 Cereal, we need you back. I'm specifically talking about Cereal the podcast, Season 1, which covered the murder of Heyman Lee and Adnan Seyed's prosecution. The strength of Season 1 was that you wouldn't have been able to say anything about Adnan's situation unless you were listening to the full reporting on the background of the case and how the criminal justice system works. When Cereal was covering Beau Bergdahl in Season 2, it wasn't the same at all. You might want to have a conversation about Bergdahl, but you couldn't know if the person you were talking to was basing their opinion on having actually listened to all the serial episodes, or if they read a single article in the newspaper, saw a headline on Facebook back when the story first broke, or heard a few snippets on Fox News. The fragmentation of reporting on most stories definitely affects how we form our opinions. Just this week, there was a think-tech episode where it was expressed that the Harvey Weinstein victims must have been implausibly naive to agree to one-on-one meetings with him in hotel rooms, and the two other people on the show didn't point out that this was inaccurate. If you read the Ronan Farrow piece, which I admit I only did this week, it's clear that the modus operandi was to get women to agree to come to a corporate event or a group meeting, and then the enablers, co-conspirators, would leave them alone with him. This is a case where knowing the background is essential to forming an opinion on the matter. If these women were planning to meet him alone, I can see that you might wonder whether they were willing participants. Well, they weren't willing. That's why Weinstein's staff had to resort to setting up these meetings on false pretenses. We all think we know what the Weinstein narrative was, since it was so broadly reported, but how consistent is our understanding of those stories? When we have a conversation about it, are we really talking about the same thing? For issues like gun violence, opioid abuse, immigration, and sexual harassment, where we have to make decisions as a society about what our norms and policies should be, we need new seasons of serial. It's important to have serious journalists go in-depth on an individual story that hasn't been big enough to break into the news cycle. If you know someone disagrees with you after they've listened to the whole story, it means something, and you can have that dialogue to find out where you agree and disagree on the issues. We need that in-depth journalism to get us thinking deeper, and as a side benefit, I think we'll also find that our friends on the other side start sounding more reasonable when we're all talking from the same starting point. Thanks for watching. I'm Nicole Horry.