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    The Loony Musings of the ‘Valley Heat’ Podcast

    Christian Duguay’s podcast purports to be about the neighbors in the Rancho Equestrian District of Burbank. One thing is for sure: It’s masterfully absurd.In the Rancho Equestrian District of Burbank, Calif., they take foosball seriously — and those who don’t, well, they might get their thumbs broken. Or worse. Foosball is life or death there, but mostly death, or at least it can seem that way on “Valley Heat,” a deliriously deadpan fictional podcast about this real neighborhood that delights in ludicrous lore and nonsense.Its host, the spectacularly ineffectual freelance insurance adjuster Doug Duguay (played by Christian Duguay, a former star of “Mad TV”), tells his audience with the earnestness of an NPR host that when it comes to causes of death, a lot of people don’t know that foosball is “second only to jumping off cliffs in bat suits.”There’s no better indictment of the algorithms that power our digital landscape than the fact that my feeds have shown me thousands of videos of comedians doing crowd work over the past few years, but not a peep about this masterfully absurd podcast. While its 17 episodes evoke the dry humor of Mike Judge and the gleefully silly song parodies of “Flight of the Conchords,” “Valley Heat” remains under the radar, probably for the same reason it’s such an exciting find. It’s too weird to neatly categorize or quickly explain.I knew little about it before a recommendation from a friend, who said: “I’m not going to tell you anything, just listen.” I didn’t get it at first. It seemed banal, wandering. But its humor sneaks up on you. It’s somehow improvisational and literary at the same time, drunk on language, packed with twists, narrowly satirical while also creating a strange aesthetic world. The muted tone requires some focus from listeners. Once I tuned into its peculiar frequency, it had me laughing out loud as much as any TV show has in recent years.The first season was released in 2020 and developed a cult following, with some famous fans like Patton Oswalt. After a few episodes of a second season, the podcast vanished for more than a year and a half. It re-emerged in January on the platform Maximum Fun, which this year released two new episodes (that include Oswalt as a voice). The show centers on Doug, a beta male buffoon who tells us he was the kind of kid who could never have fun at a party. Doug grew into the kind of adult who becomes flustered when his wife’s yoga teacher, who answers the phone by saying “light and love,” texts mermaid emojis in Venmo transactions. “The mermaid is the only naked emoji,” he explains, before hedging. “Not fully naked.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Neil Young Will Return to Spotify, Ending Protest of Joe Rogan

    The rock musician removed his songs from the streamer in 2022 to protest coronavirus podcast episodes, but reversed course in light of the show’s wider distribution.Neil Young will return his music to Spotify, two years after withdrawing it in protest over the podcast host Joe Rogan’s shows about Covid-19, the veteran rock musician announced on his website Tuesday.Without naming Rogan, Young wrote: “My decision comes as music services Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation podcast features I had opposed at Spotify.” Rogan previously had an exclusive deal with Spotify, which has since been renewed to allow wider distribution of his show.In January 2022, Young drew wide attention by accusing Spotify of “spreading fake information about vaccines” through Rogan’s show, and he gave the platform an ultimatum: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”Rogan, a comedian and actor, has become one of the most popular and influential figures in podcasting with his show “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which features long, freewheeling interviews with guests like Elon Musk, Ye, scientists and fellow comedians.Days before Young’s public letter, a group of doctors, scientists and public health officials asked Spotify to crack down on Covid-19 misinformation, pointing to an episode of Rogan’s show that featured Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist and vaccine skeptic who promoted a theory that millions of people had been “hypnotized” about the coronavirus.Following Young’s protest, the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell also removed her music from Spotify, and the R&B singer India.Arie circulated clips showing Rogan using a racial slur repeatedly on the show. Rogan apologized for his use of the word, and Spotify quietly removed dozens of episodes of his show. Rogan also said he was willing to have “more experts with differing opinions right after I have the controversial ones.”In a public statement at the time, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, said, “It is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.” The company added a “content advisory” notice to any podcast episode that involved Covid.Spotify signed Rogan to a deal in 2020, worth at least $200 million, that made his show exclusive to that platform. Last month, the company announced a new, multiyear arrangement with Rogan in which Spotify would also distribute “The Joe Rogan Experience” to other podcast platforms, as well as YouTube. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, the new deal could be worth as much as $250 million.In his statement on Tuesday, Young didn’t give a timeline for when his music would return to Spotify, and a representative of Spotify did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Last year, in an analysis of how Young’s streaming activity had changed since withdrawing his music from Spotify, Billboard estimated that the protest had cost him about $16,000 in royalties per month. More

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    The Best True Crime to Stream: Viral Stories With a Twist

    What happens when widespread attention plays an unexpected role in a crime or investigation? Here are four picks across television, documentaries and podcasts that explore the question.These days, it’s common for a true crime story to go viral, but that interest often gathers momentum only after an investigation, documentary, podcast or online conversation brings to light a previously unfamiliar saga. For this streaming list, I wanted to look instead at stories that were, to some degree, viral already, and where that buzz was essential to the yarn itself — altering or shaping the unusual events. Here are four memorable offerings.Documentary film“The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker”Caleb McGillvary, known as Kai, may have been among the first so-called milkshake ducks, a term for a noncelebrity who delights the internet, only to fall from grace.In 2013, he was interviewed for an on-the-scene news segment in which he recounted how he had intervened to stop a crime while hitchhiking in Fresno, Calif. The video, where he is referenced as “Kai, the Homeless Hitchhiker With a Hatchet” quickly went viral, and McGillvary — a goofy, charismatic, eccentric vagabond — was hailed as a hero.Quickly came a bonanza of memes and television appearances — including a segment on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” — as well as talks of his own reality show. But the good times didn’t last. A few months later, he was arrested on charges that he had killed a man in New Jersey.This 2023 Netflix documentary, from the director Colette Camden, unpacks McGillvary’s internet fame, the subsequent fallout and his murder trial. It also serves as a time capsule of sorts, capturing the frenetic pace and fickle mood of American web culture in the mid-2010s.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    5 Podcasts for Hollywood’s Awards Season

    As Oscars night approaches, these shows offer expert analysis and predictions, insight into behind-the-scenes machinations and reflections on front-runners of the past.The 2024 awards season has felt unusually hectic so far, thanks to the strike-delayed Emmy Awards shifting from their usual fall airdate to January. To help make sense of it all — and unpack the discombobulated state of Hollywood now — these five podcasts offer a mixture of expert analysis and predictions for the major ceremonies, original reporting on the industry trends and behind-the-scenes machinations that influence voting, and reflections on Oscar front-runners of the past that probably shouldn’t have been.‘Little Gold Men’This Vanity Fair series debuted in 2015, which means it’s been on hand to chronicle some of the weirdest moments in Academy history, like the 2017 Best Picture flub (when “La La Land” was mistakenly announced as the winner instead of “Moonlight”), 2021’s muted Covid-era ceremony held in a cavernous Los Angeles train station, and the slap heard around the world in 2022. But even when there’s nothing quite so unusual going on, the analysis here always makes awards season more interesting. Hosted by the Vanity Fair journalists Michael Hogan, Katey Rich, Richard Lawson and Joanna Robinson, the conversation is always exhaustive and packed with expertise, exploring not just the contenders for Hollywood’s top prizes, but also the campaigning and strategizing that shape the race. Since many Oscar journeys begin at film festivals such as Sundance, Cannes, Venice and Toronto, there’s no shortage of news and releases to cover year round, not to mention interviews; recent guests have included Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”), Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Greta Lee (“Past Lives”).Starter episode: “Oscar Voters, Start Your Engines”‘This Had Oscar Buzz’There’s a peculiar category of film that debuts with great fanfare, attracts plenty of awards buzz, and then fades from the cultural consciousness without a trace (and no awards). Not all of the films discussed on “This Had Oscar Buzz” fall into that bracket, but, as the title suggests, the focus is on the movies that had that buzzy aura around them, at least for a while. An early episode about “Cake,” a 2014 movie starring Jennifer Aniston as a woman living with chronic pain, exemplifies what works so well about this format — Aniston was lauded for her playing-against-type performance and campaigned intensely during that awards season, but was famously snubbed on Oscar nomination morning. The hosts, Joe Reid and Chris Feil, don’t belittle either the performance or the hustle, but rather use the hype around “Cake” as a jumping-off point to discuss Aniston’s career and celebrity more broadly, alongside the ins and outs of how exactly buzz gets built in the first place.Starter episode: “Alexander (With David Sims)”‘The Town With Matthew Belloni’Though not a traditional awards season podcast with predictions or play-by-play recaps, “The Town” is an invaluable resource for anyone hoping to understand the upheaval in Hollywood. Delivered in snappy episodes that clock in around 30 minutes, Matthew Belloni, a former editor of The Hollywood Reporter and a founding partner of the digital media company Puck, shares insights and exclusive reporting on the industry, whether the issue is last year’s monthslong writers’ and actors’ strikes, Disney’s succession woes or the cost-of-streaming crisis. In a recent episode, Belloni and Brooks Barnes, a Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times, went deep on the current state of the “unkillable” Golden Globes, which returned last year after a hiatus sparked by controversy surrounding its now-defunct unorthodox voting body, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Traditionally the first awards show on the calendar — and the most chaotic — the Globes have proved to have more staying power than many predicted, and this analysis is a good resource for anybody wondering why.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    How Anderson Cooper Deals With Grief and Memorializes His Family at Home

    How do you memorialize the people you loved and lost? Object by object, the CNN anchor is trying to figure it out.It took Anderson Cooper more than a year after his mother’s death to begin clearing out her apartment. It was an emotionally draining task, one that he put off — something his mother may have anticipated, because she left him a road map.He began finding notes she had left him, tucked away in drawers and sealed containers. Written in her hand on heavy stationery, they acted as a kind of treasure hunt to their shared grief.Mr. Cooper’s mother, the heiress and fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt, was one of the most famous women in the world, courted by Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, photographed by Richard Avedon, and a muse to Truman Capote, who is believed to have based the character of Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” partly on her.Just sorting through her personal papers would have been challenging for her son after her death at the age of 95 in 2019.But the apartment was also the final resting place of objects that belonged to Mr. Cooper’s father, Wyatt Emory Cooper, an author and screenwriter who died in 1978 when Anderson was 10, and his older brother, Carter Cooper, who died in 1988, when they were both in their 20s, after jumping from his mother’s balcony.Next to a pair of satin trousers, Mr. Cooper came across a piece of paper: “These are Daddy’s pyjamas.”“Daddy’s glasses,” read another, left on top of a stack of spectacles tied with a ribbon.And then, tucked away in a plastic container, he found a white silk shirt next to a knitted skirt. “Blouse and skirt I was wearing when Carter died,” read the sheet of paper lying on top.Anderson Cooper, 56Occupation: CNN anchor, author and podcast hostOn processing the past: “I’m the last one left from this sort of interesting family that existed,” he said. “I just find it sort of haunting this idea that everyone just disappears.”When a person you love dies, you are left with memories, a mental film reel of the experiences you shared, the lessons they taught you and the refracted light of their love. And at the most basic level, you are also left with their stuff — often more stuff than you can keep.Among the notes Anderson Cooper found when he went to clean out his mother’s apartment was this one, left on top of a stack of glasses that had belonged to his father.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMr. Cooper, 56, began keeping voice memos on his phone as he was sorting through his mother’s belongings in 2021. They grew into a podcast on grief, “All There Is With Anderson Cooper,” which began its second season in November.For decades, the longtime anchor of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°” has chronicled other people’s suffering. Now, he has become a correspondent from the land of his own grief.He recently invited a reporter to his Manhattan home, in Greenwich Village, where he has displayed some of the objects he retrieved from his mother’s apartment on the Upper East Side.Ms. Vanderbilt, whose fashion designs were the subject of numerous magazine features, was fond of saying that “decorating is autobiography.” For her son, decorating has also been an exercise in choosing what to remember.The doors of his home — a historic firehouse he bought for $4.3 million in 2009 — open onto the space where the fire truck once stood. When he bought the building, there was one way to get upstairs — a steel spiral staircase — and two ways to get back down: that narrow staircase or a fireman’s pole.The cherry-red spiral staircase was initially the only way to get upstairs in the former firehouse. Mr. Cooper preserved it, but added another staircase.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesA living room bookcase is filled with antique books, including some that belonged to Mr. Cooper’s mother, his father and his Vanderbilt ancestors.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMr. Cooper worked with an architect to subdivide the four-story, warehouselike space into rooms. Both the spiral staircase and the fireman’s pole were preserved. But now, a wide staircase zigzags upstairs. The wall next to the main staircase serves as a gallery of his mother’s paintings, as well as portraits of her signed by well-known photographers.It’s a celebration of Ms. Vanderbilt’s much-publicized life: At the age of 10, she became a tabloid sensation after a custody battle pitted her wealthy mother against her wealthy aunt. As the heiress to the Vanderbilt fortune, she inherited millions. But she was also a self-made woman, creating a line of jeans and a fashion empire that generated $100 million a year in revenue. She was married four times and had affairs with some of Hollywood’s leading men, including Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, who sent her adoring telegrams signed “The Feller on the White Horse.” She also wrote numerous books and painted prolifically, in a faux-naïf style.To the casual observer, there are only happy memories of her in Mr. Cooper’s home — of her legendary beauty, her talent and her connections to the famous people of her day.In the basement of the firehouse, Mr. Cooper is working his way through the last 70 or so boxes of his mother’s belongings. Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBut laced throughout are also hints of grief: On a side table is a Victorian calendar, made of intricately fashioned bronze, with three little windows for a day, date and month. “Friday,” says the first window. “22,” says the second. “July,” says the third.Mr. Cooper found the calendar on a shelf next to his mother’s bed. Then he realized what the date referred to: It was on July 22, 1988, that his brother jumped off the balcony of their mother’s 14-story apartment building, as she pleaded with him not to.After her son died, Ms. Vanderbilt moved multiple times, and the calendar went with her. But its dial never moved again, forever marking the moment of tragedy. “I was getting rid of my mom’s apartment, and I just didn’t want to let go of everything,” said Mr. Cooper, who now displays the calendar in his living room.It was three years after his brother’s death, in 1991, that Mr. Cooper discovered war reporting: After graduating from Yale University, he worked briefly as a fact checker for Channel One, a daily news program broadcast to schools. He lasted mere months before convincing a colleague to make him a fake press pass and loan him a Hi8 camcorder. In late 1991, he sneaked into Myanmar, where insurgents were fighting to overthrow the military dictatorship and sold his first TV story.The Victorian calendar that Mr. Cooper found near his mother’s bed, which still shows the day of his brother’s death: July 22, 1988.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesIn 1992, he covered famine in Somalia. In 1993, Sarajevo. In 1994, he crossed a bridge into Rwanda. When he looked down, he saw bodies caught on the rocks, their arms flailing in the water. It was at the edges of the world, in places of extreme suffering, that he discovered he could feel again, he said.When he was 10 and his mother came to tell him that his father had died of a heart attack, he remembers crying — a little, he said. And then almost never again.He pulled inward, learning to control his emotions, he said. Among his earliest impulses was the desire to be fully independent. One of his first appearances in the pages of this newspaper was in a story about a lemonade stand he helped run. He got his own bank account, and after his father’s death, he began working as a child model for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren.He retreated even further after his brother’s death, when Mr. Cooper was 21.Tracing two lines in the air, he said: “I sort of live in this middle ground of no high highs and no low lows.”He continued: “The only time I felt stuff is when things were so extreme that you couldn’t help but feel — where it was so overwhelming, terrifying, tragic that through, like, osmosis, it overcame all of the sort of things I had worked up to prevent myself from feeling,”But it was a fleeting solution. “I would come back home,” he said, “and I just felt dead.”The death of his mother and the subsequent birth of his sons — who are now 3 and almost 2 — made him take stock. (Mr. Cooper is co-parenting his children with his former partner, Benjamin Maisani, 50, an entrepreneur and nightclub owner.) He described the sadness that he used to see in his mother’s eyes. He doesn’t want his sons to see that in him.Photographs of Carter Cooper, Mr. Cooper’s brother who died when they were in their 20s.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBy now, he is down to the last 70 or so boxes of his mother’s belongings. Unpacking them has meant unboxing the real estate in his mind.A few months ago, he was in the basement of his townhouse, working his way through the containers, when he opened a box of his father’s papers and discovered an essay his father, who died of a heart attack at 50, had never published. Its title: “The importance of grieving.”Among Mr. Cooper’s earliest memories is of falling asleep curled up like a puppy on his father’s lap, while his father typed late into the night.Alone in the basement, Mr. Cooper began to read the essay. A few pages in was a description of what happens to a child who doesn’t grieve: “When a person is unable to complete a mourning task in childhood, he either has to surrender his emotions in order that they do not suddenly overwhelm him, or else he may be haunted constantly throughout his life with a sadness for which he cannot find an appropriate explanation.”Mr. Cooper stopped midsentence, taking off his glasses. For several seconds, he was silent.“I read this quote and I realized,” he said finally, his voice breaking, that “this is exactly what I’ve done.”Last year, he invited his podcast listeners to share their stories of loss. The hotline he created filled up with more than 46 hours of voice mail messages. Listening in his basement, alone, as he unpacked his mother’s boxes, he was overwhelmed.He has arrived at a new stage of grief, he said. He now feels “a welling,” he said, “that is underneath me at all times.”Mr. Cooper shows off the gallery of his mother’s paintings and photos that he created in the stairwell of his townhouse.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesAnd for once, he is feeling it in the city where he was born, mere miles from the Upper East Side, where his father and brother both died too young. He is feeling it without needing to go to a foreign country.“Here,” he said, “just in regular conversations with people.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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    The Best True Crime to Stream: Family Matters

    Four picks from television, films and podcasts that show blood is not always thicker than water.Family secrets, tumult and trauma are at the heart of so many — if not most — true crime stories, and breed some of the most bizarre betrayals. Here are four picks including podcasts, television and films that explore unforgettable crimes involving families, all of whom prided themselves on presenting a perfect image until the truth came crashing through the facade.Docuseries“Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal”Watching a true crime documentary that is following events that are presently unfolding — where those telling the tale also have no idea of what’s to come — is particularly gripping. And this tale of greed, corruption, outlandish cover-ups and murder in the lowcountry region of South Carolina is a doozy. It is, as the New York Times television critic Mike Hale put it, an “unbeatable crime story.”The first three-episode season, on Netflix, premiered midway through the trial of the family’s patriarch, Alex Murdaugh: the disgraced personal injury attorney and an heir to the area’s legal dynasty, who was accused of killing his wife, Maggie, and son Paul in 2021. The second season picks up from there, covering the march to the verdict. Both seasons were released this year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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    LeVar Burton’s New ‘Sound Detectives’ Podcast Urges Children to Listen

    The actor is engaging young audiences again with “Sound Detectives,” a comic mystery podcast that teaches the art of listening.LeVar Burton has spent much of his career encouraging children to read. Now he is urging them to listen — really listen.They can develop that skill, along with an ear for mysteries, in “Sound Detectives,” a new podcast for audiences of elementary-school age that is part whodunit, part science exploration and part comic adventure. Co-produced by SiriusXM’s Stitcher Studios and LeVar Burton Entertainment, “Sound Detectives” features Burton as a fictionalized version of himself, an inventor with the same name.“In a certain sense, ‘LeVar Burton’ has reached iconic status,” Burton said in a phone conversation. “And it’s fun for me to lean into that.” He added, “It’s also an opportunity for me to introduce ‘LeVar’ to another generation.”Many adults recognize Burton as the actor who played Kunta Kinte in “Roots” and Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” More recently, fans pushed for him to be named the host of “Jeopardy!,” a role for which he very publicly campaigned. But to large numbers of today’s parents, he is most familiar from their own childhoods as the host of the Emmy-winning public television series “Reading Rainbow,” which explored books for young readers from 1983 to 2006.“LeVar Burton Reads,” his literary podcast for adults, has been downloaded more than 54 million times, according to SiriusXM.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesThe LeVar Burton of the 10-part “Sound Detectives,” which debuted on Wednesday — SiriusXM will release a new episode every week thereafter — is an audiophile planning to open a magnificent institution, the Museum of Sound. But he discovers that sounds are becoming separated from their sources and going missing.To resolve the crisis, he hires a Philip Marlowe-style sleuth, Detective Hunch, and sends him an assistant in the form of one of his own inventions: Audie, a 3-foot-5-inch-tall walking, talking ear. In each episode, Hunch and Audie must analyze an errant sound, identify it and return it to its origins, while also trying to unmask the Sound Swindler, the human culprit who is causing the disappearances.“Sound Detectives” is the real LeVar Burton’s first podcast for children, but he stressed that he did not see it as a long-awaited return to young people’s entertainment. “I don’t feel like I’ve ever left it,” he said. Burton, 66, who has remained active in children’s literacy through founding Skybrary, a digital library of e-books and videos, said he had not ruled out a young listener’s version of “LeVar Burton Reads,” his SiriusXM literary podcast. (According to the company, it has been downloaded more than 54 million times since its premiere six years ago.)But what appealed to him about “Sound Detectives” was that he did not have the burden of being the podcast’s sole maker or its star. The independent producers Joanna Sokolowski and Julia Smith (Smith is also the producer of “LeVar Burton Reads”) created the podcast and developed it with Burton before pitching it to Sirius XM. “Sound Detectives” focuses more on the private eye — and the accompanying ear — than on the famous voice that gives them their missions.To large numbers of today’s parents, Burton is most familiar as the host of the public television series “Reading Rainbow,” which explored books for young readers from 1983 to 2006.PBSBurton also admired the plan for each episode’s end: Once the missing sound is returned, young listeners hear an on-location interview with real experts who deal with it in their work.The podcast “appeals to the innate curiosity in a child about the world around them,” Burton said, and “it introduces them to parts of the world that they might not have yet been exposed to. And those are the key precepts that were the drivers to ‘Reading Rainbow.’”“Sound Detectives” visits places like Yellowstone National Park, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the streets of Bangalore (now Bengaluru), India. When creating the missing-sound mystery for each half-hour episode, Smith and Sokolowski said in a video interview that they sometimes started with a site they found intriguing, and at other times with a sound. The sounds they chose can be challenging to identify; one example was recorded on Mars.“We hadn’t heard of another show that was dealing exclusively with sound as, like, the main narrative driver for a podcast,” Sokolowski said. “And it just seemed like a wonderful way to not only engage kids in the format, but also in the method and delivery and style and every aspect of the show.”Although the podcast industry is undergoing retrenchment, “Sound Detectives” is entering a children’s market that seems nowhere near saturation, said Megan Lazovick, a vice president at Edison Research, an analytics company in Somerville, N.J.Edison’s first national study of the children’s market (conducted recently with the advocacy organization Kids Listen) found that 29 percent of children ages 6 to 12 had listened to a podcast the previous month. That figure rose to 42 percent if their parents had also listened to one.Lazovick predicted that Burton’s association with “Sound Detectives” would be a big draw for parents. She mentioned how the new “Disney Frozen: Forces of Nature” podcast capitalized on the popularity of the “Frozen” film and its offshoots. “In the kids’ space, bringing in brands that are already trusted is sort of a no-brainer,” she said.Adam Sachs, SiriusXM’s senior vice president for entertainment, comedy and podcast programming, said that Burton was also a “huge factor” in the company’s commitment to the project.“Not only is he just a great podcast talent to work with, and we have a great track record with him,” Sachs said, “but he also has so much experience working in the kids’ content space that this sort of felt like the perfect opportunity for us to dip our toe in.” (SiriusXM declined to disclose the budget for “Sound Detectives.”)The podcast “appeals to the innate curiosity in a child about the world around them,” Burton said.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesSokolowski, who has a background in documentaries (among them, the films “Ovarian Psycos” and “Very Semi-Serious”), and Smith, who has experience in comedy (including the podcasts “Judge John Hodgman” and “Bubble”), are both parents who wanted “Sound Detectives” to be as layered as possible. In addition to investigating physics and acoustics, the podcast includes information on auditory biology (even most adults probably aren’t aware that the ears influence taste) and one episode that examines how deaf people experience sound as vibration.The two women, who wrote the scripts with Isabelle Redman Dolce, also decided that the dialogue would be partly improvised.“I like the energy that it brings, and the ideas that will sort of come forth that would probably never emerge in any other way,” Smith said. They sought actors with improv experience, and Vinny Thomas, who voices Detective Hunch, proved to be an authority on animal characteristics (like the fact that whale sharks lead solitary lives).“Hunch is kind of like an eccentric uncle,” Thomas said, “and what eccentric uncle isn’t a know-it-all?”Jessica McKenna, who portrays the ever-curious Audie, improvised song interludes as well as lines, using her skills to collaborate with the composer Adam Deibert on the jazzy “Sound Detectives” theme. “It’s a really goofy niche I’ve carved out for myself,” she said.In addition to being an ear, Audie personifies a child who is maybe “solving the case before the adult,” Sokolowski said.The creators of “Sound Detectives,” who have built a podcast website with related sleuthing activities, intend young listeners to become just as engaged as Audie in the season-long investigation.“One of the attractive exercises that we’re engaging in here is getting kids to listen critically to the world, right?” Burton said. “To use their powers of discernment, which is one of my favorite words.” More

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    The Best True Crime to Stream: Stories That Are Very Scary, and Real

    Four terrifying, unnerving picks across television, film and podcast.It’s the time of year when I tend to push the boundaries of how many scary stories I can stomach. That includes horror movies, but also, true crime offerings that I may have skipped. Of course, with true crime, that self-soothing mantra of “at least it’s not real” doesn’t apply, which makes it all the more haunting. Here are four picks that shook me to my core.Documentary“Beware the Slenderman”On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wis., Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, then 12 years old, lured their friend and classmate Payton Leutner into a forest and stabbed her 19 times. Weier and Geyser were trying to appease the fictional character Slender Man, a tall, lanky, faceless ghoul and modern-day boogeyman whose image had been disseminated on the Creepypasta Wiki, a horror-centric online forum. The girls believed that if they killed their friend, they would save their families from Slender Man’s wrath and get to live forever in what they called Slender Mansion.This 2016 documentary, directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, uses chilling footage of the girls recounting the precipitating events to police officers hours after the stabbing. And Brodsky spent 18 months with the parents of Weier and Geyser ahead of their trial on charges of attempted first-degree murder.Particularly hard to shake is how Slender Man captivated young people. The character originated from a Photoshop challenge to create convincing paranormal images, then spread to platforms across the web and became the basis of popular online games. In the documentary, mental health experts talk about the role of internet as companion; the abundance of grotesque imagery online; and what I found most disturbing: the concept that a meme with great spreadability is in fact a virus of the mind.Docuseries“John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise”The term “killer clown” would normally send me running for the hills. But I was curious about this 2021 six-episode Peacock docuseries, which is a comprehensive exploration of the crimes committed by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who preyed on boys and men and was sentenced on 33 counts of homicide in 1980. Gacy, who had been a respected and well-connected figure in his Chicago community and who performed for children as Pogo the Clown, was executed at an Illinois prison in 1994.Along with interviews of investigators, a sister of Gacy’s and family members of victims — as well as film of the excavation of his home, under which dozens of bodies were buried — the series includes a great deal of previously unseen footage of a 1992 interview with Gacy by the F.B.I. profiler Robert Ressler, who is credited with creating the term “serial killer.” (For “Mindhunter” fans, Ressler inspired the character of Special Agent Bill Tench.) Most indelible to me is how utterly ordinary and unremarkable Gacy seemed.While serial killers like him have often been too heavily glorified, there is value in not forgetting the systemic failures that allowed such horrors to continue unchecked. Much as they did with the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, the police ignored warnings and pushed aside clues, including pleas from a victim who’d survived, because of entrenched homophobia.Podcast“Dr. Death”: Season 1I decided to binge this 10-episode series on a 12-hour road trip with my dogs. Not even one episode in, I had to pull over and get out of my car for some air. But I persevered, so don’t let that dissuade you.Season 1 of this Wondery podcast, reported and hosted by the science journalist Laura Beil, tells the story of Christopher Duntsch, a young neurosurgeon who arrived in Dallas in 2010 and charmed his patients with confidence and charisma. He claimed that he could cure back pain when nothing else worked. Under his care, which amounted to butchery, over 30 patients were severely injured; two died.As stomach-turning as these accounts are, revelations about how he slipped through the medical system are worse.“In the Dark”: Season 1In 1989, 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped on a dead-end country road in his small Minnesota town, a kidnapping that would fuel an already fast-growing national paranoia: that pedophiles were snatching up America’s children. The search that followed was one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history. Though the investigation was terribly mishandled — as the host Madeleine Baran, an investigative journalist, and a team of reporters make clear over nine episodes and two bonus episodes of this American Public Media podcast (it found a new home at The New Yorker earlier this year).For 27 years, there were no answers, but a couple of weeks before Season 1 was set to debut, in 2016, Wetterling’s remains were discovered, changing everything and taking a story from decades ago and placing it breathlessly in the present. More