5 illuminating podcasts you may have missed this winter

Between wrapping up last year and kicking off this one, winter debuted several podcasts to help listeners get through the colder months. From a look at Elon Musk's history with espionage to an in-depth dive at how psychiatry could go awry, here are a few podcasts you might have missed.

'Cement City' (Audacy)

This 10-part documentary podcast made a splash last year. In an attempt to discover what is "ailing small towns in America's one-time manufacturing hubs," host-journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas and producer Erin Anderson picked one and moved there, said The New York Times. After three years of living in and reporting from Donora, Pennsylvania, the pair produced this "extraordinarily immersive portrait of day-to-day life in a troubled but irreducibly vibrant community." (Audacy, Apple Podcasts or Spotify)

'Elon's Spies' (Tortoise Media)

Sometimes, the best shows are short and sweet, a la "Elon's Spies" from the British company Tortoise Media. In a mere three episodes, the show delivers "a wealth of detailed investigation" about the czar of government efficiency, "all of it involving Elon Musk's use of private investigators to help him harass his perceived enemies," said The New Yorker. With Musk dominating the news cycle, now is fine time to revisit this gem, where host Alexi Mostrous illuminates some of Musk's stalkerish antics. They include the "pedo guy" saga, in which "Musk publicly insulted a diver who rescued a youth soccer team from an underwater cave," and an "apparent public-humiliation gambit targeting Musk's former girlfriend Amber Heard." (Tortoise Media, Apple Podcasts or Spotify)

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

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.

Sign up

'Embedded: Alternate Realities' (NPR)

The latest season of NPR's "Embedded" focuses on the relationship between radio producer Zach Mack and his aging father who believes in "conspiracy theories like terrorist immigrants, electromagnetic pulses, societal collapse, etc.," said Vulture. Sometime last year, Mack bet his father $10,000 that none of his " doomsday predictions" would occur by the year's end. The bet is both a "playful put-up-or-shut-up proposal" and a "quietly desperate piece of outreach from a son trying his best to see if his father can be retrieved from a kind of madness that's all too familiar today."

The resulting three-part series is "as gorgeous as it is painful," and what emerges is "both a gripping portrait of a family in crisis and a meditation on what it means to exist in a world where we truly aren't able to live with each other." (NPR, Apple Podcasts or Spotify)

'Bad Therapist' (Independent)

At a time when therapy speak has spilled from clinical settings to the mainstream, "Bad Therapist" reminds us that not all therapists are created equal. Hosted by psychotherapist Ash Compton and journalist Rachel Monroe, this show delves into centuries of bad actors infiltrating the world of psychotherapy. Operating as a "response to the contemporary rise of therapy and therapy-speak as a cultural aesthetic as opposed to a scientifically driven discipline," each episode sees the pair "interrogate different expressions of therapy gone wrong: scammers, self-proclaimed gurus and conversion therapy," said Vulture. (Apple Podcasts or Spotify)

'Scam Inc.' (The Economist)

This new podcast series is a "shocking look at transnational organised crime," The Economist said, which is "nearly as big as the illegal-drug trade and far more sophisticated than you might think." "Scam Inc" is hosted by Sue-Lin Wong, The Economist's Southeast Asia correspondent and host of "The Prince", an award-winning series about China's leader, Xi Jinping. The new series explores the sophisticated billion-dollar industry of online scams. Wong traces the story from the collapse of a bank in rural Kansas to networks of scam compounds in Southeast Asia where people are subject to inhumane conditions. Of all the coverage on the subject, The Economist series stands out for its "more sweeping scope and its ability to illustrate a network of depraved systems with greater accessibility," said Vulture. (The Economist, Apple Podcasts or Spotify)