K presented it seemed to be "forget about making Adnan's story add up - what matters is forensic evidence and an alternate suspect/theory."

A few mentions of "a serial killer" being the real culprit in similar cases, something that had not been floated here before.

There was also the suggestion that Don, Hae's new boyfriend, hadn't been looked at closely enough - but it was dropped as quickly as it was raised. It did occur to me that the show has been pretty hasty about ruling him out so far, especially given the time they spent on what seem like obvious red herrings like Neighbor Boy and the streaker who found the body.

I predict after the Jay detour next week, we'll come back to the Innocence Project findings re: fibre and more on Don.

The slate podcast I heard yesterday brings up a great point about how she chooses to disclose some people's full names and doesn't for others (including Jay). I can't imagine that's totally arbitrary.

in interviews she says they were vaguely shooting for a dozen episodes but that isn't set in stone

anyway SHUT UP this episode was really good & interesting & it was kinda moving how cathartic it sounded for SK, & the rearrangement of puzzle pieces - what about dna! - felt really valuable. i wish i knew when all of this had taken place; i don't know if six months ago they made efforts to dig up misplaced evidence in a warehouse or if two weeks ago they put in a RFI on stray beerbottles & a dude is craning his neck to look through a microscope right now

i think knowing a little more about what this series is - they're still researching it, it could go either way, it's in progress - helps, like it removes the weird extra-textual true detective thing of creating additional suspense on whether the show will be about the process or about the result. just vibing with a stressed detective is really fascinating & novel & engaging, i think.

hyped for jay detour.

ha now you're making me like it

did it feel genuine to you when she was airing her doubts about Adnan to the lawyer? It just felt a little manipulative, like she was putting herself exactly where she wanted the audience's heads to be at this point in the narrative. But maybe I'm being cynical and she's actually really right there with us. anyway, nitpicking, it's fucking great.

if "they're still researching it, it could go either way" is really true - that's a hell of a tight rope to walk though, I wonder how people will react if it has no satisfying ending

she is not gaming afaict

really worth reading a bunch of the interviews - slate, i think, & the NYer - w/SK to hear her talk about that kinda thing. she says she's a good enough reporter to deal with the conclusion, whether it's ambiguous or whatever. i feel like it's already strong enough to justify its focus, like it's so illuminating to be confronted with just the machinery of trials & convictions & burdens of proof & nebulous differences between accounts, &c.

did anybody watch the staircase? it came up in the NYer piece as a comparable project, it's really fascinating.

It's kind of the only really similar thing, right? A serialized week-by-week true crime thing? I loved the Staircase, but something about Serial has grabbed me even more... maybe it's just that I have to wait for it every week, while I binge-watched The Staircase

I wonder if Serial was at all inspired by TV like True Detective or the last season of Breaking Bad - both huge shows from the last year that reminded people how much fun it is to experience something together with everyone else over many weeks instead of bingeing

she is not gaming afaict

yeah. it's p telling that she sez her fav piece of tape is the girl @ the end of this ep who sounds so exasperated in sentence fragments that none of it makes sense

anyway, could be interesting what adnan sez when Koenig asks him abt jay's friends saying he went along cuz adnan threatened stephanie

part of me cant get over cathy's? I think description of adnan @ her party & her description of his behavior, asking how do you stop being high, right? and needing to go do something important. has Koenig asked abt this party? I cant recall

That call seems like a total red herring - even if A is totally innocent, it would make sense that kids were calling each other saying that Hae was missing and the cops are looking for her, and Adnan could be freaked out about being high and worried about talking to the cops.

yea def possible, and the host's recollection of adnans strange behavior being influenced by him later being convicted

But this episode sure does make it seem like Adnan did it.
I think the details of Jay's chronology will never add up - but the fundamentals (what Koenig has referred to as "the spine of his story") are unshaken. Jay admits to giving different versions of the day's events, and the prosecution may well have put forward a very flawed version of the day's events - but it doesn't seem that weird that a scared stoner high school who participated in the aftermath of a murder told a bunch of lies on his way to telling the truth.

SPOILERS
(should we ask mods to put a spoiler warning in the title of the thread?)

Also interesting in this week's show was Jay's friend Chris who gave a whole new version of events (the pool hall story) and the the whole new motive for Jay to help Adnan (Adnan's threats to Jay's girlfriend Stephanie). Odd that it seems like Jay never told cops the threats story, as far as we know anyway.

is one of these gonna drop thanksgiving morning?

Totally wasn't expecting them to actually ambush Jay like that. Seems out of character with how passive the investigation has been up to this point.

Yeah totally.

I kind of had a few seconds of "why am I even bothering to listen to this then" when she said he ultimately declined the interview. There's so much only he can answer.

latest episode is still banging around in my head. the "all facts are friendly" vs. "bad evidence" bit was really fascinating and maybe the core of what this show is ultimately going to be about.

i was already feeling pretty sure that adnan did it (separate tho from the question of whether he should've been convicted) but this last ep made me feel like 99% sure.

im interested in the jay/Stephanie/adnan dynamic

yeah, sure does seem like Adnan did it.

biggest lingering questions to me are around why he brought Jay into it at all, and if Jay had a bigger role than he's admitted.

this episode convinced me of it too, but i still think he should have been found not guilty. was totally annoyed by attorney's cross-examination style. i think he brought jay in for the reason jay said, that he was perceived to be "the criminal element" at school. i don't think jay's different stories mean much. i think he was just scared.

After this week's ep I am def more sympathetic to Jay... i dropped my suspicions that Adnan is hiding more than he's letting on a while back but now they're back in a big way.

i think the venn diagram of jay & adnan has a big swampy ??? in the crossover & goddammit i want to know what it is

and i am with schlump, i found last week's ep v cathartic & exciting & useful. a good way-marker on the road to new questions etc

i just binged-listened to 7 eps in a row - this is so engaging! although i'm having a really hard time keep track of everything.

to me, so far, the most stand-out thing has been:
when koenig tells adnan that the main draw has been him and what a "nice guy" he is etc. and he's goes off at her, kinda incoherently, but the next day really forcefully explains how being perceived as a nice guy is the least of his concerns - he wants someone to point out all the discrepancies in the case that led to him being convicted. this is what has meaning leaning away from him being guilty right now.

unless he's an actual psychopath, there really doesn't seem to be a believable motive for Hae's murder - especially such a premeditated one.

*me, not meaning

guys the most recent episode made me develop a super far-fetched theory! what if some third person committed the murder and threatened Jay to help him cover it up, otherwise he would hurt Stephanie? (naming Adnan would be part of the cover-up) something about the way Jay responded when Koenig went to his house seemed both truthful and evasive to me--like when he said, if Adnan didn't do it, who did? also it seems for real that Stephanie got threatened back then/Jay was worried for her. he said his first thought when he saw Hae's body was how fragile Stephanie is.

this is all cap'n-save-an-adnan of me and probably totally irrational and unlikely, but i am totally taken in by the dude.

also i feel like a creep for listening to this show, but i can't stop

i tried to get my wife to listen so we could discuss but after 5 minutes she was like "i do not want to listen to a show about a murder" and was adamant about how sick it was

I think this is an introduction to "true crime" storytelling for a lot of people (me included), so it's understandable that not everyone is on board.

yeah so far every time she has said 'I warn you this is upsetting' she has been totally otm, the thing is stomach turning if you aren't used to it.

As long as the show has the blessing of the girl's family, I'm ok with it. But I do think it veers slightly into entertainment, and that's not a very comfortable place.

it makes me realize what a creep i am that this is comparatively pleasant to the stuff i usually dig into :/

ha i was gonna say; i have become #true #crime #guy since this started, watching everything that came up as a point of reference (the staircase, paradise lost, &c), & there's such a difference between serial's kind of take-a-moment preparatory remarks, before something distressing, &, say, the scenes in the staircase where 8x10 glossy photographs of head wounds are passed around a conference table & light-heartedly chuckled over by defence strategists. i feel like the vague allegiance of being semi-embroiled with a weary, inquisitive reporter in serial puts you at a relatively, or at least more successfully, comfortable distance away from the sensation of gawking; that it expends enough of its capital on just reeling in threads about whether people are truthful & how credible evidence can be that you feel sort of more worthy & purposeful when you're hearing about something specifically upsetting, arguably private, &c. there was a really beautiful moment a couple of episodes into this where they played the song that hae had really loved, around the time of her prom, & it had the same effect as the romantic instrumental rockabilly guitar theme in twin peaks, the dreamy, teen-romantic theme we see whenever the guy's on his motorbike. & that's obviously a kind of cool, ear-catching aesthetisisation of something actually pretty depressing, the people involved kind of abstracted into these themes. but it does feel kinda broad enough to get away with it.

thing that was so interesting about the last episode to me was just more squarely having to deal with what lying would mean, given that adnan's so persuasively straight-shooting-seeming & that a guy in a shitty apartment saying he did it also seems credible. it's really hard getting to the stage of inventing weird, circuitous exculpating theories that involve others, because i feel like adnan's persuasiveness is so in step with how much he seems to be just unadornedly telling you how things were that the idea that he's concealing some b-narrative would erase all sense of him being so well-intentioned.

guys let's start a podcast

yeah I think my third party murderer theory is about wanting jay and adnan both to be telling the truth somehow.

The description of high school Jay made me like him, too.

big lacrosse fan

our new podcast is called cereal

this having a dramatic conclusion in which innocence is revealed & justice is done gets a lot of play
but
finding out that adnan was lying would be so incredibly jarring & difficult i think

ha ha
just some internet user friends chewing over the new episode over breakfast every thursday
the internet's slurpiest podcast

I finished ep 8 last night, and I'm still not buying that Jay went along with it bc Stephanie was his weakness. But Jay's reaction to being approached by sk and the strength of his response makes him just as believable as Adnan.

Without third party involvement like horseshoe suggests, Adnan as an actual psycho is the only conceivable theory to me.

I am troubled by Jay and his pathological lying - I've known at least 2 ppl like this, who would lie about the weather just for the sake of it.

I am more troubled by the position Jay has been put into IF Adnan really did do it. Like, wtf

I wonder why SK has held off so long on talking about Adnan's trials/lawyer. It would make sense if she'd been building a convincing case for Adnan's innocence all along and then showed us how his corrupt lawyer dropped the ball/took a dive, but really she's just given us a bunch of evidence that doesn't seem like cause for a new trial. idk if dropping the "btw his lawyer sucked" bomb in episode 10 or whenever is going to be all that mind-changing.

http://www.theawl.com/2014/11/serial-and-white-reporter-privilege

some discussion of this piece of the Race Thread. Writer has a bizarre misreading of SK's comment on Hae's diary.

As long as the show has the blessing of the girl's family, I'm ok with it.

Does it have their blessing? I assumed since they haven't been interviewed that they wanted nothing to do with the show.

i thought that in episode 1 or 2 they discussed his lawyer

There was a mention, with SK saying that some think she intentionally threw the case, which is a statement kind of asking for follow up

pretty sure they said his lawyer died a few years ago

She did, but I think he meant the topic needs to be revisited.

does it seem to anyone else like hae is missing in this? as far as i know, there hasn't been anything about her family, her friends (outside of those known to jay/adnan), etc.

that did strike me too, idk, there was stuff from her diary. i also feel like her family may not have wanted to be involved

Hae's family moved back to Korea after her murder. Don't know if SK was unable to contact them or they didn't wish to be interviewed.

Well, that complicates things. I guess that I'm wanting to know more about the person – about Hae. This isn't to say that I think pathos-wallowing is a good journalistic angle, but I'm hoping SK spends more time establishing the human behind the victim. Nearly all I know about her:

* On-again/off-again/on-again/definitely-off-again relationship w/ Adnan (unremarkable, except maybe not)
* At time of death dating 'Don' from Lenscrafters
* Good student @ WHS magnet program, w/ lots of friends
* Korean
* ???

yeah, everyone I know who's hooked on the show has talked about starting to feel uncomfortable about Hae being kind of lost in the shuffle of the story... I imagine they'll make an effort to address it soon.

a couple of things from chaudry's blog

I send a copy to the his lawyer and the court, thinking the case can get reopened based on it. I’m a law student with no experience in criminal procedure. I learn that no “new evidence” can be submitted until a post-conviction appeal. A post-conviction appeal cannot be filed until 10 years have passed since the conviction.

this is NUTS. what's the reasoning behind this type of restriction?

Adnan loses every technical appeal. Ten years pass and we’re ready to file post-conviction through an excellent attorney who is really committed to the case.
His lawyer has Asia’s letters and affidavit and sets out to find her. His private investigator locates her but returns with terrible news. She won’t testify. The PI never spoke to her but her fiance made it very clear, in a very nasty way that suggested an anti-Muslim prejudice, that Asia would not be involved and to leave them alone. It was devastating to Adnan and his loved ones. All of these years had been passed in the hope that when post-conviction came around Asia would corroborate her letters and affidavit and he would be given a new trial.

if this testimony from asia was so crucial, why had they not contacted her during that 10 years, to say 'hey at this certain date we're gonna need you to testify, are you willing?' - why did they wait till the 10 years were up?

people are speculating that if the story told on this week's episode is true (that Hae was killed in the library parking lot, not at the Best Buy) then Asia's testimony might actually prove that Adnan did it and the inconsistencies are the fault of the cops pushing Jay to tell their favored theory.

that was my thought after listening - that the library was prob the scene of the crime

a couple of things from chaudry's blog

I send a copy to the his lawyer and the court, thinking the case can get reopened based on it. I’m a law student with no experience in criminal procedure. I learn that no “new evidence” can be submitted until a post-conviction appeal. A post-conviction appeal cannot be filed until 10 years have passed since the conviction.

afaik this is wrong but i can't really tell what she's talking about. post-conviction and appeal mean two different things. you can appeal from a denial of a post-conviction petition, but i think she's talking about a post-conviction. those have to be filed within ten years generally. (and i can see from maryland's court records site that one was filed and the petition was denied).

yeah - she seemed to blow by the library as the scene of the crime thing really fast last week - that's potentially huge for the case against Adnan, solves all kinds of timing problems and blows away Asia as an alibi.

i even heard that the park that jay originally testified they had gone to smoke a joint is actually reachable in the time frame allowed if the murder happened at the library

xpost
Also Adnan's threats against Stephanie as a motive for Jay to be complicit seems huge too - but it seems really bizarre Jay wouldn't have made that part of the story he told the cops, it makes him way more sympathetic. Kind of feels like it must be bullshit.

http://www.businessinsider.com/brother-of-hae-min-lee-responds-to-serial-podcast-2014-11

wow, kind of shocking that "we don't know if this is really Hae's brother" doesn't crop up until paragraph 6 of that article. though the Koenig email does look legit fwiw

I think that may not be legit. The reddit user says he heard about the podcast from his cousin - but he also says he was approached by Sarah Koenig before it aired. Also he claims his family doesn't know about the podcast - but I seem to remember SK saying they declined to comment in Ep 1. Am I imagining that? Has Koenig ever been specific about being in touch with Hae's family?

The e-mail SK sent says just that she works for TAL and wants to do an extensive radio documentary about his sister's murder. If I received that I would assume she meant that maybe an entire episode of TAl was going to be devoted to the story, not a 12 part podcast.

I don't remember SK saying that Hae's family declined to cooperate. I relistened to the old episodes after reading that Jay Caspian Kang piece about how Serial is GETTING IT WRONG about immigrant families! and was surprised at how little she actually says about Hae's family. It's maybe a coupe of sentences.

there's a SK interview - somewhere, I forget - where she talks about having sent all initial enquiries relating to serial with prefixes namedropping TAL, just because serial didn't exist yet & it represented all the clout she had. just fwiw.

I totally get why she did that--just saying it explains how the guy can be saying both "I was contacted by SK" and "I heard about this podcast called Serial from my cousin"

yeah, ok that makes sense. if Hae's family really does not know about the podcast at all, it's kind of horrible.

ive always been under the impression that SK started with the intent of covering this story in a single episode of TAL and then later decided on the Serial format/project

From what SK says in the new episode, it sounds like that guy on reddit really is Hae's brother

no new episode until dec! gonna be a long lonely walk to work next thurs

weird episode, kind a grab bag of loose ends strung together with adnan in prison tales

successfully swung things back toward reasonable doubt for Adnan

but still - if you accept A's innocence, what the fuck is Jay's motive for making all this up?

https://twitter.com/cheerios/status/535503401736359936

my cheerios consumption is often multi-episodic

deleted, wot did it say?

it was a really dumb pun/spoof on the Serial logo that said CEREAL, and something about "its easy to solve crime when you're not hungry" or something

All three of these people think Adnan did it:

http://www.avclub.com/article/introducing-serial-serial-v-clubs-new-podcast-abou-211881

Ugh these people are so dumb.

Finally listened to the first ep, and a thing that slightly irks me about the setup is that it's pretty much down to two possibilities right away: he did it, or Jay for some reason made up a very elaborate lie. And the second option in turn doesn't present a lot of possibilities either: Jay did it himself, he's covering up for someone else who did it, he's a psycopath who wanted to get Adnan for some reason, he's just a psycopath period. I thought starting with tracking down the library alibi was sort of a weird thing to start with, I'd start with "WHY THE FUCK WOULD JAY SAY THAT IF IT'S NOT TRUE?" Whereas the library alibi is almost certain not to be a slam dunk no matter what she finds out.

So I hope the show gets to that before this Ep 8 "The Deal With Jay" or else I'm just gonna have to skip ahead.

Ep 8 (or 9) don't answer that either fwiw

before ep 8 there's an episode where they drive around town to try to recreate jay's narrative of the events that kinda directly deals w/ the veracity of his account and that's def a trend throughout, but jay himself doesn't speak until ep 8.

Like I will probably listen to it anyway because the characters are interesting, but it's hard for me to pretend there's this big complicated multi-dimensional mystery going on when there is really ONE BIG QUESTION that needs to be answered.

Woodlawn is kinda straddling the city/county line.

The trippiest thing for me about this story is that I grew up in Baltimore County and knew people in Woodlawn, plus a lot of the landmarks are familiar. Some of the referenced businesses are places where I shopped, so I'm like "was I served by characters in this story at some point?"

― RAP GAME SHANI DAVIS (Raymond Cummings), Thursday, November 20, 2014 9:05 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't remember if there was a phone booth at Best Buy. BUT...

(Bmore people help me here) Was there a phone booth on the main road leading to Best Buy, near the bus stop, near McDonald's? In my memory there was.

― RAP GAME SHANI DAVIS (Raymond Cummings), Thursday, November 20, 2014 9:21 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

whoa there detective hurting, maybe let a few episodes pass meanwhile, appreciate the journey

"characters"

Yeah, it's totally about the journey here, and frankly it makes you ask yourself some pretty heavy questions about perspective, memory, what "the truth" really is.

seems like basically a story about how the police pushed a guy to testify to a false sequence of events but nonetheless got the right person convicted

the thing is, i just don't feel like either jay or adnan have any kind of motive for Hae's murder, unless one of them is a psychopath.

the phone booth thing is really fuckin weird - like, if it never existed, jay took an awfully big gamble by stating adnan called him from it, how could he possibly know it wouldn't be checked out? is it possible that adnan had a second phone that he called jay from, and that bc jay didn't know about it he just assumed adnan must have called him from a phone booth, since adnan specified he was right there?

this has a much more salient critique of Serial than I've seen elsewhere

http://gawker.com/what-serial-gets-wrong-1660778617?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_twitter&utm_source=gawker_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

ehh the whole thing about how SK isn't questioning the police's questionable actions doesn't seem right - imo she's questioned it quite a bit. i also think it's possible that she's going to get around to the cultural/political climate of baltimore, and how that impacted the case, in a later episode.

There are now two competing podcasts that recap Serial now? Is this the first time podcasts about podcasts have sprung up? I know there is a This American Life parody podcast, but can't think of any others.

a guy i work with was named in the credits this last episode i need to get his autograph

Have listened to these over and over the last few days. Jay mostly told what the cops got him to say in the pre-interviews, right?

They probay got him to say that Adnan was planning the murder, so they could make 1st degree stick

There are now two competing podcasts that recap Serial now? Is this the first time podcasts about podcasts have sprung up?

The Wolf Den.

found listening to this quite strange. couldn't concentrate on it while working or reading twitter. found it a bit creepy having to turn everything off so i could sit and truly focus on the real story of this murder.

anyway, adnam did it

It seems obvious to me that Jay's account of a premeditated murder is false. And why would the state be so interested in a murder one conviction? I wonder if the stuff about Adnand's threats toward Jay is true and it's Jay who wants to pin the murder one so that Adnand's gone for life. Maybe he made his cooperation as a witness contingent on this point.

The state always wants to be able to charge high (murder one) so that they can get a plea deal on something lower (murder two). Having Jay ready to say that Adnan was planning the murder would be an incentive for Adnan to confess to a crime of passion.

It's always adnam

Got through all 9 and still kind of frustrated by this show -- I rme a little when the PI she hired told her to stop focusing on all the "Adnan's friend thought he seemed ___ that day" stuff because it's total bs, because I have been feeling that way all along. Meanwhile, nine episodes in, very little examination of why Jay might be lying if he is, or what alternate explanations of the crime there might be if Adnan wasn't involved. Hard to tell how much of that is just the podcast deliberately stringing the listener along in order to create a good serialized story and how much of it is being unsure what leads to follow. But it does bother me that she has no background in crime reporting or investigation and it shows. It's one thing to examine the slippery nature of truth, it's another to fumble around in the dark when a better trained person might get to the bottom more quickly.

the thing is, i just don't feel like either jay or adnan have any kind of motive for Hae's murder, unless one of them is a psychopath.

The motive for Adnan would be jealousy. The evidence against that is just a bunch of people saying he didn't *seem* like he was broken up about it. But there's also been evidence that the relationship was much more intense than his cool, casual vibe would have let on. I agree it's a little hard to believe. So far the show has left me with nothing else, so it still seems like the most likely explanation. I don't really get why the show still hasn't looked more closely at Don, or at other people who might be links between Jay and Hae, or at any other possibilities (though Jay has to get tied in somehow in order to have a reason to make up all this shit about Adnan).

one theory i saw on reddit was that hae had caught jay cheating and was going to tell steph. i actually find that somewhat more believable than adnan killing her, esp bc jay says it was premeditated and not a fit of rage.

why the show still hasn't looked more closely at Don

there's an interview - entertainment weekly, maybe? - in which one of the producers waves this aside just by saying don's alibi's watertight, that he was at work, fwiw. i forget if it came up in the show.

sk mentions that a manager at lenscrafters confirmed don was working that day.

reddit kickstarter to torture the branch manager into full disclosure

one theory i saw on reddit was that hae had caught jay cheating and was going to tell steph.

isn't this the dumb theory Adnan's lawyer was trying to use when she's yelling at Jay about "stepping out"?

Has she looked into whether Don has an identical twin? I'm clutching at straws here.

There are some details in these accounts that SK has nt really explored--probably because she isn't in the proving-Adnan-is-guilty business.

First, the person who made the 911 call said that Hae broke up with her boyfriend about a week before she went missing. We know that she broke up withAdnan way before that--so either the caller meant Don, or Hae had still been secretly seeing Adnan and finally broke it off for good.

Also one of the stories from the Jay episode was that Adnan confronted Hae about flirting with some guy and then strangled her in anger. Presumably the guy was not Don. Perhaps had told Adnan she was about to dump Don and Adnan thought she might be coming back to him, only to freak out when he heard she was flirting with new guys?

All of these also give Don a motive

First, the person who made the 911 call said that Hae broke up with her boyfriend about a week before she went missing. We know that she broke up withAdnan way before that--so either the caller meant Don, or Hae had still been secretly seeing Adnan and finally broke it off for good.

or the caller is not an infallible source

Well it was the pope tbf

Adnan did it in a fugue state.

Jay and Adnan were really just working for a ring of Maryland politicians, ministers and other luminaries who wore animal masks and engaged in ritual murder in cars in the Best Buy parking lot.

I really agree with Hurting's point from upthread - there's tons of weeds to get lost in with this story but the big over-riding question now is why the fuck should we believe Jay would make up a big elaborate story to frame Adnan? A story that makes him an accessory to a murder. And if the answer is he lied because killed Hae, why the fuck would Jay kill Hae?

I don't think I could convict Adnan if I were on a jury and the podcast through ep 9 was the sum of the case, but I also still feel like Adnan did it is the most likely explanation, with inconsistencies in Jay's story probably coming down to him minimizing his own role/flaws in his memory. Everyone in this story seems to smoke weed all the time, so that would explain a lot too.

yeah, it does not seem like a leap at all to accept that Adnan probably should not have been convicted based on what we know of the case against him... and to believe he seems like he had the most likely motive, the opportunity to commit the crime, and a semi-reliable witness saying he did it. Not enough to put someone away for life, but not nothing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/business/media/serial-podcastings-first-breakout-hit-sets-stage-for-more.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fthe-media-equation&contentCollection=business&action=click&module=NextInCollection®ion=Footer&pgtype=article

I don't really get the guilty-but-shouldn't-have-been-convicted- argument. Lack of every single nail being hammered down in a case doesn't really add up to reasonable doubt. It would overturn nearly every conviction that went to a jury, as there are always details that don't fit. If I were on a jury and I thought a guy had murdered someone, I don't think "Some stoner chick doesn't remember seeing a pay phone when she was shoplifting from Best Buy 15 years ago," would cause me to vote not guilty.

Someone on Reddit (yes i know) presented this (completely fictional) scenario, which helped me be able to accept the proposed "infidelity" motivation for Jay, or the way the situation could have escalated very fast:

Hae approaches Adnan's car, realizes Jay is driving.

HAE: If you don't tell Stephanie that you cheated, I will.

JAY: If you do, I'll tell your parents you've been lying to them for years and having sex.

HAE: Then I'll just go to the police and tell them you're a dealer.

Would only be believable to me if Hae was good friends with Stephanie, which I don't remember being the case but maybe I'm forgetting something. Also is there any reason to think Jay was cheating on Stephanie?

There was no evidence in this case. There was one witness, and his story was only corroborated by the phone records if you overlook all the places where it doesn't. I don't think this is a case where there is just stuff that does not add up, this is a weak case. Also, don't think Adnan did it.

Well, maybe not *only* believable if they were friends, but again, no evidence for that theory yet afaik.

It's legitimately absurd to say that there was "no evidence" in this case.

What was it, then? Phone records. A fingerprint on a book Adnan could have seen many times before.

The testimony of Jay is extremely strong evidence even if not everything matches. Saying it's "only one witness" like it was just some random eyewitness who saw a flash of Adnan's face in a car is really missing the point. Again, maybe not enough to convict, but you need a pretty good story to explain it away.

The difference between Serial and some of the documentaries that have led to exonerations is that the others have posited a plausible alternative suspect as well as poking holes in the state's case. How horrible for Hae's family if Serial actually got her murderer sprung on technical issues. Not that that will happen.

but it might, idk, i think in that entertainment weekly interview w/ Koenig she again mentions the innocence proj and that it will factor in again in this narrative

I don't consider one witness to be enough evidence, especially not one who took a plea deal. Like, that's just a princip. I would never ever vote to convict in a case that hinged on a single witness who got out of prison himself by testifying. And that short segment where they interview a juror saying 'he had to go to prison himself' 'no he didn't' 'huh...' That was one of the most horifying details yet.

Also, I think 15 years is long enough in prison for anything, especially for an underage convict. But then again, I'm European.

15 years is also a long time to be dead at someone's hands. (I'm American btw)

I think Adnan probably did it, but if I were on a jury and was presented with the evidence described in this podcast, there is no way I would feel confident enough about Adnan's guilt to actually vote for a guilty verdict.

from what I've heard about the Innocent Project's work on this case (SPOILERS): They're mainly focusing on DNA tests of the rape kit--running it against a serial killer who was active at the time, and another guy. If either of those suspects turn up as hits then maybe Adnan will get another trial. If not, I don't know how his case gets relitigated.

Lots of criminal convictions necessarily hinge on the testimony of one witness. Again, big difference between "one witness" who sees something from the sidelines and "one witness" who knows the perpetrator and has a long, detailed account.

The plea deal taint is a problem, but again, there are limited possibilities: either (1) Jay played exactly the role he said and got himself exonerated for giving up Adnan, (2) Jay was more of a co-conspirator with Adnan and massaged things to make it sound like it was only Adnan, or (3) Jay is covering up for himself and/or someone else by creating a very elaborate fabrication that happens to match up with a lot of details in spite of other inconsistencies. It requires Jay alone and/or with some unknown third person murdering someone Jay doesn't have much connection to while just happening to also have Adnan's car and phone. And I would assume that police investigated Jay as well, although the show hasn't really gone into this from what I remember. And I doubt the police were like "oh, we have this other dude who might have killed her, and he even has a rap sheet and is a pot dealer, but who cares lets just get the popular kid based on a story that might be made up and not even look into the other guy."

Like I said, I don't know if I could convict, but if it's just a matter of weighing more and less likely explanations so far, I still think Adnan is the more likely person.

XP that would require Jay framing his friend to save a serial killer (or hallucinating the story or something)

I think there's a 4th possibility that's far more likely: Jay did help Adnan hide the body, and initially lied about it to the cops. They kept pressing him so that he had to admit certain things, and after the story started to come out, they continued to get him to add thingsthat fit their preferred timeline and theories.

If Jay had been forced into helping a serial killer getting rid of the body, why on earth would it be more weird that he also felt forced into concocting a lie to further help a serial killer? Like, I don't get that.

And there was a witness giving Adnan an alibi. But we all just ignore that. When really, the whole corroboration of Jays story also hinges on a single witness, Nysha.

If Jay had been forced into helping a serial killer getting rid of the body, why on earth would it be more weird that he also felt forced into concocting a lie to further help a serial killer? Like, I don't get that.

lol

And Nysha's story is factually incorrect. Mentions a job that Jay didn't have at the time. And the prosecution ignores that. Like, it's the smoking gun, and it isn't true.

from what I've heard about the Innocent Project's work on this case (SPOILERS): They're mainly focusing on DNA tests of the rape kit--running it against a serial killer who was active at the time, and another guy

wait - what rape kit? i don't remember there being any mention of evidence she was raped - am I just forgetting that?

She wasn't, but they had to do one anyway

So Jay just randomly called Adnan's friend, who Jay wasn't friends with, on Adnan's phone, while in the midst of murdering or covering up the murder of Adnan's ex? Probably to help the serial killer frame Adnan.

butt dial

oops wrong thread

No, Jay called all his friends on Adnan's phone, while helping Adnan bury his girlfriend, but then Adnan wanted to be sure that people knew it was him, so he called Nysha also.

Like, Adnan planned the perfect murder, but then decided he had to give the prosecution proof that he did it, and called a person that Jay didn't know.

Frederik, your ironical explanation assumes that Adnan, a high school student in the 90s, had an understanding of how phone record evidence could be used against him, whereas mine assumes that a serial killer forced a random kid to frame his friend and has managed to keep him quiet about it for fifteen years. Which seems more likely?

The one thing Adnan has going for him is that it seems unlikely that a murderer would involve his pot dealer in hiding the body. But everyone says that Adnan was gregarious so he maybe didn't want a bonding opportunity to go to waste.

Yeah and OTOH there's the "Jay was the kind of guy you'd ask for help with this kind of thing" possibility.

I think whatever the explanation, a lot of the weirdnesses of the story may boil down to "this is a bunch of stoned high school kids we're talking about."

jay did it for scooby snacks

Well, no, because, if they were just using his phone, why would all the calls except one be to Jay's friends? Why didn't Adnan call all his other friends?

And assaigning guilt doesn't work that way, taking two stories and figuring out which seems more likely. There is always a shitload of other possible stories that could be the case. Nysha could be wrong about which phone had an answering machine (she says 'not that number' at trial) The phone could have been not in Leakin Park and Jay could have been fed the entire story by the police - they get him after they get the phone records.

Jay led the cops to her car, though. How does he know where her car is if the cops just fed him the story?

And assaigning guilt doesn't work that way, taking two stories and figuring out which seems more likely.

Not really sure how many more different ways I can find to say "I wouldn't convict based on this, I just think it's more likely that Adnan did it."

And so far the alternate explanations sound downright ridiculous. The cops fed him the entire story?!

It happens more than you think. It's called a false confession.

The cops had the car first, lied about it - I think a bigger problem with that explanation is that Jenn led them to Jay, so... Also, I may hold a lower opinion of cops than most people.

And the thing is, I don't think it works to think if it was 'more likely' that Adnan did it. It's either likely or not likely. And imo, it's not likely, because that story does not make sense. That we haven't found the real story yet does not mean it's not there.

False confessions happen all the time. False confessions of the kind you are talking about here do not happen all the time.

I know cops are unreliable and definitely cook shit up, but that seems like a crazy level of conspiracy re: the car + Jay

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-interview-7

A growing number of scientists and legal scholars, though, have raised concerns about Reid-style interrogation. Of the three hundred and eleven people exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing, more than a quarter had given false confessions—including those convicted in such notorious cases as the Central Park Five. The extent of the problem is unknowable, because there’s no national database on wrongful convictions. But false confessions, which often lead to these convictions, are not rare, and experts say that Reid-style interrogations can produce them.

You are preaching to the choir waterface, but I don't think this is one of those situations.

ok

Also does the podcast suggest this was a Reid-style interrogation?

I have a degree in history, btw, I spent a year training source criticism, looking at shit like this and figuring out what stories worked and what stories didn't work. And Jays story does not work, imo. Though obviously, since we only look at stuff through the podcast, we aren't really can't really do source criticism anyway, so who cares.

But Jay had the car, Jay had the phone, Jay had reason to lie. Like, I believe Adnan over Jay.

Then why didn't the cops charge Jay with murder? Slam dunk according to you

Ok, and I have a degree in law, am admitted to the bar, and took courses such as Criminal Law and Evidence. Doesn't make either of us criminal investigators.

I've listened to a lot of podcasts, so I think I'm the expert here

But as pointed out, Sarah Koenig also has no background in this, which is why I think she wastes a lot of time on dead ends and red herrings, as multiple people point out to her, but I think because storytelling is a priority over crimesolving there, she continues to do it anyway.

Yeah, like I said, who cares. But this is not criminal investigation, or law. This is actually history. But secondguessing second degree history without going to the sources is bad history no matter what you do, so it's not as if any of what I write would be good history. Still, like, just wanted to say.

I think whatever the explanation, a lot of the weirdnesses of the story may boil down to "this is a bunch of stoned high school kids we're talking about."

― my jaw left (Hurting 2), Monday, November 24, 2014 10:40 AM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"no background" is a bit harsh, she's a reporter with decades of experience and Peabody Award - and taking the time to chase down the dead ends and red herrings is explicitly part of the show's mission and why it's so interesting and different

xpost

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Layne-400a.jpg

lol

But Jay had the car, Jay had the phone, Jay had reason to lie. Like, I believe Adnan over Jay.

qft

Jay also has a reddit fan fiction motive

The show is kind of implicitly on Adnan's side isn't it? I think Sarah Koenig admirably admits her bias in favor of Adnan, but Adnan gets so much time to talk, to be cool and charming 15 years later, and it's very easy to think "oh he couldn't have done this because he sounds like such a cool reasonable likeable guy," and I think that that's so unreliable as an indicator in either direction, especially when so much time has passed. Jay, of course, didn't want to talk. That's not SK's fault. I just hope the show starts digging more into possible alternate theories, much as the innocence project person suggested is ideal.

I definitely sometimes am listening and think "this guy just doesn't *sound* like he did it." Then other times I think "he has weird speech tics whenever he starts discussing certain things, maybe that's a sign of guilt" but mostly I just try to remember that that entire line of thinking is pointless.

yea - all of that, and SK's struggles with objectivity and advocacy are all part of the show's design I think. The genius of the show - what makes it feel very new - is that it invites you to criticize it and analyze it and argue about it

Another moment that makes me shake my head in disbelief over the American judicial system: In episode one, where the judge states that the witness giving Adnan an alibi does not work, since she places him 'on-campus' and he says he was at the library, which everyone considers to be on-campus. The amount of coincidences involved in the process means that absolutely nobody should be punished with in life without paroloe, or worse, imo.

I know I have to ignore my own incredulity, which screams "he didn't do it!" whenever I listen to Adnan speaking. But I keep coming back to the fact that we have Jay, who, at the very least, is willing to drag the dead body of an innocent girl into a park and throw some dirt on it, vs. Adnan against whom we have only patchy circumstantial evidence and who I think many of us have difficulty fathoming him capable of this crime.

i can't stop thinking about the streaker guy who found the body & the idea that someone told him where to find it

otm. And that someone anonymously phoned the police and told them to look at the ex-boyfriend.

Me, too, taking into Mr. S's sis-in-law's Woodlawn connection and the fact the body was so obscured.

kind of shocked people can't imagine that Adnan did it. I can see having reasonable doubt or problems with the cops, the prosecution, and his lawyer for sure. But unless I'm missing something huge - he has never made a compelling argument for his innocence. He has no alibi, and can point to no facts that exonerate him. Not saying that means he did it - but I find it hard to believe he's incapable of the crime - or less capable than Jay.

i find it interesting that adnan has had 15 years to come up with a story and he hasn't - that sways me towards believing him, but maybe he's just that wiley?

yeah i really hope the streaker guy recurs in the story; i feel like it was pretty early on that he was contacted by SK & said he didn't want to talk, & i sorta hoped the increased visibility of the show might give it a little more clout to engage with people who'd ignored it previously.

also find recurrent pot mentions itt kinda strange? i think it's enough to just know that eye-witness testimony is notoriously shitty & that this all happened forever ago; it seems kind of a weird lens to see this particular group as subject to additional or unusual memory impediments.

hey also i tried to write a post about the thinkpieces linked above, the race one, which was really interesting, & the gawker one, which was really shitty, & i couldn't, it was too messy, i was barking at the computer screen. but, re: the latter, just broadly, sometimes i just think the thing that's so corrosive and terrible about ~thinkpieces~, & which makes tilding them mandatory, & which separates them from a history of writing responsive to culture, is just the fucking tone, man, like jesus christ does everybody have to sound so annoying, & like they were just about to surfboard in & do the same thing but better were it not for the inadequate example at hand usurping them so shittily. like if somebody could write from a slightly less oppositional angle than the arbiter of all amateur culture, dispatching their joaquin-phoenix-in-gladiator-thumbs-down verdict, positing every shortcoming as a stupid oversight & subject to simple correction - It's bullshit; It's shitty journalism - i feel like it would be easier to deal with them. there's such value to reading something & feeling it instantly broaden your parameters or awareness of what somebody was saying or wasn't, whether their priorities were shortsighted or subject to biases. but Let Me Tell You Why Serial Is Doing It Wrong is so hard to take i think.

xp yes me too

ppl who get caught and are actually guilty (esp teenagers) either confess or lie like crazy

like the innocence project head lady who sez SK isn't lucky enough to get the one complete textbook sociopath who could pull off actually doing this crime and behaving this way

I've avoided almost all the think pieces because it seems like if you want to take down Serial for its journalism - you need to go do some journalism eg actually get out and report the story. get the Jay interview they couldn't get. get Hae's family to respond. go out and do a more nuanced take on the racial politics of woodlawn than serial did. show us there's something wrong, don't just tell us. not saying the show's above criticism at all - just haven't seen anything that looked deeper than the predictable outrage-factory backlash bullshit

maybe check yr privilege bc some ppl don't have the luxury of ignoring the white supremacist subtexts of NPR journalism

(jokes, i think the question of getting entertainment from a teenager's murder is more pertinent fwiw)

yeah, the whole "You think you like this podcast, but guess what...white privlege! Into the trash with it" approach is hacky as hell

i think it's enough to just know that eye-witness testimony is notoriously shitty

Not to nitpick, but this isn't really about "eye-witness testimony." There were no eye witnesses. The main "witness" testimony is from a guy who claims direct involvement in the crime. The "unreliability" issues with him either stem from faulty memory (which could have been impacted by weed, which he says they smoked that day), lying, or both.

i actually haven't read the critical pieces - i kind of glanced at them and didn't bother when it looked like they weren't about the real stuff about Serial that makes me uncomfortable

Wouldn't waste your time

ty for that, hurting, & you're not nitpicking, & it's nice feeling sort of on the other side of this from you, generally, like it's interesting to have to think about more critically than i do naturally.

i guess generally what i'm getting at is that, the thing that's so interesting about this to me is that it's so often cresting up against just how nebulous & difficult & ultimately benign-feeling any kind of account is; there's that tension between feeling temporarily embroiled in the currents of who you think's telling the truth, how much correlative wiggle-room somebody else's account permits them, whether their alibi affords them grace, & then the remembrance of the less metaphysical dimensions, that somebody definitely died, & so something less subjective happened. every time you get a line into the kind of testimony that seems to promise closure or salvation, the sort of sole stream of content on which we feel like we can rely to find resolution, you're instead reminded of how subjective & messy & just separate that kind of thing is. what was it they were discussing, a few weeks back, maybe zeroing in on jay, where they went to speak to a few people we hadn't met before, & asked for additional accounts about some small aspect of the case -- i forget, but each differed slightly, memories of a phonecall or how someone was behaving that didn't cohere. there's the clarification on the website about whether the letter attesting to adnan being in the library can be taken seriously given that it talks about the day coinciding with the year's first snowfall, & how that doesn't jive with meteorological data. & all of this is just so grinding, & feels like it kind of broadens the gulf between physical events, lost to time, that some thing definitely happened, & what we're left with now, where a bunch of things that can't simultaneously be true have this effective truthfulness to them, independent of facts, just by virtue of being all we have, the only bridge. i don't know. did everybody watch the staircase? i keep mentioning it. without getting too far into the details of it, the staircase is this short #true #crime series & then there's a follow up episode shot a decade later. & in the follow up episode there's such a weird implicit change of vantage point, where it's like the intermittent time elapsed changes the perspective on any verdict rendered.

i guess i am just leaping into diffuse any kinda pot-centric criticism because it feels like a minor variable in the broader context of just such an already messy set of stimuli. the police influence & changes in narrative & general lacunae in jay's story are already so overwhelming that how much more receptive his memory might have been sober, if he was high, feels minor. anyway all of this is the thing i like about serial, just it totally destroying my faith in my ability to meaningfully perceive or form concrete experiences of being alive.

^^^^^^^^^^^^

post of the year

I think that's a good post but I could argue the other side of that too - there is a huge body of scholarship and professional experience and judgment on the relative reliability of various kinds of evidence and testimony. Truth is always murky, never entirely within your grasp, but there are ways of getting closer to it or further from it even if its a limit you always merely approach and never reach. Koenig's style, format, and background tend to accentuate the murkiness. The case is already pretty susceptible to that sensation but she deepens it. I think someone with more background in this stuff and perhaps less interested in telling that kind of story might be able to clarify things more, even if you'd never get all the way there.

I mean, for example, certain lineup techniques or interrogation techniques produce notoriously bad results. But we also have learned that there are better, more reliable ways of doing these things. Some police departments actually have changed their methodologies as a result of all the research and it makes a difference. So it actually is possible to use research to improve the accuracy of criminal investigations and get closer to the truth more often.

when you get such a body of seemingly diverse testimony, is effort made to look for specific details that correlate over all versions as opposed to direct/consistent retelling of events?

like if you are trying to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar, the best way to do it is to ask 100 people how many they think are in there, then average their guesses. so in the context of a trial, does it matter if everybody says "he was driving a blue car" but nobody can agree where he was going or what the weather was like or what he was wearing etc. can you rely on "blue car" as sort of an average emerging fact, or does the evidence have to be more continuous?

yeah that sounds pretty on point. maybe useful here to present my credentials as Big Podcast Fan & Internet User & wonder whether vibing to the ambiguity, true detective style, is a bigger priority for me than yielding to the kind of unavoidable all-we-have metrics for likelihood of guilt, &c. i just like my moment of amateur interrogation, cf. i wonder whether this being not in my backyard, & kinda in your backyard, kinda? - like with you having more of an affiliation with Thinking About The Law than me - speaks to my understanding of its value; i'm less concerned if it flails around ponderously in actual, serious matters because i want to think about them, & my relationship to the actual subject matter is secondary (again!, cf true detective, where i don't care about the conclusion). & this maybe makes good case for the ethical critique of serial turning something distressing into entertainment being a pretty dubious activity. but it's fresh, to me. to me to me to me. i remember reading arguments about gawker on ilx - maybe after the boston bombings?, i forget - & the degree to which something public is fair game by virtue of being something in which people are interested. & i kind of hate that perspective, find it prurient, but i guess that's where i am, here, that there's this separate public half-life to a murder & its reportage that's its own separate zone, like there being multiple political dimensions to which murders are prominently reported, & that concentrating on those is separate from really considering the dimensions of the actual case itself.

xpost
i don't know if that applies here so much, because Jay is the only one providing a version of events and Adnan is only saying "he's lying" so there's not much truth to average out

i guess i mean in the supporting testimony or retelling of events from others (outside jay's version of events). also was kind of a general question but perhaps this is not the right thread

xp, it's only barely in my backyard. Being in civil litigation, and in a field where most stuff either settles or gets thrown out, the burdens of demonstrating "truth" are SOOOO much lighter than in a criminal prosecution. I mean your standard to begin with is preponderance of the evidence or similar, rather than reasonable doubt, and then you don't often get to trial anyway. But I certainly relate to the feeling of having a bunch of complex facts before you, knowing that you only have the tip of the iceberg and may never even get to see the rest of the iceberg, and being like "yeah, could be x happened, could be y happened, no way to be sure."

Like you can work on something for a few years, dig though tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, depose a bunch of people, and at the end of it you've barely pierced the shroud.

Serial's got a little bit of Zodiac in it.
The more info that gets pulled in, the less clear it ultimately is.
Even something that should be so simple like: "Was there a phone booth in front of the Best Buy?" ends up unanswerable.

"Pull the phone booth records from all Best Buys 1997-2002. ENHANCE!"

Is it answerable tho

apparently not - but i would have thought bell would have kept some records on locations of payphones

if "the girl who shoplifted there 15 years ago" is brought in as an expert you have to wonder

It might be the kind of thing that gets destroyed after a while, or it might be that she just couldn't get whoever has the records to go through the trouble of digging them up, IDK. Does she specify why she couldn't get a record of it? I forget now.

Yeah the whole "I would know because I used to shoplift" thing was sooooo worthless.

yeah it's funny though if you view the podcast as being a meditation on truth more than being about a murder

It's more about memory and gossip than the nature of truth.

Unrelated to whether I think he did it or not, the most striking moment of the whole show for me so far is when he says that now as a more religious person he thinks that he might be responsible for his own fate basically implying that he wasn't living as a good muslim and this is god's punishment or something, only he can't even come out and just say it, and there's this very heavy pause, and it's like the first time you really hear him drop his chill demeanor. It didn't necessarily make me think it was more or less likely that he did it (it could just as easily be taken at face value or as a masked way of expressing guilt about the crime if he committed it imo) but regardless it was surprising.

I guess not the first time, there's also the part where he gets angry about the "you're a nice guy" comment.

That moment just seemed super-real to me. I have known so many latter-day Muslims who fucked around in their youth, are dissatisfied with their lives, and try to draw some causal connection between the two to help make sense of it. Not that most of those people are currently in jail for murder. But in that moment Adnan reminded me of no one so much as my sister. (In fact, she told me that part of the episode made her cry.) I'm not saying that means he didn't murder Hae, but that moment was legible to me as something else.

by fucked around, I mean smoked weed and had sex btw, not killed people.

This guy does a really good SK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muqaQfk_gVw

'Mail Kimp' is my favorite current in-joke.

I'm partial to the guy who says "use a male chimp"

i like the "delivering hi-fives" guy

Unconvinced by the person who actually uses Mail Chimp. Unconvinced anyone actually uses Mail Chimp.

wtf IS Mail Chimp?

The company that sponsors Serial.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/freddievonchimp/sets/72157626505122242

For so long I thought the voices on that mailchump ad would turn out to be people interviewed on Serial, Radiolab-style

Hi, I'm a shoplifter and phone booth location expert and I use Mail Chimp.

it sounds like a spam service

You thought that every other podcast that the same MailChimp ad runs on would turn out to secretly have been a crossover with Serial a year before it started?

xp it's a mass mailing service w/ strict rules about opt-outs/ins and not spamming (i've never used it but i reviewed it once as a possible mailing software for work - we went w/ constant contact instead)

xpost Yes, I thought that about a bunch of podcasts I never heard.

i have this nagging unease about the mailchimp

yall should listen to Startup. very fascinating mail chimp ads on there.

mailchimp ad really bites the old school THIS IS PUBLIC RADIO INTERNATIONAL panaphonic PRI jingle from early TAL eps

i hear Slate is starting a Mailchimp Ad Spoiler Podcast

We've entered the "forget the Super Bowl, how were the commercials?" era of this

http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/12/01/serial-podcast-adnan-syed/

some big stuff in today's episode-- (spoilers) Adnan wanted a plea deal at some point! People condemning show for ignoring anti-Muslim bias actually hadn't heard the whole series yet! Adnan's lawyer maybe didn't fuck up his case but was weirdly greedy! Streaker dude is funny under oath!

I stand by my earlier criticism that the court/lawyer stuff should have come way earlier in the series, but I guess SK is on a track now where she focuses on a single player each episode. But is next week going to be an interview with some psychologist?

I think I said above that I think the podcast is designed too much for "storytelling" at the expense of actually examining evidence in a remotely productive way. Of course, as the primary purpose of it is to tell a This American Life-y story rather than to get to the bottom of a crime imo, and I guess I can't totally fault it for that.

yeah, this episode was a nice little TAL episode about the mental decline of a lawyer tucked into a larger project

feels like this was the episode i've been waiting for (not that i haven't been on-board the whole run)

weird - maybe I was just grumpy today but this one made me feel really sick of SK.
Maybe because I just don't buy Adnan's innocence at all any more, but all her pro-Adnan biases really are starting to irk me.

they have irked me throughout. I can't say for sure whether I "buy" or "don't buy" his innocence, I just feel like a lot of bullshit has been thrown my way.

I'm just getting tired of side-trips while the main obvious question of: "if not Adnan, who?" remains completely unexamined.

and if they're unable to rigourously examine that central question for libel reasons or whatever, why are you wasting our time?

but the prosecutor getting Jay a lawyer thing is insane and big news, and it seems like he should get a new trial based on that alone

Big news to us maybe. Can you get a new trial based on facts that were known and used by your lawyer in your frat trial tho?

Haha first not frat

phone posting leading to a lot of lols lately

I think there is pretty much zero chance he'd get a new trial based on who recommended his lawyer

maybe so, the impression given by the show today was that this was more than a recommendation, that it was really not normal and could be perceived as influencing Jay's testimony because he felt indebted

yeah, big news to us

I think at the post-conviction appeal stage, with an ineffective assitance claims, you have to demonstrate that the outcome would likely have been different.

and that's assuming Syed's lawyer didn't raise the issue at trial, which I don't know if she did

we heard her raising it

quite loudly

Yeah, the fact that Jay got a lawyer from the police is massively fishy.

I really really don't think Adnan did it anymore.

it's obv problematic but i dont see how that particularly is massively exculpatory for adnan? like it makes you think theres like a conspiracy involving the da and police? that is crazy imo

nb i dont think he did it either

if adnan didn't do it, who do you think did?

do you think jay acted alone?

the serial killer/mystery person forcing jay to pin it on adnan theory makes no sense to me.

at the very least, jay definitely led the cops to her car - so he must have known something.

not being argumentative - genuinely interested in what makes people think adnan is innocent

Jay did it. Or whoever Jay met in the park in that timeperiod where he claims he was with Adnan but nothing about the phone records add up did it.

Jay did not do it

Why do you think Jay didn't do it?

no motive, too stoned to put in the effort

i think it's interesting that adnan hasn't played too much of the martyr - like, his prison story is v v different from what you normally hear. i would have expected him to really play up how miserable it is, but he does the opposite. it was really striking when after talking about what it's like, he sort of ended with "i have a life. it's not the life i may have planned, but i have a life". it's things like that, and when he's talking about how hard it's been on his family and there is the barest hint of a catch in his voice, that really make him compelling as an innocent party in all of this.

i don't agree that SK is biased towards adnan, but i think it's much easier to be on adnan's side when you hear so much of his story from his own mouth. as listeners, we don't know jay at all.

i'm looking forward to - hopefully - a full episode on the forensics of the case.

i started out being sympathetic to adnan but now I'm kinda like, yeah but that's what he NEEDS you to think & kinda take him with a grain of salt now

i honestly dk who did it, dont really think jay nec did but he prob knows who did if he didnt

im also not 100% adnan didnt like im maybe 85/15 he did not kill her; id be surprised but if there was like some smoking gun against him id be like welp ok

i'm pretty much 50/50 at this point. the intrigue sorta compensates for serial's occasional hackiness.

yeah I'm not invested as much in the whodunnit anymore as I was the first few eps because it's obv & frustratingly NOT about that even though it's pretending to be

but by the same token i am def on board with wherever the story goes

Yeah so the fact that he maybe asked for a plea is weird. I buy that a lot of people take pleas on crimes they didn't commit. It's harder for me to believe that he would under his circumstances. But who knows.

Strangely I've been finding myself not completely trusting syed based on something about the way he speaks. But these kinds of reactions are notoriously unreliable. Especially given that there's a confirmation bias problem if I'm already slightly leaning toward guilt

One question I do have: it seems like we're being fed that he's either telling the truth or he's a psychopath. Are those really the only options? Can't a non psychopathic person tell elaborate lies and maintain innocence if so motivated?

otm

everyone says what a great guy he is/was, he was popular and did well in school, he's maintained his innocence and been a model prisoner, he's agreed to be interviewed for serial and has been very compelling and believable... i really don't think that a normal person can pre-meditatedly murder their ex and do all this without being a clinical psychopath. which i don't think he is. i think a normal person would eventually break in some way, or there would be more stories about his "dark side" either way.

I imagine it's unlikely a psychopath would or even could cover for a single crime with 14 years' worth of "good behaviour".

So anyone who lies about a crime and doesn't change his story is a psychopath?

I think the thing Adnan is clinging to is that he did not premeditate the murder. So the case against him and the 1st degree conviction are false. There is a kernel of truth in everything he says. Jay is lying about some things. Adnan did not do any "real Hitler shit"

I don't think anyone did any premeditated murder. But if Adnan didn't plan it meticulously, it's impossible to fit him into Jays timeline and the phonerecords. Which is why I think Jay did it, or whoever he met in the park. In a fit of anger.

jay's timeline is bullshit

Fred I just think you're overlooking that it could be true that jay is lying and or misremembering parts of his story and still be true that adnan did it

This is why I have my doubts about the adversarial system of justice - you have two opposing parties each with potential motives to distort the truth, and I don't buy that grinding two lies against each other is a reliable way of discovering truth.

But when did Adnan do it? And how? It seems that Hae was killed in the middle of the afternoon, and I don't buy that Adnan and Jay was together at that point.

coming to Radio 4 Extra:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/dec/05/bbc-radio-4-serial-sarah-koening-hae-min-lee

url had me thinking 'ouija board excusive' or something

http://www.funnyordie.com/articles/482049ca5f/serial-ball

What keeps you from believing Jay and Adnan were together that afternoon?
Adnan has no alibi or counter-narrative - and no-one else remembers being with him (except Asia McLain - briefly, and not entirely convincingly).

I don't believe Adnan called Jay from Best Buy, and there is no other convincing narrative for when they met, and when Jay dropped him off again. The call records don't match it.

There are other phones! And other parking lots! And you already believe Jay is a liar if you think he's the killer or the accomplice to someone he met in the park (?). I don't follow your logic.

Right, but when is the next incoming call? Jay had the car, the phone, the shovels. If Adnan's involved, he would have had to call his own phone. And it would show on the call list.

He could have been with Jay the whole time. He could have set up a rendezvous point in advance that didn't require a call. His could have been one of the many calls that day. Jay's a liar for sure - that doesn't exonerate Adnan.

But if Jay lies about this - and this is a pretty fucking huge lie, and complete needless as well - there is no evidence at all for Adnan's involvement.

But we don't know it's a lie! Why is the Best Buy call a lie again? Because the shoplifter is sure there was no pay phone there 15 years ago?

And even if Jay didn't call Adnan from Best Buy, there lots of other ways it could have happened that fit the general contours of Jay's story if not every insignificant detail.

Hae's body is where Jay said it was - and Adnan's cell pinged from in or near Leakin Park at a time when he says he has own phone, which is also the time that Jay says they were burying the body.

Also there's no evidence of Adnan's involvement - but no evidence of Jay's involvement either, so it's really just one guy's story against the others. But Jay's seem to line up with a bunch of stuff we can confirm (phone records, car, body, other witnesses like not-her-real-name-Kathy and Jenn Pusateri, the Nisha call) while Adnan's story doesn't line up with anything anyone else remembers, except Asia McLain - which he doesn't remember.

Hae's body is where Jay said it was -

he knew where her car was but i dont recall that he made any statements abt her body?

he said they buried her in leakin park, described where and how deeply etc

Jays story lines up - somewhat - eventually, after several different versions.

and adnan has no story, and nothing that corroborated his non-version of non-events

Jen is jays best friend and Kathy is Jens best friend, so their stories are not exactly without issues.

That's why I tend to believe Adnan - he has had a long time to work up a story and yet he hasn't.

did you believe Shaggy cause he said "it wasn't me"?

Kathy's story does not back up Jenn and Jays. And Jenns story doesn't really back up Jay's either - she says he stayed at hers until 3:45, which is obviously untrue. And the phonerecords doesn't backup Jays story either. Nisha doesn't back up Jays story either - what she describes would have happened weeks later. So really, the only thing that backs up Jays story is that he new the location of the car and the body. And how does that incriminate Adnan?

Xp dude it's ok to have a discussion or debate without involving OTT condescension.

i don't think there's anything that incriminates adnan, just as there doesn't seem to be anything that incriminates Jay other than what he's admitted to about the car and the body.

it really comes down to two guys' stories.

I'm inclined to think they're both lying - but I think Jay has told us a lot more of the truth than Adnan has so far.

xpost
sorry was shaggy thing was meant more jokingly than condescendingly

enjoying the discussion/debate

The thing is, apart from the weird Nisha call, at all incriminating times the phone is only used to call Jays friends.

There is a long presentation of the call-log here: http://viewfromll2.com/2014/11/23/serial-a-comparison-of-adnans-cell-phone-records-and-the-witness-statements-provided-by-adnan-jay-jenn-and-cathy/

i have to check that out

but what about the pinging from Leakin Park when Adnan says he would have had his phone, when Jay says they were burying the body? Don't you find that problematic if you think Adnan is innocent?

Yes and no. Why wouldn't Adnan just lie and say Jay still had his phone? And the cell tower pings are not 100% indisputable.

Jay served no time for his involvement. I find his willingness to supposedly help Adnan cover up the murder pretty shady, and his excuses for it totally unbelievable. And jays rep as sort of a compulsive liar - people like that are really good at convincing themselves of their own stories.

I definitely don't buy the innocence project's alternate killer theories - Jay was definitely involved, and I'd believe Adnan was involved before considering an outsider.

I think the nisha call doesn't necessarily implicate Adnan: for one thing, nishas recollection of the one time she spoke to Jay was clearly well after the murder, and Jay could have just called her house and faked being a telemarketer or something, to place Adnan with his ph at that time.

also possible that she just got mixed up - she just embroidered her story with later knowledge of Jay's workplace

but yeah it kind of cancels itself out - her number definitely gets called, but her memory of the call doesn't make sense so you kind of have to discount it

I've already listened to every episode twice, but I wanna go back and listen AGAIN and take notes!

There's some interesting stuff on rabia chaudry's blog - copies of documents from police and the lawyer.

u may want to check out the reddit home page for it, linked way upthread. they have google doc transcriptions of every ep

jon ronson speaks to adnan's family in the guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/dec/07/serial-adnan-syed-family-podcast-interview

I found that letter at the end a bit chilling

also, it was kind of weird to hear people going on about "psychopaths" as I kind of thought that was a bullshit term. At least that's what I remember from The Journalist and the Murderer.

Letter was definitely most compelling part of this episode. Rest didn't add much.

this was a weird episode for me

It was a very weird one. It does feel a bit like they're milking it now - maybe should have wrapped up in 10 episodes as planned, last few have gotten pretty lost in the weeds.

The stealing from the collection part could have been dealt with more quickly - I think she was just trying to make it clear that she ran down all the rumours.

I appreciated that she spent some time exploring the idea that he could be an outwardly nice normal guy and still have killed someone, etc. but it felt like common sense to me... but maybe she needed to hit the point hard since she's skated by it so far.

What did you all make of the letter exactly?

I'm biased against Adnan, I'll admit... for no really rock-solid reason, I'll also admit.

To me it felt like the letter was a hail mary. A pre-emptive admission that he's been manipulative from the start, that was in itself manipulative.

Predictions for how she wraps it all up in the last episode next week?

Adnan seems to think that SK is supposed to be part of his defense team or something, evidenced by how pissed he got when she asked him about stealing from the mosque. Why wouldn't a journalist ask about that?

The letter struck me as a panic response. He had tried his best to manipulate SK on the phone, but then, after the show started airing and he realized that she was not just going to straight-up present a defense for him, and perhaps still had some doubts about him, he began to re-think things: like, "maybe I should have said something about her father dying"

yeah - that's how it struck me too. and kind of panicked and unnecessary too, considering how sympathetic she actually is.

on the other hand, if I was innocent and I knew the sympathetic reporter was about to be doing her final show - I might be writing panicked 17-page single-spaced letters too.

I wonder what rumors about other people Adnan wanted SK to track down, and whether she didn't for legal reasons or because they were bs

yeah, it was weird - she said none of the rumours were that significant and then almost immediately afterwards talked about s one so incriminating it would have wrapped up the show if proven (which it wasn't).

I think Serial is most interesting at showing how a violent event long ago touched a lot of peripheral people, and how it lingered and transformed in their memories. Ultimately we're not getting much of value from the didhedoit? stuff, but I liked hearing that Adnan's conviction caused families to tell their sons not to give rides to girls.

The show could have been truly great if SK had been able to get the cooperation of Hae's family and Jay (and Don and etc.) and focused less on amateur sleuthin' than the aftereffects of Hae's murder.

I wonder if the show could have been different if she'd treated Jay with the same objectivity and empathy she treated Adnan. It seems now like a mistake to have just shown up on his doorstep one day already pretty thoroughly convinced of Adnan's innocence and more or less flat out telling Jay they thought he was lying. Of course Adnan had more to gain and Jay had more to lose, so maybe it wouldn't have made a difference - but it feels like she cultivated a relationship with Adnan and gained his trust in a way she didn't even consider trying to do with Jay.

i love it, but in the long run it's looking like the whole season gets the big cartoon stamp that says "unsubstantiated"

I see people are starting to get annoyed that the teaser snippet from the first episode of someone saying "Basically threatened me, like, you know what happened to Hae. This is what's going to happen to you. That's how I felt that day” has not yet come into play on the show.

The show has done a very good job of establishing that the prosecutor's timeline is basically bunk. At the same time it hasn't really uncovered any credible alternate scenario where Adnan is not involved with the crime.

yeah - exactly - and they talked about that exact point in Episode 7 with the Innocence Project lawyer. I thought this was going to be the turning point for the whole series:

Sarah Koenig
As a legal question, Deirdre says they should only have to prove Adnan isn’t their guy, he’s not the killer. But as a practical matter, she said, their chances are much better if they can go a step further, and say to the State, “not only is this not your guy, we can tell you who is your guy.”

Deirdre Enright
The truth is, when you can give the answer of who it is, it makes it a whole lot easier on everybody else to walk away and do this thing that no one ever wants to do. Usually, there is some logical explanation, right? There is a guy, there is a serial killer, there is somebody who is motivated, there is somebody who hated Hae. Usually there’s something. So, you don’t have to, but I always tell people, you have to.

Good luck to SK if the plan is to jam in a whole serial killer/alternate theory in the last episode.

Yeah the only real possibility is that Jay did it/assisted someone other than Adnan in doing it for some mundane reason and has been covering that up for 15 years. That theory would be semi credible except that at apparently at same time Jay was doing this he and Adnan were just chilling, driving round and smoking dop.

Would have been good to methodically go through every alternate suspect (streaker, Don, the serial killer they're talking about on reddit, others?) and explain exactly why they're 100% cleared in Serial's eyes. They kind of did this in a scattershot way throughout the series - but the question of "If not Adnan, who?" seems more important than big chunks of recent shows like the shoplifter's memories of the Best Buy pay phone and whether Adnan stole 60 bucks.

The problem with that though is that Jay is the big elephant in any if not Adnan scenario. So you either have to prove Adnan didn't/couldn't have done it or figure out why Jay would say he did.

yeah - methodically going through these guys would, I think, also have to cross-reference Jay's version e.g. ok if Don did it, how did Jay know where the car is? if it was a serial killer with no known connection to Jay, why was Jay able to describe how Hae's body was buried? Why would Jay send his friend to prison for life - possibly death row - to protect any of these people?

and then of course you have to interrogate the idea that Jay acted alone - look at motive, opportunity, etc...

just can't see how the show can spend so much time on "but he seems like such a nice guy" and so little on testing alternate theories against what we do know

especially after doing such a good job of showing the flaws in the state's version of events

I think SK is being ultra-cautious about alternative theories, for legal and ethical reasons. Adnan's outburst about SK not following up on rumors about other people probably means that people have being telling lots of stories about Jay that never made their way onto the podcast.

http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/full-episodes/v6ahcm/december-10--2014---sarah-koenig

For sure - maybe it's impossible to avoid if he won't talk but it seems unfair to Jay to me if what the show has discussed so far is more or less where they leave it

that colbert interview is blocked in Canada. Anything juicy?

not really, just Colbert being surprised that the first This American Life spin-off was about a murder rather than 24 hours in a nursing home waiting room.

I think SK is being ultra-cautious about alternative theories, for legal and ethical reasons. Adnan's outburst about SK not following up on rumors about other people probably means that people have being telling lots of stories about Jay that never made their way onto the podcast.
--ancient texts, things that can't be pre-dated (President Keyes)

There are lots of stories about Jay in the podcast.

I know, but aren't most of those first hand accounts, rather than "Someone told me that Jay told him..."?

Same is true for Adnan. She doesn't present any hearsay.

yes, I'm just saying that a rumor about Adnan is easier to verify. She went with the story of Adnan stealing money--even though he was never convicted of that crime--because she could get Adnan to talk about it on tape. If someone told her that they heard Jay used to steal from the collection plate then she would have to track down someone who actually saw him doing it, since Jay isn't going to talk to her about it.

She followed up on all the rumors and that one was verified well enough that she asked Abnan about it. I don't think that story reflects worse on Abnan than Jay's friend's stories do about Jay.

I think maybe Keynes is saying she might be unable or unwilling to report other more damaging rumours about Jay than the ones she has reported because she can't get his side of the story. But yes, she has definitely reported some rumours about both of them (and held off on others - like the decision today not to reveal the nature of the super-damaging rumour about Adnan when the source didn't confirm it) .

gotta admit, i'm dying to know what that mysterious rumor was about.

i found the letter really moving - like, everyone thinks i'm this creepy charmer, so i have to try really hard not to be, but then ppl also think i'm a psychopath without empathy, wtf am i supposed to do? which is why i think he got so mad at SK when she was talking about what a good guy he is a while back - he wants to be cleared of all charges based on the facts of the case, not a subjective view of his personality.

Well, he would never ever be cleared of all charges because of his personality, as has been discussed, he will never get parole without 'showing remorse', which obviously he doesn't when he claims he didn't do it. Nice Catch-22, American legal system. But I do think it's a weakness in the show, that one the one side they are very cognizant at how his personality doesn't really matter to the case, and how we can never really know it anyway, but on the other hand she keeps on saying stuff like the crux of the matter is whether he was the type who could have done it or not. Which, no, it's not. The crux of the matter is that there is not evidence that he did it, other than a witness statement which doesn't match any other statement or the call log or anything. Like, I actually liked getting that expert to talk about killers and psychopaths, and whatnot, but it is besides the point.

I disagree completely. Abnan's personality is a huge percentage of the reason this story is so compelling. If you didn't find him sympathetic and want for innocence the whole thing falls down no matter how flimsy the evidence is. Irony is though that Jay also seems kinda likeable (with the enormous caveat that this is a dude who by his own admission participated in the murder girl who he barely knew for no reason he's able to articulate).

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4m0NiXCMAAgXK6.png

adnan's personality is def a big part of it, but it's also the hidden depths of every major person involved. and i don't think SK is at all saying the crux of the matter is whether he is the type capable of this sort of murder, at least, not in an evidential or prosecutorial way: the crux of what makes this story compelling is the questioning of how we think we can judge someone's past or future behaviors and somehow make a story out of it - every time SK has talked to experts about how to tell if adnan is lying or playing her, they've all basically said "there's no scientifically reliable way to tell", every "tell" could go either way. the only exception to that was the innocence project lawyer, who pretty much insisted that if the client doesn't have a story than they're innocent.

xposts

sure, that's the hook. they mostly seem like nice, relatively normal 17 year old american kids. how could they be involved in a girl, strangled to death and buried under six inches of dirt in a park?

but that's enough of a hook that the whole story doesn't need to be obsessed with that point. I felt like it was overkill with the cutesy Adnan shit today. He was nice if you weren't good at sports! He kissed a guy on the cheek to stop a fight! When he stole from the mosque it was take the fellas out for snacks at the mall! He's the best prisoner ever!

I get it - this is all relevant but I've heard literally hours of nice guy Adnan shit now. I feel like he did when he blew up at her - doesn't matter how nice he is. I know he's nice. Give me some information that makes me believe he didn't strangle a girl and bury her under six inches of dirt. And if the show never directly addresses why Jay would say he did, it kind of fails.

"but that's enough of a hook that the whole story doesn't need to be obsessed with that point"

But I think one of the hooks is how obsessed Koenig is with that point because she's actually talking to these folks and it's clearly getting to her!

yeah - i wish she had moved on from that point. maybe he changed, maybe he's gaming everybody - doesn't even matter. ultimately it's of no relevance to whether he killed hae or not.

the whole model prisoner/golden child thing she's stuck on is definitely interesting - there's a ton of tension around that if he might have killed a girl, and I can see how her This American Life instincts push her to keep looking at that angle but there's nothing to uncover there any more.

Well there's nothing much left to uncover anywhere barring amazing last minute revelations.

Next week on Serial: Cats in trees, How many did Adnan rescue?

From today: 'To me this question is the hard center of Adnans case: Can you tell, really? Can you tell if someone has a crime like this in him'. That was what prompted what I wrote upthread.

The hard center of Adnan's case is obviously the two hours where he supposedly killed Hae, and how Jay's story of that doesn't match the phone records.

xpost
I guess... like I said, what's missing is a good hard look at what they've been implying since day one: that Jay is lying. Maybe impossible if he won't co-operate, but ultimately unfair if they never pick apart their own implications about Jay with the same rigour they applied to picking apart the state's narrative. I`ll shut up now, I`m repeating myself.

agree completely with that, frederik

There's a limit to how far you can interrogate Jay's story without his cooperation. I mean they have picked apart his story. But destroying that doesn't get you closer to figuring out what happened let alone exonerating Adnan.

Well, it should. Jay's story is the main evidence against Adnan. Take that away, and all else is just speculation.

It should legally or logically? I think legally sure (except of course Adnan's already been convicted so his legal remedies are limited by that). Logically I think most people still can't get over what was Jay's motivation to pin it Adnan if Adnan didn't do it. Jay appears to be the only one who can answer that question (or at least the only one the show's found who can) and so far he seems pretty set that even if he lied or was inconsistent in various tellings that Adnan was the one who did it.

right - and beyond that: if not Adnan, then who?

and if the strong implication is that Adnan is innocent

it follows that either Jay did it alone, or with a mystery person.

is it fair to put that implication out into the world without even asking the same basic questions they asked about the case against adnan?

Jay's last name and current home town are 2 seconds away on google. He has a kid. Is it fair to put out hours of storytelling into 5 million people's ears strongly implying the man might be a murderer without taking responsibility for doing so, or even really admitting that that is exactly what you're doing?

my vote for season 2 is SK tracks down Connie Converse

the story about Jay wanting to stab his friend so that his friend knows what it feels like was pretty o_O

I don't get the logic of that, AlexinSF. Either Jay told the truth, or he lied. So we take a look at evidence, they show that he didn't tell the truth. Ergo, he lied. The fact that it's weird he lied does not then turn it back into the truth again.

But the question is the wrong way around. The whole case should be based on physical evidence, first and foremost. What story does the phonerecords imply by themselves? How does that story fit with Adnans and Jays stories? And when I look at that, on the link I posted upthread, it def seem to fit more with Jay having done it by himself. It does not fit with the prosecutions story at all, and I have a hard time fitting Adnan into the murder-part of it at all.

the phone records are a mess - so i don't see how they clear anybody any more than they nail anybody... but in any case, Adnan's phone pings multiple times from Leakin park at the time Jay says they were burying Hae there, and at a time when Adnan says he was in possession of his own phone. but I think we went over this stuff last week.

I think the only thing the show has strongly implied is that the prosecutors timeline is completely wacky and that Jay's stories are totally inconsistent. That's probably enough for reasonable doubt in a murder trial, but it's a far cry from Jay=totally guilty and Adnan=totally innocent. If latter is what a listener has gotten from the podcast then I'd say that has more to do with them than anything in the podcast.

"Either Jay told the truth, or he lied."

It's not either or. It is totally possible that Jay told the truth about some things and lied about some other things. One of the things he might have told the truth about is Adnan killing Hae and him helping Adnan dispose of the car and the body.

xposts. from Frederik's link from last week:
The 7:09 p.m. and 7:16 p.m. calls are the two most significant calls in the case, because both calls were routed through L689B — which is the tower/antenna whose range is almost exclusively limited to the southwest leg of Leakin Park, where Hae was buried.

The problem with Jay doing it by himself is 1) there is no motive as far as I can tell for Jay doing it all and 2) he hung out at various times with Abnan the entire day and 3) managed to do various things that incriminated Abnan in the process. If the lady from the Innocence Project thinks that Sarah getting hooked with a charming psychopath well if Jay did it all by himself then he's basically charming psychopath X master criminal X a 1000.

"hooked with a charming psychopath is unlikely"

oh i think the show has definitely made a case for Adnan's innocence based on his character before and after the crime - it's a huge theme throughout the show, every episode comes back to it.

totally agree - and am inclined to believe - big chunks of Jay's story are bullshit and big chunks are essentially true

I think I'll just wake up this morning make Adnan think I need his car to buy a present for Stephanie then go kill his ex-girlfriend and frame him for it then we'll smoke pot and then hang out some more then I'll tell my friend Adnan did it then wait six weeks yes PURE GOLD!

Oh and I won't bother to keep my story straight after that because who cares of course everyone's going to believe Adnan did it why because I am super trustworthy.

As crazy as the prosecutions timeline is at least there is ring of sense to the whole thing... jealous teenage dude enlists ne'er do well friend to help dispose of body of murdered girlfriend, behaves in totally irresponsible teenage manner while doing so.

Jay being like "sure whatever I'll help you dispose of the body and car" is actually the most really why would he do that? But ironically that's the part of the story that's actually corroborated by Jay!

and it just doesn't seem that far-fetched to me - there are zillions of true crime article every month about teenage killings where a bunch of kids knew or helped cover it up for no particular reason other than they were hanging out that day

zillions/every month maybe overstatement but you know what i mean

The only chunk of Jays story that doesn't ping out is everything at the time of the actual murder...

If Jay did it, he prob met Hae coincidentally - he was in Adnans car, so would make sense. Something happened, he snapped. That is the main reason I'm inclined to believe Jay did it at this point: you can construct a timeline for him doing it completely without psychopathy. Just severe anger issues, and he def seems to have that.

Yeah that's true. It's mostly wtf from a rational adult level. For a teenager maybe not that far fetched..

same could be said of adnan re: just snapping, right?

also we don't necessarily know the time of the actual murder - we just know the approx time she left school and approx time she should have been picking up her cousin

Like, it's not 'inconsistencies'. The whole part of his whereabouts while the murder happened were obviously made up.

And the phone records aren't 'a mess'. They're just phonerecords. It's just that Jay and the prosecution has lied about them, makes it all weird.

And I don't think there is time for Adnan to snap. The whole timeline of the prosecution only fits together with Adnan planning it exactly to get the alibi he wanted.

He met Hae coincidentally in Adnan's car then snapped and killed her and then somehow arranged by himself to dispose of her car and her body and hang out with Adnan and frame Adnan and all by his lonesome and then he's just living the rest of his life like a normal dude. Yeah no sorry that's charming psycho x master criminal x a 1000 plus just insane luck to boot.

"Hey Adnan you don't mind driving with your phone and me over to Leakin Park for a little. Maybe someone will call us. Just hang out hear for a second while I drive your ex-girlfriends car over here and dispose of her body."

everything alex in sf is saying is basically why i decided many episodes ago that adnan did it

yeah, same here. I don't understand the "timeline doesn't allow for adnan to do it" argument when you think the jay/prosecution timeline is bs anyway.

No. Adnan asks him to take car and phone. Because of Adnans car, meets Adnans ex, snaps, kills her. Has Adnans car and phone, arranges to get rid of body with it, further incriminating Adnan. Takes car and phone to Adnan, hangs out with him. Adnan gets stoned, steals Adnans phone, buries Hae, brings back Adnans phone. Really, apart from the phonething, which is kinda smart, the rest makes sense.

lol no way maybe in a work of fiction

You're forgetting that he's also telling his best friend at this exact time "oh by the way Adnan was wut done it".

How exactly is he getting both Hae's car, Hae's body, Adnan's car and Adnan's phone to all these places by himself again? Also dude is out of control in your mind to snap and strangle Hae, but somehow coldly and methodically covers up crime and again frame's acquaintance (coincidentally ex-bf of girl he killed in out of control fugue state) immediately after? Yeah that's not at all implausible.

yeah don't see it, nice effort though! better than I could have come up with

The problem is, if Adnan called for Jay, we can look at incoming calls. There is 2:36, which the prosecution focuses on. That one does not work with snapping. 3:15, which does not work either (it's explained on the Serial blog why). And then the next one is 4:27, def while Adnan is at track - he calls to be picked up at 4:59. So Adnan would have to have killed Hae before 2:36, and that does not fit.

There are also several calls to people from the I-88 at 3:48 and 3:59 to unidentified people. Could be Jays friends who helped him dispose of the body.

And again: He could frame Adnan because he had car and phone. Same thing that could have made him meet Hae.

Also, those two incoming calls at Leakin park? They come right after an outgoing call to Jenns pager. And we know Jenn helped Jay cover it up (she admitted it, and several of other things she said that helped Jay does not fit)

And there is nothing 'immediate' about the way Jay covered it up. Adnan had to hurry, he had to be at track. If Jay did it we get another hour for the killer to get his shit together.

Def. while Adnan is at track in what world again? Maybe I'm mis-remembering where it was established that he was definitely there.

So just to be clear: in your mind it is most believable that Jay kills Hae sometime before 4:58, leaves her body and car somewhere random (or maybe calls friend and speedily disposes of both), picks up Adnan at track, drives around with him for a while, goes to Kathy's house, gets stoned, then somehow gets his phone to Leakin Park (then way way later I guess disposes of both car and body with a friends help) then calls Jen they meet up "hey what's up Adnan killed Hae" waits six weeks and then changes story umpteen times on way to a conviction of Adnan.

All the incoming calls argument suggest is that Jay's story about getting a pick-up call from Adnan doesn't check out for a couple of times.

It doesn't rule out that they could have been together the whole time. They could have pre-arranged a meeting place and time. The pick-up call could be one of the later unidentified calls if there even was a pick-up call.

If the timeline cooked up by Jay and the cops is really suspect, as Serial has convincingly argued, why look to it for proof of anything?

Also - no-one remembers Adnan being at track if I recall correctly. Doesn't mean he wasn't there - but there's no "Adnan had to be at track" at time x or y if we don't know he was really there.

All the while Adnan's just like none the wiser "aw shucks thanks for picking me up man. You ain't acting at all suspicious either."

Well, both Jay and Adnan says Adnan was at track, there is an incoming call at 4:58 which tracks perfectly with Adnan calling to be picked up. If Adnan wasn't at track, then we should just stop looking at evidence and testimony at all. Like, it's one thing that every part of the case agrees on: Adnan eventually made it to track.

And why on earth would Adnan had given his new cell phone to Jay if it wasn't so he could make the pick-up call? The phone is with Jay, it's not at Woodlawn while Adnan is at school.

Like, that is what looking at the phone records give us: Adnan's phone is with Jay. Q: Why would it be with Jay? A: So that Adnan could phone him no matter where he was.

Most likely reason for Jay's changing story is that he's actually a lot more complicit in arranging and covering up the murder than he's letting on. And all the permutations of the stories are to hide that and enable him to escape a long accessory to murder sentence.

What could he possibly have done that he hasn't admitted to?

Apart from killing Hae on her own, of course.

His own. Sorry.

He could have been much more involved in planning, covering up the murder than he's indicated thus far. In fact as the stories basically eventually moved more towards him being an active participant.

That is extremely vague and useless.

Watch Rope.

I have. Good on you for knowing the one Hichcock where the guy is actually guilty ;)

My point is basically when you are guilty of something (and Jay is by his own admission to his friend and to the police guilty of at minimum being an accessory to murder) it's not surprising that you would try (and the detectives would try to assist you, since you are their sole witness to a murder) to massage details in such a way as to minimize that crime and maximize the murderer's crime. That kind of massaging is sort of inevitably going to result in these inconsistencies, but it doesn't invalidate the general thrust of his testimony (this is basically what the detective that Koenig argues too so no points for originality for me).

Well, obviously I agree with that, as it's exactly the same thing I am saying: He lied to cover up his own guilt. We just disagree on where that guilt ends. But if we know that Jay was involved, and is willing to lie about it, and get Jenn to lie about it, then there is no reason to believe anything of what he says. And it's not that I'm a fanatic about presumption of innocence - Bill Cosby def did it - but when that is put on top of the problems with figuring out when Adnan would have had time to do it, and the thing with Adnans 'alibi', which anyways is better than Jay's, then I'm going to go ahead and feel it's more likely Adnan wasn't involved.

But also, if we're saying that criminals change their statements to cover up their tracks, then why didn't Adnan do the same? Like with his phone being at Leakin Park when he says he's at mosque: It's the easiest thing in the world to explain: 'I was too stoned to know where my phone was.' The tough part of that alibi is claiming to be somewhere filled with people, where someone should have been able to debunk it completely. The phone thing is just weird.

Oh anyways, I'm stopping now, it's late in DK.

i can't remember - is there any actual forensic evidence for Hae's time of death? iirc her time of death is based off jay's testimony and jen saying that jay told her about it that night. is there evidence to prove Hae was also buried in Leakin Park that same night?

the whole 'could this guy who is pleasant and likeable and responsible REALLY have killed anyone' really makes me crazy

because my whole thing is why are people not more cognizant of the fact that [warning unsubstantiated hyperbole] half the fucked up shit in the world is done by ppl who ARE pleasant and likeable bcz the combover serial killers are like, 1% of anyone.

my biggest beef with this show is the way she idealizes character traits that just seriously have nothing to do with anything.

anyway this whole episode just felt like a 'we need to fill an episode' cul-de-sac to me

SK is clearly a likeablist

But also, if we're saying that criminals change their statements to cover up their tracks, then why didn't Adnan do the same?

Because different criminals are different and their situations aren't really comparable.

Sorry still stuck on this Jay works alone scenario because my mind is boggling at it. Let's pretend that this is all Jay and it's a crazy crime of passion or whatever and then he's like "woah better cover this shit up" and he starts doing that methodically and at the same time starts framing Adnan, calling Nisha, arranging for the phone to be near Leakin Park cell towers, telling Jen that night that Adnan did it, etc, but why do any of that? Why bring Adnan into it at all? Most of these actions result in the policy getting to Jay! And Jay has no way of knowing that Adnan won't have an alibi, no way of knowing that Adnan will end up being a total patsy, no way of knowing that he'll get to walk. Was he just counting on being the luckiest criminal ever?

Also Adnan has no alibi. It's not way better than anyones. He literally cannot remember where he was basically the entire day and one person (other than Jay) remembers seeing him that afternoon.

Also Adnan has no alibi. It's not way better than anyones. He literally cannot remember where he was basically the entire day and one person (other than Jay) remembers seeing him that afternoon.

― One bad call from barely losing to (Alex in SF), Thursday, December 11, 2014 11:12 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and like SK said herself, how could you not remember anything about a day when the police call you and tell you your ex-girlfriend is missing?

i think he was so confident that a)jay wouldn't tell the police anything b)even if he did, no one would believe him that he thought a simple deny deny deny/i don't remember anything strategy would work. i also think having jay borrow his cell phone and car was a half-assed way of covering/muddying his tracks.

Adnans 'alibi', which anyways is better than Jay's

Neither of them have an alibi.
Jay confessed, and Adnan has no alibi other than Asia MacLean, and she has recanted - and it would't necessarily let him off the hook even if it did check out.

is there any actual forensic evidence for Hae's time of death?

This is a really key question - and something that I think was blatantly misrepresented in Serial, which makes a huge deal about the "21 minutes" in which the crime must have happened. BUT that 21-minute timeline comes from Jay and the Best Buy call - both of which Serial argues forcefully are unreliable. I understand they're making the point about how the prosecution's timeline seems impossible - but the inference is that if Adnan could not have killed Hae in those 22 minutes he must be innocent - which isn't true.

From Episode 1:
According to Jay's story and the cellphone records, she was dead by 2:36 PM. So sometime in those 21 minutes, between 2:15 and 2:36, she was strangled. So that's obviously the same window Adnan needed to account for. To quote Adnan, "My case lived and died in those 21 minutes."

But we know Jay's timeline ultimately does not add up - which leads us to believe Jay might be minimizes or omitting his own role in Hae's death - why should we believe Hae had to have been killed in that 21-minute window? If Jay is lying about his role, that's the part of the timeline he is MOST likely to be lying about. So again, it just does not prove Adnan's innocence if this story doesn't check out... and Adnan's vague account of this period (basically "I was probably at the library because sometimes I checked email" at that time and "I never missed track" later) certainly doesn't amount to an alibi.

But I will say again because I'm feeling guilty for trashing the show and playing internet Columbo for my own entertainment now: the big truth that Serial revealed stands: this is a miscarriage of justice. Prosecution put up a shitty case and pulled some dubious moves, and the defence did a bad job. Whether he did it or not, it seems like he did not get a fair trial.

i'm glad SK is doing this show instead of you guys

xp I think he got a fair trial. At same time I don't think burden of proof was met, but it's always easy to Monday Morning quarterback these things.

No way did he get a fair trial - at least one juror admits totally judging Adnan for not testifying, which jurors were specifically told not to do, and given the evidence and testimonies, and the fact that Jay was cut a deal that was never revealed in court, I can't believe a jury could legitimately find Adnan guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt".

If this is not a fair trial than basically no trial in the United States is a fair trial.

Seriously prosecution didn't do anything completely egregious to taint the case.
His defense was able.
And the jury was unanimous.

I don't see the misconduct or inequity here. Adnan caught some bad breaks and obviously for the money he was paying his defense could have been sharper, but to say this was a miscarriage of justice? I don't see it.

a jury ignoring instructions/nullifying doesn't mean an unfair trial. If the judge had not given the instruction, the trial would not be fair.

By the way I did read about the Whitman case. That case is so messed up it makes this one seem tame by comparison.

Sorry Witman case.

wow you all make me feel like such a bleeding heart!

I'm looking forward to next week's finale, and next December's HuffPost story about how that dude from Serial is still in jail.

If this is not a fair trial than basically no trial in the United States is a fair trial.

― One bad call from barely losing to (Alex in SF), 12. december 2014 17:46 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, amen. And it isn't, and no one ever is, it seems. US justice is completely fucked up.

i suspect that jury instructions are more often not followed than they are followed, but i thought the jury was aware of jay's deal. maybe i'm misremembering. i remember the one juror expressing disbelief that he didn't go to jail, but i thought there had been testimony about it. i feel like SK started with the conclusion that the defense did a bad job, but hasn't proven it. there are things that could have been done differently, and the attorney's style was really grating, but i'm not persuaded that she really fucked up.

I think it was more that SK started with Adnan's family's allegation that the attorney had fucked up, but then concluded that she'd done ok. Except maybe for not following up on Asia.

yeah

Did Jay have any motive to kill Hae/any motive to say Adnan did it, if Jay didn't and a third party did?

there is no evidence of a motive on jay's part, just speculation that he was cheating on stephanie, hae knew about and was threatening to tell.

http://i.imgur.com/pq88ulD.jpg

There's an "h" in there if you listen closer.

sounds like HHKREEMP? to me

KHIMP at the very least

Right? Just like my dn.

exactly

*delivers hifive*

internet very much in character looking at a show about a girl's murder and wondering "How can we insert 'mail kimp' into some Linkin Park lyrics for our tumblr?"

^

I understand the feeling of distaste about a lot of the Serial jokes but I think it's inaccurate to say Serial is about a girl's murder. It's really about a man's conviction. Obviously Hae's murder is central to that story and I'm not in any way trying to diminish that but the podcast just isn't about her. It's about Adnan.

well, yeah. that's the main problem with it. I didn't have a problem with that Best Buy tweet, but some of the hipster stuff is lame:

https://41.media.tumblr.com/48ba39102e5ece9209f31c7a84300a5e/tumblr_ng2dko0kH21t0d7sno1_500.jpg
http://36.media.tumblr.com/ea6b52083d06b538af1f6fb9deae1cd6/tumblr_nf0414Zgds1qicn50o1_500.jpg

woah that's brutal, what the fuck is wrong with people?

I don't get that second one at all.

Linkin Park had a song called In The End It Doesn't Even Matter. It's a hideously formed "joke" based on Leakin Park, where the body of Hae Minh Lee was buried.

Leakin park is pronounced like Linkin Park in a Baltimore accent

One thing that struck me about this whole thing is the very neutral, professional tone that SK and a lot of the interviewees have - is that an American thing or is it just the amount of time that's gone by since 1999?

Actually dunno about 'professional' there

huh? she seems very casual and informal to me, especially with friends and family of Adnan

what you're hearing is know in America as "the NPR voice"

xp yeah - that's what I mean, casual, neutral, sort of thing. Ah and there's a name for it

At first I was honestly hearing that tone and thinking it was definitely a sign of guilt but I think it might be more that Americans are better at having confident conversations w/strangers where they come across as relaxed

Linkin Park had a song called In The End It Doesn't Even Matter. It's a hideously formed "joke" based on Leakin Park, where the body of Hae Minh Lee was buried.

― Brio2, Monday, December 15, 2014 3:19 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Leakin park is pronounced like Linkin Park in a Baltimore accent

― cardamon, Monday, December 15, 2014 3:20 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I knew all of this except for the name of the Linkin Park song. Thanks!

And yes that is a hideously formed joke, tastelessness aside. Also it's gross considering the context.

Oh people.

A further question from me is, should I get into This American Life? Like, what is it?

It's a podcast that offers stories (mostly non-fiction, but fiction, too, sometimes) on a theme each week. It's varied enough in its subject matter that I think it's worth looking through the archives and listening to episodes with themes/subjects that you find interesting. Sometimes they do really good investigative journalism type stuff, sometimes it's more like memoir, sometimes it's hilarious, sometimes it's infuriating.

I'm sure if you asked us to name one episode that we thought encapsulated the spirit of TAL, everybody would pick something different, but I'm going to rep for this episode because the diner where it is set is literally two blocks from where I'm sitting right now and I eat there a few times a month so I'm quite partial to it - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/172/24-hours-at-the-golden-apple.

yes!

its been around almost 20 years at this point and really is the cornerstone of the current american public radio style

as far as content, its all over the place. from straight journalism to personal essays to shaggy-dog storytelling to little-known history to standup comedy and fictional storytelling

their own "favorites" page is as good a place to start as any:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/favorites

i feel like ilx as a whole is a little more critical/wary of TAL than your average group of 30+ educated westerners, but when they're good, they're really good

xposts

All of those on the favorites "short list" are really good.

Yeah, the diner one is quintessential old school This American Life at its best. I think it's been on a not-so-hot streak for the past couple of years - though the high points are still high.

http://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/534/a-not-so-simple-majority

This recent one about a school board battle was very good

Full disclosure: I've been a huge fan of TAL since it first aired, so I am not even remotely cool w/r/t my enthusiasm for the show. Haters to the left.

Okay will give this a whirl. I'm starting to like the idea of a radio broadcast ... on my computer! I'm probably a bit late to that but n/m

most TAL stories end ambiguously or up in the air. Though when they are re-aired years later they may have an update telling you that everyone in the story is now dead or that nothing has changed.

There a newer podcast called Criminal that's quite good

That Tig Notaro thing this week was maybe the laziest TAL story I've ever heard them put to air - just some clips from her tv special strung together with some script from a producer. Quality control is out the window on that show. They have a really great one about every 2 months - usually a full episode on a single topic like that great school board one - and they tread water and run repeats the rest of the time. Probably having 3 of their veteran producers on Serial for the past year hasn't helped TAL proper - but I love the idea that Serial will mean they try creating a bunch of new and different shows.

some personal favorites:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/492/dr-gilmer-and-mr-hyde (prob the closest in style to Serial that i can think of)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/486/valentines-day (act 1 is some really amazing personal history, you'll laugh, you'll cry)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/516/stuck-in-the-middle (act 1 is me IRL)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/396/1-party-school (probably double-interesting to a non-american, idk)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/199/house-on-loon-lake (real-life ghost story, the ride is better than the destination though)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/206/somewhere-in-the-arabian-sea (the fascinating mundanity of the military industrial complex)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/129-cars (the best HBO comedy that never happened)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/388/rest-stop (cant even put in to words what makes this one so wonderful to me, prob the episode i've played more than any other)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/534/a-not-so-simple-majority (x-posts)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-giant-pool-of-money (prob not as good now, but hearing it in '08 it felt like the biggest thing since live 9/11 coverage)

House on Loon Lake was the one that hooked me. and yeah, Giant Pool of Money might feel familiar now - but it was so important when it came out.

wait you mean really you?: stuck-in-the-middle (act 1 is me IRL)

no thread police but we do have this threaD: this american life, c/d

one thing I began to realize after awhile is that a lot of TAL content comes from other podcasts--that's how I found shows like 99% Invisible and Here Be Monsters

xpost lol no, but my corporate help-desk had that same hold music for years and i became obsessed with it, to the point of hunting down a track that Shazam mistakeny tagged it as. in the leadup to the reveal i was like "is it my song? is it my song????"

funny timing, because they recently replaced it with something that sounds like the night-rider theme, equally as enthralling but i miss the old one

LOL for a second i thought you were saying you were one of the TAL producer's 81-year-old dad

i was thinking man this gr8080 guy is pretty clued in to pop culture for a guy in his 80's

gr8181

xpost lol no, but my corporate help-desk had that same hold music for years and i became obsessed with it, to the point of hunting down a track that Shazam mistakeny tagged it as. in the leadup to the reveal i was like "is it my song? is it my song????"

funny timing, because they recently replaced it with something that sounds like the night-rider theme, equally as enthralling but i miss the old one

― gr8080, Monday, December 15, 2014 4:43 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hahaha that is the same hold music that they used at the fertility clinic where we spent three years trying to make babby happen, so obviously I called there quite a bit, and was also obsessed with the hold music and had the same "IS THIS IT? IS IT????" response. Although as soon as the woman kind of hummed it I knew it was it.

Also LOL at gr8181

Guys, I just got around to listening to 1-11 and I'm loving it. Interested to see what the PI comes up with.

it was a weird experience being in the middle of a 2 week vacation last April and listening to that episode while on a train ride through the Portuguese countryside and then temporarily having my headspace blasted back to the office

re: "stuck in the middle"

Gawker piece on Serial had a great line on the NPR voice:
"She admits her confusion and frustration and speaks frankly about the walls she hits in her investigation, in that solemn NPR monotone that well-meaning liberals like myself have come to associate with quality reporting."

takedown of Serial, op-ed from Philadelphia public radio

http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/blogs/centre-square/item/76311-with-one-episode-left-will-serial-soar-or-crash-and-burn

v otm, or at least echoes most of my misgivings

i for one refuse to have my news mediated by guys who look like this
http://i.imgur.com/frgsPiN.jpg

aw i like mo

xxpost

yeah - this sums it up well.

At times it seems Koenig’s true topic is not the factual case, but her own feelings about it.

She is fascinated by the puzzle of whether a guy whom she finds likable could really have been capable of strangling a teenage girl with his bare hands. She returns to this theme again and again. She is more like a novelist playing with the classic question of “what is evil?” than a savvy journalist hunting fresh evidence.

Comparing this to Fatal Vision is pretty bizarre, but I do agree that the story is as much about Koenig as it is about the murder which definitely begs question of "why do this"?