Hello again. This is Sarah Koenig, back to remind you that our new show, “The Idiot,” is out today. If you read last week’s newsletter you know how excited I am about this one, so I’ll spare you the jumping up and down and just tell you: It’s a five-part series from M. Gessen, the writer, reporter and New York Times Opinion columnist — who also happens to be strangely good at making audio stories. Here’s how M. describes the show. What they don’t say in that video (because no normal person toots their own horn like this), is that M. is a top-notch reporter and unflinching interviewer with a deep well of moral clarity. I’ve appreciated those qualities when I’ve read their books and articles about terrorism or authoritarianism. But I didn’t anticipate how great the results would be when M. turned them on their own family. Because that’s what this show is, a fastidiously reported family story. It’s about a crime committed by M.’s least-favorite cousin, Allen — “a clown, a blowhard, a pompous ass.” M. rolls out this tantalizing résumé within the first couple of minutes of the show: “He would call himself an ‘entrepreneur.’ He started his first business in college: He hired students to ghostwrite papers for other, wealthier students. He went to law school, and got fired from his first job — he later told me that this was because his fine legal mind made the other lawyers insecure. Then he lived in Russia, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, working a series of increasingly shady jobs. In Africa, he was involved with diamonds and worked with an Israeli company that provided security for mining. If someone had set out to write an unlikable international-huckster character, they couldn’t have laid it on any thicker.” M.’s writing sounds effortless when you hear it, but if you looked at the script you’d see no fewer than 12 footnotes in that one paragraph alone. And some of the footnotes are almost as entertaining as the facts they support. I mean, the words “blowhard” and “pompous” are footnoted. With specific examples. Initially, M. figured they could tell this story in one episode. But after talking to many other family members, attending Allen’s trial, and spending endless hours on the phone with Allen from prison (even the morning after M.’s own wedding), they realized their reporting had spilled into multi-episode podcast territory. Over here at Serial Productions, we couldn’t be more pleased. All five episodes of “The Idiot” are out now, wherever you get your podcasts.
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