Benjamin Cannon

However, as a listener with a critical ear, the only true-crime podcasts worth their salt are the ones which turn that maxim on its head, spending all their time in the morass of the legal system and taking a distinctly human approach to their subjects. And, for my money, there are few shows that have better exemplified this than Empire On Blood, the 2018 podcast chronicling inmate Calvin Buari’s yearslong quest to have his life sentence for a double homicide overturned.

With Podcast Canon, Benjamin Cannon analyzes the history of podcasts and interrogates how we talk about the art form. Since 2014, I’ve paid close attention to podcasts for this publication, but that has largely been through a skeptic’s gaze. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a bona fide narrative audio freak, but I’ve begun to realize that my love of the medium is in spite of itself, not because of it.

With Podcast Canon, Benjamin Cannon analyzes the history of podcasts and interrogates how we talk about the art form. In December of 1995, Your Radio Playhouse broadcast its first episode on Chicago’s NPR affiliate station WBEZ. Though it wasn’t long for this world—by the following year, after just 16 episodes, it would disappear with a startling completeness—Your Radio Playhouse would become perhaps the most important show in the history of modern audio storytelling.