Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

xp, it's only barely in my backyard. Being in civil litigation, and in a field where most stuff either settles or gets thrown out, the burdens of demonstrating "truth" are SOOOO much lighter than in a criminal prosecution. I mean your standard to begin with is preponderance of the evidence or similar, rather than reasonable doubt, and then you don't often get to trial anyway. But I certainly relate to the feeling of having a bunch of complex facts before you, knowing that you only have the tip of the iceberg and may never even get to see the rest of the iceberg, and being like "yeah, could be x happened, could be y happened, no way to be sure."

Like you can work on something for a few years, dig though tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, depose a bunch of people, and at the end of it you've barely pierced the shroud.

Serial's got a little bit of Zodiac in it.
The more info that gets pulled in, the less clear it ultimately is.
Even something that should be so simple like: "Was there a phone booth in front of the Best Buy?" ends up unanswerable.

"Pull the phone booth records from all Best Buys 1997-2002. ENHANCE!"

Is it answerable tho

apparently not - but i would have thought bell would have kept some records on locations of payphones

if "the girl who shoplifted there 15 years ago" is brought in as an expert you have to wonder

It might be the kind of thing that gets destroyed after a while, or it might be that she just couldn't get whoever has the records to go through the trouble of digging them up, IDK. Does she specify why she couldn't get a record of it? I forget now.

Yeah the whole "I would know because I used to shoplift" thing was sooooo worthless.

yeah it's funny though if you view the podcast as being a meditation on truth more than being about a murder

It's more about memory and gossip than the nature of truth.

Unrelated to whether I think he did it or not, the most striking moment of the whole show for me so far is when he says that now as a more religious person he thinks that he might be responsible for his own fate basically implying that he wasn't living as a good muslim and this is god's punishment or something, only he can't even come out and just say it, and there's this very heavy pause, and it's like the first time you really hear him drop his chill demeanor. It didn't necessarily make me think it was more or less likely that he did it (it could just as easily be taken at face value or as a masked way of expressing guilt about the crime if he committed it imo) but regardless it was surprising.

I guess not the first time, there's also the part where he gets angry about the "you're a nice guy" comment.

That moment just seemed super-real to me. I have known so many latter-day Muslims who fucked around in their youth, are dissatisfied with their lives, and try to draw some causal connection between the two to help make sense of it. Not that most of those people are currently in jail for murder. But in that moment Adnan reminded me of no one so much as my sister. (In fact, she told me that part of the episode made her cry.) I'm not saying that means he didn't murder Hae, but that moment was legible to me as something else.

by fucked around, I mean smoked weed and had sex btw, not killed people.

This guy does a really good SK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muqaQfk_gVw

'Mail Kimp' is my favorite current in-joke.

I'm partial to the guy who says "use a male chimp"

i like the "delivering hi-fives" guy

Unconvinced by the person who actually uses Mail Chimp. Unconvinced anyone actually uses Mail Chimp.

wtf IS Mail Chimp?

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.