If you're looking for podcasts about strange stuff happening in small towns (and you've already listened to S-Town and taken an audio tour of Woodstock, Alabama) then you can't do better than these two:
1) Hysterical . . . this one investigates a spate of oddball symptoms-- tics, verbal outbursts, twitching, spasms-- that spread virally through the girls in an upstate New York high school in the town of LeRoy-- and the question is: was this mass hysteria, otherwise known as conversion disorder? or was it due to toxic chemicals or something environmental? a great one if you love The Crucible and the Salem Witch trials;
2) Cement City . . . two journalists stumble into a dying Pennsylvania town-- Donara, home to the Donara Smog Museum, which memorializes the Donora Smog of 1948, an air inversion containing fluorine that killed twenty people-- and they buy a house? a house made completely of concrete? and they get caught up in town politics and what it's like to live in a place with no bank, no grocery store, and no school, but a whole lot of camaraderie;
and while I recognize that these podcasts are presenting a very thin sliver of what it's like to live in a place that does NOT feel like it's the center of the world, and these podcasters have cherry-picked extremely interesting narratives of truly oddball events and these small towns just happen to be the setting, it's still really interesting to inhabit places like these, places that I will probably never truly understand, because I live in a fast-paced, densely populated, and expensive region of the country, with all the amenities and conveniences and ethnic restaurants and parks and high-end grocery stores and sky-high real-estate prices and even if I were to move to an out of the way rural kind of place, I'd never be able to pass as a local . . . you can take the guy out of Jersey, but you can't take the Jersey out of the guy.
5 comments:
okay, some fact checking. while it's definitely on the decline (the population has decreased by some 60% since its heyday in the 60s) donora (with two o's, not two a's) isn't the middle of nowhere. it's only 20 miles south of pittsburgh. ken griffey, jr and stan musial were donorites! and while it's true there's no grocery in donora proper, there's a lovely foodland just across the river in monessen. this has been 'today in donora'. we now return you to your regularly scheduled sentence.
metaphorically in the middle of nowhere?
It’s right on the banks of the Manongahela! East Brunswick is more in the the middle of nowhere.
fact checking the fact checker, episode three claims donara is 30 miles from pittsburgh with no good way to drive there, so essentially isolated
it's still spelled donora, despite your efforts to the contrary
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