This morning, I was listening to This American Life Episode 679: Save the Girl. The introduction starts out as thus: IRA GLASS: Of everything in pop culture, what can make a teenage boy cry? That’s a very specialized list, right? And we got to talking about this at our office because Lina Misitzis, one of the producers here, remembers how there was this one video game, a PlayStation game, that got her brother and his friends when they were kids. And I thought, oh man, there can be only one game that they’re talking about — Final Fantasy VII. And that delights me because whenever old fuddy-duddy podcasts like this…
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Mike Daisey and the Uncanny Valley of Fiction
I recently became a fan of “This American Life” and finally got to listen to the “Retraction” episode (see reference). Long story short, they ran a excerpt from Mike Daisey’s theatrical monologue about visiting China’s Apple factories. Afterwards, there was fact-checking, and it turned out a number of Daisey’s purported experiences (guards with guns, 12-year-old workers, underground unions meeting at Starbucks) could not be corroborated. This fascinates me because I love TAL’s documentary nature, and it’s so rare for a journalistic organization to admit they made a mistake. But not only that, TAL dedicated an entire episode to it, and gave everyone a chance to make a statement. When Daisey…
