Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

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.