It boasts 5,638 subscribers as of this writing, but its readers are probably far more numerous. The subreddit has become a recommended resource for anyone listening to the podcast. One of them is Jacob White, a 34-year-old Broadway stagehand from Queens who moderates the SerialPodcast subreddit under the name Jakeprops. Yet the popularity of the show, which seems to have caught Koenig and her producers (who include This American Life’s Ira Glass) off guard, has brought a lot of people to her little space, making it suddenly crowded. In the podcast, Koenig presents herself as a person who more or less stumbled into these holes, and then got stuck there, turning around and around in the same small bit of rocky, pitted terrain. There are plenty of holes into which a person might fall, sorting these things out. And the motive attributed to Syed, the fury a jilted ex, is both obvious and hollow. Jay is the latter sort of witness, a man who revised his story to the police several times. Witnesses contradict each other and sometimes themselves. Photograph: Meredith Heuer/NPRĪs in every crime, from those simple statements unfurl any number of investigative puzzles. And who are really in prison, or really in danger of ending up in trouble with law enforcement, or even just with their privacy violated, as a result of all this.
Real people who also, as the story unfolds, have Google, Facebook and Reddit accounts. Serial is, after all, not a work of fiction. But in the post-listening haze, as I poked around myself and discovered the social media undergrowth amassing under it, I began to have questions about what I was participating in. And Serial’s listeners have obsessed over it as serial readers have from the age of Dickens right down to True Detective.
Downloads of the show seem to increase each week, reportedly averaging at roughly 850,000 an episode.
That experience with Serial is hardly unique. And then, when I was done, my appetite not quite sated, I satisfied my 21st-century curiosity in a prosaic way: I fired up Google. A dinner with a friend interrupted me and I was palpably impatient, restless, wanting to get back to my listening. I only tuned in once six episodes had aired, but then it became a binge. I fell into Serial, the new podcast that re-investigates a murder, the way they used to say one fell into bankruptcy: slowly, then all at once.
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