Perhaps that’s not a sticky enough pitch for advertisers.īut I shouldn’t be a stickler for categories. At heart, Being Trans feels like a more specific evolution of the Radio Diaries concept: blown-up audio diaries that provide vivid windows into the ordinariness of extraordinary lives. One could argue that it harkens back to the earlier forms of the genre, a la 1971’s An American Family or the initial seasons of MTV’s Real World, or perhaps is more contiguous with the chiller Asian varieties, like Terrace House, but the fact of the matter is that the pitch feels imprecise within the contemporary Western context. The reality television framing simultaneously oversells and undersells Being Trans, mostly because the popular conception “reality television” these days is ultimately quite far from what the podcast actually delivers. (Relatedly, of all the podcast studios, Parcast is probably the best candidate to go full hog with the “reality television, but podcasting” framework, given its basic cable style and furious pace of production.) This is Dating comes to mind, along with its genre brethren LoveSick, from House of Pod, and Blind Dating, from Parcast. There are at least two other podcasts coming out this summer that attempt to position itself as an audio-first take on reality television, and meaningful efforts around the idea can already be found in podcast directories everywhere, especially in the relationships space. I’ve seen this concept pop up more lately. Produced by Lemonada Media ( Add to Cart, Believe Her) via its new sub-brand Being Studios, the show is being promoted as innovation in form - “reality television” meets podcasting, a framing that was central to a recent New York Times write-up about the production. As it says on the tin, the show is an effort to capture and present the day-to-day experiences of trans individuals as they go about their lives, and the debut season focuses on four such individuals who reside in Los Angeles: Sy-Clarke Chan, a nonbinary legal assistant Chloe Corcoran, a university administrator who’s a trans woman Jeffrey Jay, a standup comedian and a trans man and Mariana Marroquin, a trans woman originally from Guatemala. Robert Evans speaks at Powell’s City of Books tonight, Tuesday May 3, at 7 pm.There’s a lot packed into each episode of Being Trans, a new spin on an old idea that’s admirable for what it’s trying to do. Other authors have spilled a lot of ink over America’s internal contradictions, but After the Revolution is unique in its gusto. Dudes kill other dudes and then even more chaos ensues. This is the type of novel where nudist cyborg super-soldiers ride robot horses into battle against bloodthirsty theocrats. The political situation of After the Revolution is meaningful not in the abstract, but for the immediate, personal experience the novel situates us with.Īnd the book moves. He does not simply info dump about the state of his fictional world, he makes it real and felt for the people the reader follows, and that makes the politics of the world feel more alive than any kind of sermonizing would. Evans also clearly has a political and philosophical point of view, and he mostly expresses it via empathy for his characters and their experiences. However, Evans uses these basic types well, like a talented chef making a nicely-executed grilled cheese sandwich. Unlike those other authors, though, Evans makes his point with cyborgs, drugs, and over-the-top military hardware. This supposedly unified nation contains irreconcilable contradictions, and there’s a whole lot more e pluribus than there is unum. Like Callenbach, Garreau, and Woodard, Evans argues that some parts of the US are, simply, fundamentally different from each other. Colin Woodard made a very similar argument in his 2012 book, American Nations, which posited that the US is divided by culture, religion, and political ideology.Īfter the Revolution (AK Press) is journalist and podcaster Robert Evans’ attempt at carving up the American map. In 1981, journalist Joel Garreau argued that the US was several different nations stitched together in his book, The Nine Nations of North America. Ernest Callenbach did it in 1975 with Ecotopia, a novel about the Pacific Northwest seceding from the rest of the country. Speculating about how the US will crack apart is a cottage industry for sci-fi authors and political commentators.
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