Capitol, a tremendous amount of reporting, documentation, and opinion-shaping about the attack has been generated near-daily, and so a perfectly natural question that may arise with Will Be Wild - the eight-part documentary on the matter led by Trump Inc.’s Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz - would be this: “Well, what else is new?” The answer is that it’s less about generating any explosive revelation at this point and more about figuring out a way to process the future within this calcifying context of multiple clashing subjective realities. It’s hard not to feel despair when considering the galling asymmetry between information and action with respect to the January 6 insurrection. Hosted by Vernon native Sam Mullins and produced by Abukar Adan, Wild Boys ends up being a fascinating story about the spirit of small-town life and the aftermath when that spirit is taken advantage of. The town took them in, and the whole affair eventually became a media sensation. The latest season revisits a story that took place in the rural British Columbia town of Vernon, sometime in the early 2000s, when two boys suddenly appeared in the community claiming to be born of the wilderness. The most interesting podcast in the category of the New Year so far comes from Chameleon, Campside Media’s podcast shingle dedicated to grifter narratives. Because of this, you’ll continue to find the podcast world, along with almost every streaming service in active operation, pumping out as many fraud stories as it possibly can, capitalizing on a moment that’s become a defining interpretive framework of our modern reality. The vibes may be shifting, but tales of people scamming, shamming, and swindling seem to be lasting well beyond summer, to the point where it’s basically the new monomyth. Read Nicholas Quah’s interview with Sounds Like a Cult hosts Amanda Montell and Isabela Medina-Maté. Sounds Like a Cult is a playful take on that perspective, but in that playfulness, it gets at something fundamental about the world: No matter where you are, you’re never too far from the brink of cultishness. The podcast broadly serves as an extension of Montell’s work in her recently published book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, which examines how language is central to the cultivation of cultlike dynamics and how that manipulation of language has been replicated in the other, seemingly banal aspects of our culture, such as the corporate life.
The premise is deceptively simple: In each episode, the duo takes a different phenomenon floating about in the culture - theater kids, minimalism, Trader Joe’s, and so on - and compares it to the framework of a cult.
You can squeeze a whole lotta juice out of a good concept, as evidenced by Amanda Montell and Isabela Medina-Maté in this enjoyable chatcast.
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