The Chinatown Sting

Lidia Jean's been working on a new project — Examined: The Backfire Effect. It asks what happens when a system decides it already has an answer, when admitting a mistake feels harder than living with one, and when closing a case starts to matter more than getting it right. Examined: The Backfire Effect tells the story of Scott Macklem’s death, a murder that happened nearly 40 years ago in the parking lot of a community college in Michigan. The police quickly found their suspect. There was just one problem: The man they claimed did it was nowhere near the scene of the crime, and he had the alibi to back it up. Host Josie Duffy Rice — a journalist, former lawyer, and expert in the criminal legal system — tells a story of how justice and prosecutorial misconduct works in America, and why sometimes a case is about much more than innocence versus guilt.  Find more episodes of Examined: The Backfire Effect wherever you get podcasts. Binge the full series now with a Pushkin+ subscription — sign up on the Examined Apple show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In February 2024, celebrated children’s book author and illustrator Petra Mathers and her husband, photographer Michael Mathers, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Petra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy, and deeply in love. As much a love story as one about death, it begs the question: what did that decision do to the people left to mourn them? In season 3 of Death of an Artist, journalists Leon Neyfakh and Alice Gregory set out to interview everyone who got one of Petra and Michael’s letters—as one married couple trying to understand another. Told through intimate conversations with Petra and Michael’s friends and family about their own relationships to aging, grief, death, and the friends they thought they knew, Death of an Artist weaves together a portrait of a community grappling with the Mathers’ deaths and the final words they left behind. Search for Death of an Artist wherever you get podcasts. And get early, ad-free access to the entire season now by subscribing to Pushkin+ on the Apple Podcasts show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.