Below is The Week’s round-up of the best podcasts of the year so far. If you make a purchase through links on our site, we may earn a commission.
Classy
Jonathan Menjivar’s eight-part podcast “Classy” is a “witty exploratory tour of the unease and shame provoked by differences in social status”, said Jenny McCartney in The Spectator. Menjivar grew up in a working-class Latino family in Southern California, the son of factory workers. But now “the cultural water in which he swims has changed”: he lives on the East Coast, has a job in media, and fears that his taste for expensive cashmere socks makes him look like a “rich asshole”.
His “riveting and occasionally moving” podcast examines how “class discomfort” leads so many of us – rich and poor – to “expend energy on evading negative judgements”. In one episode, Jarvis Cocker, who famously skewered “posh people slumming it” in Pulp’s song Common People, turns up to “talk with endearing honesty about the culture shock of transforming from unemployed Sheffield songwriter to London pop star”.
The Pirate of Prague
Podcasting has become “almost dementedly preoccupied” with scammers, catfishers and the like, said James Marriott in The Times. But even if you feel as if you’ve had enough of the genre, I’d suggest making an exception for “The Pirate of Prague”, about the Czech-born financial fraudster Viktor Kožený.
As a teenager, Kožený faked a talent for physics and “charmed a visiting professor into inviting him to live in America”. He then seduced the professor’s wife, lied his way into Harvard, and schmoozed a job at a London investment bank – the springboard for a career, back in the Czech Republic, in espionage, politics and international financial scams. It’s a gripping tale, told with wit and brio. “Nobody is more jaded by tales of outlandish scams than I am, but ‘The Pirate of Prague’ revived my failing stamina.”
The Second Victim: Daisy’s Story
“I am only alive because a man made the decision to rape a child in his home, and therefore I have lost everything,” explains Daisy, the pseudonymous narrator of “The Second Victim: Daisy’s Story”. We are never told Daisy’s real identity – for good reason, said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times. But her “powerful” podcast is both a “triumph of storytelling and of one woman’s efforts to come to terms with her own story”.
In the eight-part series, Daisy describes her early life as a black child growing up with adoptive white parents in an English village; we then follow her on her quest to find her birth mother, Grace, who was raped, aged 13, by a man whose children she was babysitting. Their first meeting unleashes a torrent of emotions – “anxiety, confusion, validation, isolation” – and signals a switch in the series’ focus from Daisy’s life story to her quest for justice, as the “second victim” of that crime. It is rare to find a podcast “so visceral, intimate and full of emotional complexity”. Available on Audible.
Looking for more podcast recommendations? Take your pick from our round-up of the best true crime and political shows.
Featuring shows on class, fraud and the legacy of a shocking crime
