The Chinatown Sting

Here's a preview from a show we think you'll enjoy, Agent Layla.

When she was 20 years old, something terrible happened to Vienna Luke. And for more than a decade, the truth of that night remains buried. But when Vienna becomes a mother, she realizes she must confront the past and uncover the truth – whatever the consequences for her family. Her sister Shawnessy comes aboard in the role of dogged detective and Vienna plays the secret agent in a relentless search for answers and justice. Personally: Agent Layla is a gripping true story about memory, family and how far one woman must go to set the record straight. Hosted by Jodie Martinson. 

About Personally: Get lost in someone else’s life. From a mysterious childhood spent on the run, to a courageous escape from domestic violence, each season of Personally invites you to explore the human experience in all its complexity, one story — or season — at a time. This is what it sounds like to be human.

More episodes of Agent Layla are available wherever you get your podcasts, and here.

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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.

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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.

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Deep Cover's new season, The Family Man, tells a story about how families can deceive each other and the lengths we’ll go to to protect our loved ones Elise and Marissa grew up in a seemingly normal house in the suburbs of St. Louis, but it was a house built on secrets. There were things their father never told them—like how he really made his money. One night, the police showed up, raided their house, and seized boxes of evidence. Hours later, the sisters turned on the TV and saw something surreal: their father in the middle of a police chase. The local news identified him as “The Boonie Hat Bandit”. The girls were stunned. They struggled to accept the truth: Dad had been living a double life. How long had he been lying to them?  What had he done?  And who, exactly, was their father?

Find Deep Cover: The Family Man wherever you get podcasts. If you want to know how the story ends right now, binge the full season by signing up for a Pushkin+ subscriptions on the Deep Cover show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus. 

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Here’s an excerpt from a new Pushkin audiobook, The Pain of Others by Miguel Ángel Hernández. In a quiet town in the Spanish countryside, Miguel Ángel Hernández’s best friend murdered his sister and took his own life by jumping off a cliff. No one ever knew why. The investigation was closed, and the crime forgotten. Twenty years later, when time has dulled the shock but not the questions, Miguel returns home, putting himself in the shoes of a detective, in an attempt to reconstruct the tragic night that marked the end of his adolescence. But the investigation will awaken ghosts that he thought he had left behind: a childhood marked by sin and guilt; the constant presence of illness and death; the oppressive, closed world from which he managed to escape. Based on true events, The Pain of Others is a chilling audiobook that blends police thriller, investigative reporting, and literary suspense—an unflinching reckoning with violence, memory, and the question that still haunts the author: Did he fail to see the warning signs that his best friend was capable of this horrific crime?

Find The Pain of Others on Audible, Spotify, pushkin.fm/audiobooks or wherever you get audiobooks.

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Here's a preview of a podcast we think you'll enjoy, Bad Women Presents Stolen Sister, a special limited series from RTÉ. The story of Elizabeth Plunkett – a 23 year old woman from Dublin who was murdered by Ireland’s first serial killers. On the last weekend of summer in 1976 Elizabeth Plunkett went on a night away with friends, to Brittas Bay in county Wicklow before she was abducted by John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans. Now, almost 50 years later, Elizabeth’s family are finally trying to get their sister some justice.

Binge all episodes of Bad Women Presents Stolen Sister early and ad-free with a Pushkin+ subscription. Sign up at pushkin.fm/plus or on the Bad Women Presents Stolen Sister show page on Apple Podcasts. 

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Streamed by millions every day, porn is everywhere. It shapes our culture, our relationships, and even technology. Yet, nobody seems to know who really controls the business. The power brokers tend to lurk in the shadows, while their performers remain quite literally exposed.

In Pushkin's new audiobook, The Kink Machine: The Hidden Business of Adult Entertainment, two Financial Times journalists, Patricia Nilsson and Alex Barker, start digging into the porn industry and following where the money flows. Their reporting uncovers a shadowy power structure that includes billionaires, tech geniuses, and the most powerful finance companies in the world.

A gripping exposé of how power operates behind the most taboo corner of the internet, Nilsson and Barker unravel a story about control, influence, and an industry with staggering cultural reach that no one really wants to talk about—until now.

Find The Kink Machine on Audible, Spotify, pushkin.fm, or wherever you get audiobooks.

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Valley of Shadows is a new Pushkin true crime podcast that digs into a nearly 30-year old secret buried in the California desert. On June 11, 1998, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputy Jon Aujay went for a run in California’s Devil’s Punchbowl park...and never came back. Nearly 30 years later, the mystery surrounding his disappearance has only deepened. Some say Aujay is just another missing hiker, claimed by the inhospitable landscape of the Southern California desert. Some say he took his own life out there. But there’s another theory that many of Aujay’s friends and LASD colleagues are convinced is true—that he was the victim of foul play, and that his own department is covering it up. Through exclusive interviews, revealing wiretaps, and buried police files, investigative reporters Hayley Fox and Betsy Shepherd uncover vestiges of the Wild West in a small California town, where outlaw biker gangs crank out methamphetamine and local cops operate on both sides of the law.

(00:01:04) Find Valley of Shadows wherever you get podcasts. Binge the entire season of Valley of Shadows, ad-free, by subscribing to Pushkin+. Sign up on the Valley of Shadows show page on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm/plus.

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We’re sharing a preview of another podcast we think you’ll enjoy, Deep Cover Presents: Snowball. Snowball follows journalist Ollie Wards as he unravels the wild story of how his own family was taken in, and taken down, by a charming con woman from California…and tries to find out where she is now. He embarks on a question to find out how she did it, why she did it, and where she is now. Financial ruin, shattered trust, and a mystery that stretches across continents and decades—it’s got all the twists and turns you'd expect from a high-stakes crime thriller…only it's all true. Here’s a preview of Snowball by the Unravel Podcast team. 

If you can’t wait to find out what happens, binge episodes of Deep Cover Presents: Snowball early and ad-free with a Pushkin+ subscription. Find Pushkin+ on the Deep Cover show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.

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Here's a preview from the new season of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast, The Alabama Murders. Florence, Alabama. 1988. A preacher has an affair. A woman is murdered. One death cascades into more, stretching across decades and leaving no one untouched — victims, bystanders, perpetrators, and those just trying to help. Eventually, the consequences lead to the center of a hot national debate on who should be allowed to live, who should die, and how the state should kill them. On The Alabama Murders, Malcolm asks: why, in our efforts to alleviate suffering, do we so often make it worse?

Find Revisionist History: The Alabama Murders wherever you get podcasts. To get early access to ad-free episodes and extra content, subscribe to Pushkin+ on the Revisionist History show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.

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