What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/1328956
and Kaitlin feels compelled to investigate. Each episode focuses on a different passenger and a different theory, most of them fairly unlikely. Planes typically crash for ordinary reasons, not outlandish ones. (Even more outlandish: Did Atlantic 702 really crash at all?) But the episodes, written and directed by John Scott Dryden and Lauren Shippen, have their own propulsion. And the voice talent is strong, particularly Tran, who grounds the narrative even as Kaitlin spirals. Stay in your seat through Episode 4, when the all-knowing Patti LuPone guests as a psychic. — Alexis Soloski 'Appearances' You don't need a label (serialized auto fiction? audio memoir? one- woman show?) to become absorbed into the world of this singular 10-part series, created and performed by Sharon Mashihi in collaboration with "The Heart" creator, Kaitlin Prest. Mashihi plays Melanie, a nominally fictionalized version of herself, who is 35 and wants to have a baby. There are obstacles — Melanie is single(ish), a source of shame in her close-knit, traditional Iranian family — and the show deposits you in her head as she tries to think and feel her way toward some version of a happy ending. If "Appearances" were only Melanie's story, it would be intriguing enough; Mashihi's fearless narration and immersive sound editing cast a spell. But it's her earnest efforts to inhabit her family's perspective, as in a heartbreaking episode told entirely in the voice of Melanie's mother (also played by Mashihi), that yield the show's greatest triumphs. — Reggie Ugwu 'Octavia's Parables' At some point in the past year, I drew a hard boundary around my news intake, but I still needed a way to process all the grief, and upheaval and uprisings, the endless death and devastation. "Octavia's Parables" became my comfort audio feed. Led by Adrienne Maree Brown and Toshi Reagon, two thoughtful scholars of Black science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, each episode dissects a chapter of her Parable of the Sower series, which outlines a disturbingly familiar dystopian world ravaged by greed, capitalism and illness. Reagon and her mother, renowned musician Bernice Johnson Reagon, created a rock opera for the books, and the stellar music is layered throughout. Butler died before she finished the planned trilogy — her fans think we're collectively writing the third book now — and decoding the map she left for us to navigate an apocalypse has felt like the only grounding way to spend time when all else felt too bleak. — Jenn Wortham 'Goodbye to All This' This utterly transporting audio memoir by Australian radio producer and novelist Sophie Townsend is so fully and seamlessly realized that you'll wonder why there aren't dozens more like it. Maybe now there will be. But there's only one Townsend, and the story she tells, about what happened when she learned that her husband, the father of her two young daughters, was dying of cancer, is the kind that could take a lifetime to cohere. Townsend, nine years removed from the events of the narrative, recounts them with a painterly attention to texture and detail. Vividly remembered scenes unfold with the help of atmospheric sound design — the din of a coffee shop, footsteps on a hospital floor — that complements her narration without distracting from it. Throughout, Townsend's delicate voice remains front and center, its willfully unwavering timbre hinting at an inner tumult words can't describe. — Reggie Ugwu 'My Year in Mensa' It started as a joke. In 2018, comedian Jamie Loftus tested into Mensa, the high IQ society, just so she could write an article about it called "Good News, They Let Dumb Sluts Into Mensa Now." "I, a dumb slut, have been admitted to Mensa, a virginal organization created by English barristers for people who only want to hang out with other virgins," she wrote. This upset members of Firehouse, a Mensa Facebook group, some of whom threatened violence. A year later, Loftus went to Mensa's annual gathering in Phoenix to meet them. Then she made a four-episode podcast about it. Come for the glib self-owns, the vuvuzela as punctuation, the hotel suite toga parties. Stay for the history of intelligence tests as a deeply racist enterprise and the thorny, unresolved examination of the disparities between the selves we present online and off. — Alexis Soloski LIKE our Facebook page before 11:59 pm this Tuesday, Jan. 19 to be entered to win: 2 FREE 1-Hour Passes to Branson Big Air Trampoline Park Go to: facebook.com/BestBranson Like The Best of Branson on Facebook for a chance to win some Really Great Prizes! (Passes good Monday-Thursday) This week's Prize: New contest each week! facebook.com/BestBranson JANUARY 17-23, 2021 WHAT'S UP! 41 PODCASTS Podcasts Continued From Page 38