If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I am really, really interested in drugs. I read Patrick Radden Keefe’s earlier this year after it spent way too long on my “to read” pile, and found its tale of the rise and rise of the Sackler opioid dynasty genuinely terrifying (though isn’t artist turned Oxy campaigner Nan Goldin ?). Naturally, I got stuck into this week – a new miniseries from the Atlantic – about “the pills we take for our brains and the stories we tell ourselves about them”.
It’s sensitively made, but scary, as much of this stuff is; the tale of two siblings who found themselves on the same treatment for heroin addiction, but whose lives took very different paths, will stay with me for a while. As with Dan Taberski’s recent series , about a group of young girls who developed Tourettes-like symptoms in tandem, there are real characters in here dealing with some very difficult ailments, but we’re also never far away from bigger questions about how we think about mental health and selfhood. Read on for our picks of the week, from scammer dads to a gritty Paralympics pod, and five of the best podcasts for fans of classic movies – from old Hollywood hits to Hammer horror history.
Comedian Gary Vider hasn’t spoken to his con artist dad in 24 years, after a childhood in which he made him pose as a young journalist to blag his way into Michael Jordan’s locker room (above), and helped him photocopy dollar bills for school lu.