Recommended listening: If Books Could Kill, a podcast about terrible airport books.
Exciting news for fans of the expanded You’re Wrong Aboutiverse! Michael Hobbes—formerly of the equal parts entertaining and illuminating You’re Wrong About podcast (which he started with Sarah Marshall), currently of the just as excellent, diet-and-wellness-fad-debuking Maintenance Phase (co-hosted with Aubrey Gordon)—has a new podcast with Peter Shamshiri of 5-4 (“a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks”). If that doesn’t sound promising enough, the new podcast, If Books Could Kill, centers around our old friends, books! Specifically, extremely dumb airport books.
In the introduction to episode one, which dives deep into Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s massive best-seller Freakonomics, Hobbes and Shamshiri explain that they’ll be exploring “the dumb books that captured our collective imagination” (or “the books that did to our brains what Jigsaw did to Robin Hood”). Hobbes calls the airport books on which the podcast will focus “the superspreader events of American stupidity,” and Shamshiri describes them as “natural vessel for pseudoscience and fake history.” Every episode will focus on a different book.
Having listened to the first episode, I can wholeheartedly recommend subscribing, and definitely not buying Freakonomics at the airport, no matter how paltry the selection at Hudson News is. I’m just crossing my fingers for an episode on The Secret.
You can find If Books Could Kill here.
