Show Notes
The satire site The Babylon Bee, a conservative Christian answer to The Onion, stirred controversy when some readers mistook its headlines for misinformation. In this episode, The Atlantic’s religion reporter Emma Green sits down with the editor in chief, Kyle Mann, to talk about where he draws the line between making a joke and doing harm, and to understand what humor can reveal about American politics. Further reading: “Who Would Jesus Mock?” A transcript of this episode is available.
Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at [email protected]. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Julia Longoria, with editing by Emily Botein and Katherine Wells. Fact-check by Michelle Ciarrocca. Sound design by David Herman, with additional engineering by Joe Plourde. Transcription by Caleb Codding.
More from The Experiment
Julia Longoria presents her new series from Vox, Good Robot.
Host Julia Longoria is back with a new season of More Perfect, from WNYC Studios. We’re taught the Supreme Court was designed to be above the fray of politics. But at a time when partisanship seeps into every pore of American life, are the nine justices living up to that promise? More Perfect is a guide to the current moment on the Court. The show brings the highest court of the land down to earth, telling the human dramas at the Court that shape so many aspects of American life — from our religious freedom to our artistic expression, from our reproductive choices to our voice in democracy. In the season trailer, Julia returns to the place where she first fell in love with SCOTUS: high school. Subscribe to the podcast here. Supreme Court archival audio comes from Oyez®, a free law project by Justia and the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School. Support for More Perfect is provided in part by The Smart Family Fund. Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook @moreperfectpodcast, and Twitter @moreperfect.
The Experiment is coming to an end. For our final episode, we contemplate our strange, sometimes beautiful, often frustrating country. We go back to some of the people we met and fell in love with while making the show, and ask them how their version of the American experiment is going. A transcript of this episode is available.
In The Atlantic’s new series How To Start Over, Olga Khazan takes listeners on a journey of reinvention. How To Start Over is your guide to navigating life’s gray areas, whether knowing it’s time to make a career switch, repairing strained family ties, or forging new connections in a post-pandemic world.
Deep in Yellowstone National Park, there’s a glitch in the U.S. Constitution where, technically, you could get away with murder. Lawmakers didn’t seem interested in fixing the problem until Mike Belderrain stumbled into the “Zone of Death” while hunting the biggest elk of his life. In a world with so many preventable deaths, The Experiment documents one attempt to avert disaster. This episode of The Experiment originally ran on February 4, 2021. A transcript of this episode is available.