[MrMastodonFarm]

After CBC's cancellation of Wiretap Jonatahn Goldstein is back with Heavyweight. Listened to the first three episodes and it's a brilliant podcast. #3 Tara is particularly moving and seems personal for Goldstein.
https://www.ft.com/content/98877c0a-...7-e7ada1d123b1

If Heavyweight, the new US podcast hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, tells us anything, it’s that grudges shouldn’t be left to fester. The show, commissioned by Gimlet Media, home of StartUp and Reply All, is about identifying the moment when human relationships go wrong. So far no fights have broken out, though hearing the testimonies of the bitter and broken-hearted is, for the listener, a bit like being punched in the gut.

In the latest episode Goldstein recalls a video made by a fellow student at his art college that has haunted him ever since. Made in the late 1980s, the film was called Anger and featured the stories of young punks, warring couples and people plotting revenge. At the time Goldstein had been struck by a woman who cried as she described the experience of being “intersex”, and by the little girl who sat next to her, staring blankly into the camera as her mother sobbed. “She sits there as though absorbing radiation,” says Goldstein. He wanted to know what had happened to her.

Goldstein is a former producer on This American Life, the wellspring from which scores of brilliant podcasts have emerged, and the presenter of the now-defunct WireTap, a critically adored show on Canada’s CBC radio network.

There are similarities here to WireTap, specifically in Goldstein’s archly charismatic delivery and his reliance on friends and family as subject matter. But while on that show the suspicion lingered that the contributors could be actors, there’s no sign of artifice here. Heavyweight depends on Goldstein’s personal connection to his subjects and his directness as an interviewer. He is, it seems, impervious to discomfort — Louis Theroux without the gaucheness.