Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

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?