Slow Burn
4.8/5
Critic Rating
Clarence Thomas is one of the most powerful figures in America today. Nearly every issue of national consequence has his fingerprints all over it, from voting rights to gun rights and from abortion access to affirmative action. But nothing about his journey from rural Georgia to the Supreme Court was inevitable.In the eighth season of Slate’s Slow Burn, host Joel Anderson traces Justice Thomas’ surprising path from youthful radical to conservative icon. You’ll hear about why he came to despise the race-based admission policies that personally benefitted him, how he credited his political rise to the Black self-s...
Critic Reviews
Score: 5
Patricia Nicol • The Times UK • Jun 19, 2022
"(Season: Roe V. Wade) A timely and necessary listen. …"
Score: 5
Fiona Sturges • Financial Times • Jun 5, 2022
"(Season: Roe vs. Wade) Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/18942132-72fc-4464-89b4-b6c79b6fad1a Slow Burn doesn’t deal in chronological storytelling, preferring to parachute the listener into different flashpoints in the narrative. In doing so, it cuts straight to the human stories behind big political moments, and shows us how the past informs the present."
Score: 4.9
Nicholas Quah • Vulture • Nov 4, 2021
"(Season 6) Slate’s flagship audio-documentary series continues apace. Slow Burn’s general method is to convey the memory of what it was viscerally like to live through a thick historical moment. The approach falls from one of its core arguments: that the past never really ends, and that the present is abundant with unresolved tensions that echo through time over and over again."
Score: 4.8
Antonia Quirke • New Statesman • Jul 1, 2020
"[Season 4] Each intense episode here is so perfectly calibrated. It’s particularly effective hearing that (David Duke) voice on the radio, of course – disembodied. He might have been behind a white sheet. …"
Score: 4.5
Jake Greenberg • PodcastReview.org • Dec 13, 2019
"[Season 3] The work Slow Burn does to clearly document the Tupac-Biggie relationship makes for an admirable piece of reporting. Season 3 proves that the Slow Burn method, of using the distance of a couple decades to reconsider and reorganize recent history, is amenable, and capable of much more than revisiting the White House. …"
Score: 4.7
Erin Bury • Quill Inc. • Nov 23, 2019
"[Season 1 & 2] If you want a Wikipedia-style overview, this isn’t it. But if you’re like me, and you’ve always wanted to know more about two of the century’s biggest political scandals, then this is well worth the listen."
Score: 5
Fiona Sturges • Financial Times • Aug 18, 2018
"[Season 2] Like its predecessor, the second Slow Burn is an electrifying portrait of a political scandal, full of surreal detail and surprising twists, and made all the more potent when heard in the era of #MeToo."
Score: 5
Andrew Liptak • The Verge • Apr 8, 2018
"[Season 1] While Nixon’s resignation now feels as though it was the logical, natural outcome, Neyfakh paints a far different picture of the four years that followed the Watergate break-in. The efforts to investigate and impeach the president faced almost insurmountable obstacles —including Nixon trying to shut down the investigation while firing people — which have taken on a new resonance in 2018. By focusing on these characters, the show brings a new depth to what listeners know about the scandal, providing tangible examples of the people who worked to push the investigation forward."
Score: 5
Nicholas Quah • Vulture • Jan 11, 2018
"Slow Burn is a dense listen, though it never really feels that way. Slow Burn goes down easy despite its hefty portent. It’s constantly surprising. It’s addictive for the right kind of casual history nerd. It’s smart in its composition. Slow Burn has a pleasantly simple and deliberate construction. It should be noted that Slow Burn isn’t just a solid exercise in the history podcast genre. The project was developed with a more timely concern in mind, which is to ask: How can the past help us understand the present?"
Score: 4
Catherine Nixey • The Times UK • Dec 8, 2017
"[Season 1] History is rarely about the past. More often than not it is the present in costume. And if you are happy with history as parable and paradigm rather than impartial chronicle, then this is corking. Those coiffed women and their swindling men are riveting."
