Monthly Archives: October 2018

How inflated statistics, cultural anxieties and moral crusaders turned a tiny number of missing children into a decade-long political project. Digressions include 1870s parenting, “E.T.” and the lack of parks in Los Angeles. Both co-hosts secretly believe that the popularity of TV movies in the 1980s explains all of America’s social problems.   

Links!

• Podcast Patron Saint Joel Best’s terrific 1988 article debunking the “missing children” statistics
• “The Enterprise of Child Safety in the Age of Reagan”: Another great article on how missing children became a right-wing political crusade
• A lovely rumination on the disappearance of Etan Patz and what it meant for kids in New York City
• A 2009 New York Magazine feature on the suspect in the Etan Patz murder
• 1977 article on the “discovery” of child abuse
• Spin Doctors and Moral Crusaders: The Moral Panic behind Child Safety Legislation
• The long, weird and winding podcast series on the disappearance of Adam Walsh
• Terrific analysis of the “children as prey” trope
• Philip Jenkins’ Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America
• The Maryland parents who came under police suspicion for letting their children go to the park

Razorblades in apples, babysitters on acid, killers in backseats and “rainbow parties”: In this episode, Mike and Sarah investigate the scary stories Americans tell each other and discover the actual anxieties behind them. Turn on your high beams for this one. 

Links!

• “The Razor Blade in the Apple: The Social Construction of Urban Legends”
• Miriam Forman-Brunell’s awesome book on babysitters
• Snopes’ debunking of the “killer in the backseat” myth
• The terrible 2005 New York Times article asking whether “rainbow parties” are real
• Caitlin Flanagan’s 2006 “streetwalker” opus in the Atlantic

Corrections!

The first two times Sarah mentions Miriam Forman-Brunell’s book, she calls her “Miriam Forman-Brunelli.” Sorry!

Sarah tells Mike how Ed Gein became one of America’s most famous serial killers despite not actually being one. Plus, the cinematic villains Gein inspired and what the slasher movies of the 1980s were really about. Digressions include Freud, summer camp logistics and the T-1000. Mike continues to awkwardly insert his teenage crushes into every conversation.

Mike tells Sarah how an over-simplified diagnosis, over-confident doctors and over-zealous prosecutors got thousands of innocent parents thrown in prison. Digressions include food poisoning, Sherlock Holmes and 1950s medical ethics. Mike wanted to mention Louise Woodward but he forgot. 

Links!

• The 1962 paper proposing the existence of abused children
• The original 1971 article that invented shaken baby syndrome
• And the later debunking by the same doctor
• 2011 New York Times Magazine article about Trudy Munoz Rueda
• A long and glorious scientific dismantling of the shaken baby syndrome hypothesis
• Another scientific review finding insufficient evidence
• Jeffrey Havard and the unlicensed medical examiner

Sarah tells Mike how pop culture created a two-decade-long obsession with multiple personality disorder and repressed memories. Digressions include Dead Poets Society, restless leg syndrome and the low editorial standards of the American publishing industry. The Satanic Panic makes a cameo appearance.

Links!

• The case of the human meat hamburger
• Excerpt from Debbie Nathan’s “Sybil Exposed”
• Excerpt from Elizabeth Loftus’ The Myth of Repressed Memory
• Frontline documentary: The Hunt for Memories