6 days ago
'Slow Burn' Is on The 100 Best Podcasts of All Time
History
The original season of Slate's excellent Slow Burn , which began airing in 2017, somehow managed to render oft-retread stories from American history surprising, thanks to an unexpected cast of characters and added context that gets lost in the process of mythologizing. Kicking off with a series about Watergate, Slow Burn closely traced when, exactly, the public was pushed over the edge by Nixon's lies—it was later than you think. The unforgettable first episode of the first season, 'Martha,' tells the horrifying and revealing story of Martha Mitchell, wife of Nixon's attorney general, who was kidnapped and locked in a hotel room in an attempt to cover up the Watergate leak. Mitchell is rightfully the center of that narrative, and the podcast continues to find the very real people often forgotten in the sweeping history-book narratives. The second season covered the Clinton Impeachment—the podcast reminds you that the coverage of Monica Lewinsky is even more sexist than you remember. And more recent seasons have traced the road to the Iraq War, the 1992 L.A. Riots, and the Rise of Fox News, all of which offer lessons for our current political moment.
