When I pressed play, I was pleasantly surprised. This podcast reminds me a lot of Radiolab, an NPR science podcast I love and listen to regularly, and I didn't realise that there were any other radio shows that were set up in quite the same way. I may have to start regularly listening to this one as well.
I had heard of Cindy Sherman and her movie stills before, and if that happened to me at one of her shows, I would have no idea what to think. I thought Cindy Sherman's reaction to hearing what had happened to the hosts was interesting. She seemed to have some respect for this woman because, more or less, this woman was doing the same thing that Cindy does in her work, pretending to be someone else. This seems like a fairly inconsequential masquerade, unlike some of the other instances of pretenders talked about later in the episode.
The second story, about the man who was lonely after a breakup and pretended to be the person strangers in a cafe had agreed to meet up with just so he could talk to someone, really does remind me of something I would hear on Radiolab. It's not farfetched, but it's an odd response to being lonely. You can't really make friends if you're pretending to be someone else, and in the long run, friends are what someone lonely needs, or else the loneliness is not going to go away. If he were himself, however, he might have a chance of making some kind of lasting relationship with new people he meets, and therefore the problem might eventually not be a problem anymore. There would be a sense of power though, and simultaneous powerlessness, I think, in pretending to be the person these people are expecting, because you can meet such different people, and, as the character in the story was able to do, make these people nervous and respectful of you by manipulating their apparent situation. But at the same time, there is powerlessness in not knowing anything about them and having to improvise your way through the meeting, hoping you don't get yourself in trouble by picking up a wrong clue from context.
I think the journalistic piece was more about the merits of hyperlocal vs. local vs. outsourced journalism than the assumption of a fake identity, though the company was not entirely transparent about how they were operating, even to its employees. There are upsides and downsides to what the company does, and upsides and downsides to its opacity. Like the journalist who was interviewed said, it feels wrong, and the people who are being paid to type up these stories are not reporting properly because they're not invested in what they're reporting or who they're reporting it to. Like the founder of the company said, it's a good way to get the backlogged stories out of the way so that real, local journalists can take on the more important stories and be invested in the stories and their audiences. The company may not want to reveal its sources because people will have opinions about whether or not what they're doing is wrong and especially deceptive. But they may want to, because then at least no one can accuse them of being dishonest.
The piece by Jackie Clark about her step mother and father illustrates a much more consequential instance, not necessarily of a false identity, but of not disclosing the whole truth about yourself. I know about something similar that happened to a close friend of mine, but I will not divulge details because they are not my business to divulge. For a while though, it becomes unclear what sort of relationship you're supposed to have with this person who was so close to you for so long but had another side you didn't know about. I can understand why Clark did not write off her father right away. He was her father, she couldn't instantly stop loving him. I'm relieved that instead of being hurt and not wanting to talk to him at all, she at least considered the possibility that there was some very understandable cause that led him to pursue this secret relationship and keep it a lie from his wife and children.
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