5 Podcasts Where Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

There’s an overwhelming amount of news to keep up with right now, and it can sometimes feel impossible to look away or take a break. Getting absorbed in a truly compelling story can be a great antidote to doom-scrolling, and if focusing on fiction isn’t working, you can try a crazy-yet-true audio narrative.

These five shows all center on stories so shocking, unbelievable and full of twists that it’s hard to believe they’re nonfiction.

‘Noble’

“It takes 28 gallons of fuel, and a spark, to burn a human body.” So begins the attention-grabbing opening to “Noble,” which describes the process of cremation in grueling detail to set up the story about to unfold. In February of 2002, investigators acting on an anonymous tip discovered a pile of more than 300 corpses abandoned in a wooded area of Noble, Ga., a tiny rural town in the Appalachian foothills. This horror movie scene was found on the grounds of the Tri-State Crematory; it turned out that the owner had been improperly disposing of bodies for years, while assuring grieving families that their loved ones had been cremated.

In a sensitive eight-part series, Shaun Raviv, an Atlanta-based journalist who has written for Wired and The Washington Post, unravels the emotional and legal details of this disturbing saga through interviews with investigators, experts and family members. Noble also uses this singular story as a jumping-off point to explore deeper questions about what the living owe the departed, and our ambivalent relationship to death.

Starter episode: “The Gas Man”

‘Sold a Story’

For decades, a staggering number of top-rated primary schools across the country have failed to effectively teach children how to read. That sounds like it can’t possibly be true, and yet over 13 detailed episodes, this American Public Media podcast lays out how a deeply flawed teaching method took hold despite having been widely debunked by cognitive scientists.

This approach (known as the “whole language” method) encourages children to decode words by understanding the overall meaning of a text rather than learning words by sounding them out (known as phonics), and the conflict between the two sides is so fraught that it’s been called “The Reading Wars,” and demands for reform have mounted nationwide. In “Sold a Story,” Emily Hanford speaks with educators, linguistics experts and parents to weave together an exposé of this systemic failure and its ramifications for children.