July podcast picks: the Olympics, camping and children’s shows
Featuring Blind Landing, Fogo: Fear of Going Outside, Fun Kids, Wild Crimes and more

Spotify’s terrific Human Resources podcast explores the formative role of slavery in shaping various aspects of British life – from our buildings and cultural institutions to what we eat and drink, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. In recent weeks the series has looked at subjects including Robert Peel, the origins of the Greene King brewery, and how Liverpool is “grappling with its slave-trading past”.
The presenter is the journalist and author Moya Lothian-McLean, who grew up in Herefordshire, the daughter of a white British mother and a black Caribbean father. She’s an “engaging” presenter, with a knack for conducting nuanced and illuminating interviews that make us reconsider our assumptions. Any teenagers frustrated by the way they’re taught history at school “should try Human Resources for another approach”.
Much has been written and said about the US pop star Britney Spears, and the “extraordinary legal conservatorship” that has controlled her life since 2008. Even so, a gripping new podcast on the subject is well worth a listen, said Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times. The “sharp-witted” eight-part BBC documentary Pieces of Britney shot to the top of the download charts when it was released at the start of the month.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Writer and presenter Pandora Sykes begins the “riveting, troubling” tale in 2008, then winds back to chart Spears’s rise to fame from “hardscrabble Louisiana childhood to being the pop princess of post-Aids, post-Clinton America, to a humiliated, silenced woman funding her own sequestration”. Sykes “makes a compelling moral case” for the story’s importance. My only caveat: the dramatised vignettes of scenes from Spears’s life are “toe-curling”, with the actors “sounding like interlopers from a Tennessee Williams play”.
The US blues pioneer Harry Pace made a “huge contribution to US culture – then seemingly vanished”, said Fiona Sturges in the FT. An outstanding new podcast from WNYC, the makers of the acclaimed 2019 series Dolly Parton’s America, asks how and why it happened.
A hundred years ago Pace, a young African-American businessman, started Black Swan, a groundbreaking record label featuring only black artists, and with Ethel Waters’s Down Home Blues transformed American music. But within two years, white rivals had squeezed him out of business. Pace sold up, left the music industry and retrained as a lawyer.
Like the Parton series, The Vanishing of Harry Pace “documents one person’s rise while telling a broader story about society and culture”. This five-part series “is rich in detail and immaculately produced and researched. The narrative rarely ends up where you think it will and provides a masterclass in storytelling.”
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Groypers: the alt-right group pulled into the foreground
The Explainer The network is led by alt-right activist Nick Fuentes
-
10 concert tours to see this upcoming fall
The Week Recommends Concert tour season isn't over. Check out these headliners.
-
How to put student loan payments on pause
The Explainer If you are starting to worry about missing payments, deferment and forbearance can help
-
A tour of Sri Lanka’s beautiful north
The Week Recommends ‘Less frenetic’ than the south, this region is full of beautiful wildlife, historical sites and resorts
-
Giorgio Armani obituary: designer revolutionised the business of fashion
In the Spotlight ‘King Giorgio’ came from humble beginnings to become a titan of the fashion industry and redefine 20th century clothing
-
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale – a ‘comfort’ watch for fans
The Week Recommends The final film of the franchise gives viewers a chance to say goodbye
-
The Paper: new show, same 'warmth and goofiness'
The Week Recommends This spin-off of the American version of The Office is ‘comfortingly and wearyingly familiar’
-
Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons – ‘riotously colourful’ works from an ‘exhilarating’ painter
The Week Recommends The 34-year-old is the first artist to take over Dulwich Picture Gallery’s main space
-
Born With Teeth: ‘mischievously provocative’ play starring Ncuti Gatwa
The Week Recommends ‘Sprightly’ production from Liz Duffy Adams imagines the relationship between Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe
-
Art review: Lorna Simpson: Source Notes
Feature Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, through Nov. 2
-
Jessica Francis Kane's 6 favorite books that prove less is more
Feature The author recommends works by Penelope Fitzgerald, Marie-Helene Bertino, and more