Listening Assignment: Foretold

It's a short edition today, and I'm sending you away with some homework

Hello, all you Bingeworthy readers! Thanks again for your support of this newsletter.

Whether you’re on a camping trip, trying to stay cool in some baking-hot portion of Europe, shuttling kids to and from day camp or being evacuated from forest fires (like my friends in Behchokǫ̀, NWT), summer is partly about taking it down a notch.

Or at least trying to.

I’m still trying to achieve the “reading novels again” portion of the summer, so in an effort to get back to that moment, this week’s edition is short, and it includes a listening assignment.

Have you listened to this series from the LA Times yet?

Next week, we will take a long swim through the podcast series Foretold, including some juicy back story from the creator Faith Pinho, and the Executive Producer, Jazmín Aguilera, who sat down to a Zoom interview with me a couple of weeks ago.

Whether you’re on an actual road trip and need something to listen to, or you’re looking for a virtual road trip, go find Foretold. It’s a journey into the world of fortune-telling, Romani-American culture, and an illustrated guide about how to drastically change your life.

But then I’m going to suggest you spend extra time and attention listening to Episode 7, A Prism. Because that’s where this whole series comes together in a very interesting way.

If you watched Inventing Ana, the Ana Delvy story, or you listened to the BBC 4 dramatized podcast Fake Heiress, you know the back story to my questions.

What does a journalist do when she hits a moment of reckoning?

• Is this story real?

• Is my source telling the truth?

• How do I tell this story now?

This episode got me thinking all about how we tell stories after that dreaded moment, the same one that sparks fear in every journalist's heart.

Have a great week, which hopefully includes some listening, and maybe even some novel-reading.