![]() And particularly since 2014’s wildly popular Serial, the podcast has become a narrative about how we make narratives rather than about how narratives resolve. It seamlessly blends the art of storytelling with the communication of facts. Podcast journalism is unabashed narrative journalism. Its episodic segments create meaning by selecting, spotlighting, and ordering particular subplots and their myriad characters, prodding listeners to acknowledge both the multiplicity of connections and the informational gaps across the segmented narrative while refusing to wrap it all up with a tidy ending. In fact, the podcast form denies closure as much as the war itself does. It is of its time, a serial literary form that encapsulates post-9/11 life in a particularly post-9/11 narrative style. As with forever war, a podcast is an unwieldy beast, an aural deluge of information that if poorly managed threatens to overwhelm. ![]() ![]() The podcast, a form of narration born in 2004, just one year after the initial burst of American post-9/11 fervour fuelled the invasion of Iraq, is a fitting form to hold the complex, myriad details of the decisions leading to the Iraq War. It is a lot of story-maybe even a forever story-not only because it must communicate an overwhelming amount of information about an event that has not yet ended, but also because it is the story about ourselves that Americans must compulsively return to, retelling it again and again in an effort to make sense of the imbroglio that has defined the United States for the last twenty years. Everyone did it.” Telling the story of forever wars requires a long cast list. “At some point,” host Noreen Malone muses in episode four of Slate’s 2021 Slow Burn season on The Road to the Iraq War, “I started to think war in Iraq was like Murder on the Orient Express.
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