Serial: Recent Episodes
Serial Productions
Serial is a podcast from Serial Productions, a New York Times company, hosted by Sarah Koenig. Serial unfolds one story - a true story - over the course of a whole season. The show follows the plot and characters wherever they lead, through many surprising twists and turns. Sarah won't know what happens at the end of the story until she gets there, not long before you get there with her. Each week she'll bring you the latest chapter, so it's important to listen in, starting with Episode 1. New episodes are released on Thursday mornings.
After a month at sea, Keiko pops up near a Norwegian fishing village, causing a stir among the residents and his own team of caretakers. They figure that if they wait until spring, maybe Keiko will swim off again with a wild pod. If they can all just make it to spring.
Our newest podcast, “The Good Whale,” is out now. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts, or follow it here: https://lnk.to/good-whale
To get full access to this and other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.
To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.
Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at serialshows@nytimes.com
Keiko disappears in Icelandic waters, swimming east for four weeks. Unobserved, with no human contact. Since nobody knows what happened to Keiko during that mysterious time, we decided to recreate it — as a musical. From Keiko’s perspective, naturally.
Watch the music video for "The Ballad of Keiko" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1k1TQ2Lh0o
Our newest podcast, “The Good Whale,” is out now. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts, or follow it here: https://lnk.to/good-whale
To get full access to this and other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.
To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.
Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at serialshows@nytimes.com
A fresh training team takes a hard-line approach and doubles down on breaking Keiko’s bond with humans. By summer it seems to be working, until one day Keiko swims away. This is the moment they’ve all been waiting for.
Our newest podcast, “The Good Whale,” is out now. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts, or follow it here: https://lnk.to/good-whale
To get full access to this and other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.
To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.
Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at serialshows@nytimes.com
Keiko finally arrives in Iceland, where years of preparation will be put to the test when Keiko gets his first chance to interact with orcas in the wild — something he hasn’t done since he was a calf. It does not go according to plan.
Our newest podcast, “The Good Whale,” is out now. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts, or follow it here: https://lnk.to/good-whale
To get full access to this and other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.
To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.
Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at serialshows@nytimes.com
Keiko has a new tank in Oregon and a dream team of experts that gets him into shape. But soon they start fighting over what a realistic future looks like for this golden retriever of an orca.
Our newest podcast, “The Good Whale,” is out now. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts, or follow it here: https://lnk.to/good-whale
To get full access to this and other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.
To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.
Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at serialshows@nytimes.com
When the movie “Free Willy” is released, word gets out that the star, a killer whale named Keiko, is sick and living in a tiny pool at a Mexican amusement park. An environmentalist sets out to give the fans what they want: their favorite celebrity orca back in the sea.
Our newest podcast, “The Good Whale,” is out now. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts, or follow it here: https://lnk.to/good-whale
To get full access to this and other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.
To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.
Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at serialshows@nytimes.com
After the movie “Free Willy” became a hit, word got out that the star of the film, a killer whale named Keiko, was sick and living in a tiny pool at a Mexican amusement park. Fans were outraged and pleaded for his release. “The Good Whale” tells the story of the wildly ambitious science experiment to return Keiko to the ocean — while the world watched. An epic tale that starts in Mexico and ends in Norway, the six-episode series follows Keiko as he’s transported from country to country, each time landing in the hands of well-intentioned people who believe they know what’s best for him – people who still disagree, decades later, about whether they did the right thing.
Our newest podcast, “The Good Whale,” is out now. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts, or follow it here: https://lnk.to/good-whale
To get full access to this and other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.
To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.
Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at serialshows@nytimes.com
The criminal case against the men accused of planning the Sept. 11 attacks is the one aspect of Guantánamo that would seem to make sense – until you start watching it.
Majid Khan spent years locked away in CIA black sites. What would he tell the world when he finally got the chance to speak?
One reporter has been covering Guantánamo since the day the prison opened. The military would like her to go home now.
After the worst happens at Guantánamo, the warden tries to explain it to the outside world – and to himself.
A new warden comes to Guantánamo and decides to make some changes. A prison’s a prison, he thinks. How hard could this be?
The case against a young airman gets even weirder when the government pulls in two fresh investigators. Part 2: A bride, an FBI agent, and a polygraph machine.
An Arabic-speaking airman is sent to Guantánamo to translate, and soon finds himself at the center of a major scandal. Part 1: Suspicion swallows evidence.
In 2002, an elite interrogation team secretly staged Guantánamo’s most elaborate intel operation — to try to get a single detainee to talk.
Maybe you have an idea in your head about what it was like to work at Guantánamo, one of the most notorious prisons in the world. Think again.
From Serial Productions and The New York Times, Serial Season 4 is a history of Guantánamo told by people who lived through key moments in Guantánamo’s evolution, who know things the rest of us don’t about what it’s like to be caught inside an improvised justice system. Episodes 1 and 2 arrive Thursday, March 28.
In fertility treatment, a successful outcome is defined as a healthy baby. In this story, the outcomes are complicated for everyone involved.
At the nurse’s sentencing hearing, the patients learn a shocking detail that forces them to confront the limits of their compassion.
The patients know what happened to them. Now they learn who did it. The story of the nurse whose own pain was also unseen.
Patients at a fertility clinic experience excruciating, unexpected pain. For months the reason for that pain remains hidden. Then they get a letter from the clinic.
The patients in this story came to the Yale Fertility Center to pursue pregnancy. They began their I.V.F. cycles full of expectation and hope. Then a surgical procedure called egg retrieval caused them excruciating pain.
Some of the patients screamed out in the procedure room. Others called the clinic from home to report pain in the hours that followed. But most of the staff members who fielded the patients’ reports did not know the real reason for the pain, which was that a nurse at the clinic was stealing fentanyl, and replacing it with saline.
From Serial Productions and The New York Times, The Retrievals is a five-part narrative series reported by Susan Burton, a veteran staff member at “This American Life” and author of the memoir “Empty.”
Susan details the events that unfolded at the clinic, and examines how the patients’ distinct identities informed the way they made sense of what happened to them in the procedure room. The nurse, too, has her own story, about her own pain, that she tells to the court. And then there is the story of how this all could have happened at the Yale clinic in the first place.
Throughout, Burton explores the stories we tell about women’s pain. How do we tolerate, interpret and account for it? What happens when pain is minimized or dismissed?
Episode 1 of The Retrievals arrives Thursday, June 29th.
Kim Barker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times, revisits an unsolved murder that took place while she was in high school in Laramie, Wyoming, nearly 40 years ago. She confronts the conflicting stories people have told themselves about the crime because of an unexpected development: the arrest of a former Laramie police officer accused in the murder. All eight episodes of "The Coldest Case in Laramie," a new show from Serial Productions and The New York Times, are available on Thursday, February 23rd wherever you get your podcasts.
Rachel goes back to California, to the place where she grew up and where her brother and father died, to find answers.
For more information on 'We Were Three': https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/11/podcasts/we-were-three.html
Rachel retraces how her family, over decades, fell apart and came back together.
For more information on 'We Were Three': https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/11/podcasts/we-were-three.html
Rachel goes back to California, to the place where she grew up and where her brother and father died, to find answers.
For more information on 'We Were Three': https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/11/podcasts/we-were-three.html
A three-part series from This American Life producer Nancy Updike. When Rachel McKibbens’s father and brother died suddenly last fall, two weeks apart, from Covid, she’d had no idea her father was sick, and no idea her brother was dying. They were unvaccinated, but the story of what happened started long before that. All three episodes of "We Were Three," a new show from Serial Productions and The New York Times, are available now wherever you get your podcasts.
It’s Baltimore, 2022. Adnan Syed has spent the last 23 years incarcerated, serving a life sentence for the murder of Hae Min Lee, a crime he says he didn’t commit. He has exhausted every legal avenue for relief, including a petition to the United States Supreme Court. But then, a prosecutor in the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s office stumbled upon two handwritten notes in Adnan’s case file, and that changes everything.
A strange letter appears outlining a plot by Islamic extremists to infiltrate Birmingham schools. Hamza and Brian visit the supposed mastermind of the plot, and he tells them he did take over a bunch of schools – just not for the reasons in the letter.
Hamza and Brian think the source of the Trojan Horse letter might be hiding in plain sight. After learning about the petty personnel dispute that probably gave rise to the letter, they’re even more bewildered about how it ever could have been taken seriously.
In a state of surprise, Hamza and Brian leave a meeting with the man the Trojan Horse letter was first sent to. And they learn about an internal investigation report that local officials have kept hidden, but which they think could contain a bombshell.
A series of frustrating interviews with Birmingham politicians leaves Brian and Hamza wondering if crucial information about the Trojan Horse letter was kept from officials in London. Then one rainy Friday afternoon, Brian hears back from a government source who wants to meet right away.
Hamza and Brian learn that the Trojan Horse letter wasn’t the only unsigned letter alleging an extremist operation was afoot in Birmingham. An interview with a couple who lodged complaints against their school starts out cordially, but six hours later, the atmosphere is so tense that not even an offer of tea can smooth things over. And Hamza stops pretending he’s not angry about what he’s hearing.
Hamza takes a long, hard look at what the government found when it investigated more than 20 majority-Muslim schools in Birmingham. And our two reporters have a confrontation – with each other.
Birmingham authorities struggle to explain why they disavowed their own findings about the Trojan Horse plot. But when Brian and Hamza make a discovery deep inside some court documents, everything suddenly makes sense.
A man banned from working in education in the aftermath of the Trojan Horse letter inspires Brian and Hamza to track down one last witness with him – in Australia. And all three travelers find their faith tested.
A mysterious letter detailing a supposed Islamist plot to take over schools shocked Britain in 2014. But who wrote it? From Serial Productions and The New York Times, “The Trojan Horse Affair,” an investigation that became bigger than we ever imagined. All eight parts are available now, wherever you get your podcasts. Search "The Trojan Horse Affair."
The Improvement Association PAC’s power in the county is threatened when an unlikely candidate enters the race for county commissioner. Plenty of people outside the PAC now have their own ideas about how to build Black political power here. Zoe examines what this election could mean for the PAC’s future.
With the PAC’s reputation suffering because of years of cheating accusations and resentment stirring within its ranks, a prominent member turns against the leadership. Nevertheless, Horace and his closest allies make a bold move by supporting a political upset at the center of the county.
Zoe delves into one of the most serious allegations against the Bladen Improvement PAC: an accusation about stealing votes from vulnerable people that goes back 10 years. In trying to track down the veracity of this particularly persistent rumor, she comes to understand how and why election cheating allegations are so sticky.
Zoe talks to people in the county who believe the Bladen Improvement PAC has been cheating for years. She tries to get beyond the rumors and into specifics, and comes face to face with the intense suspicion and scrutiny leveled against the organization. In the middle of another election, Zoe goes out with members of the PAC to watch how they operate and try to make sense of all these allegations against them.
Following a notorious case of election fraud in Bladen County, North Carolina, in 2018, the reporter Zoe Chace gets an invitation from Horace Munn, the leader of the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, a Black political advocacy group whose name was dragged into the scandal. Horace asks Zoe to come down and investigate for herself and find out who is really cheating.
Listen to the trailer for our newest show, "The Improvement Association." From Serial Productions and The New York Times, hosted by Zoe Chace.
Chana has traced the history of the school from its founding and come to the present. But now: One unexpected last chapter. Last year, the school district for BHS mandated a change in the zoning process to ensure all middle schools would be racially integrated. No longer can white families hoard resources in a few select schools. Black and Latino parents have been demanding this change since the late 1950s. The courts have mandated it. Chana asks: How did this happen? And is this a blueprint for real, systemic change?
Public schools are inequitable because the school systems are maniacally loyal to white families. We can’t have equitable public education unless schools limit the disproportionate power of white parents. But is that even possible? Chana finds two schools that are trying to do just that, and both are actually inside the 293 building. One is downstairs in the basement, where a charter school called Success Academy opened about 7 years ago. The other is upstairs at BHS, the newly renamed SIS.
Chana Joffe-Walt explores how white parents can shape a school — even when they aren’t there.
She traces the history of I.S. 293, now the Boerum Hill School for International Studies, from the 1980s through the modern education reforms of the 2000s. In the process, Chana talks to alumni who loved their school and never questioned why it was on the edge of a white neighborhood. To them, it was just where everyone went. But she also speaks to some who watched the school change over the years and questioned whether a local community school board was secretly plotting against 293.
Chana Joffe-Walt searches the New York City Board of Education archives for more information about the School for International Studies, which was originally called I.S. 293.
In the process, she finds a folder of letters written in 1963 by mostly white families in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. They are asking for the board to change the proposed construction of the school to a site where it would be more likely to be racially integrated.
It’s less than a decade after Brown v. Board of Education, amid a growing civil rights movement, and the white parents writing letters are emphatic that they want an integrated school. They get their way and the school site changes — but after that, nothing else goes as planned.
It’s 2015 and one Brooklyn middle school is about to receive a huge influx of new students.
Reporter Chana Joffe Walt follows what happens when the School for International Studies’s 6th grade class swells from 30 mostly Latino, Black and Middle Eastern students, to a class of 103 —an influx almost entirely driven by white families.
Everyone wants “what’s best for the school” but it becomes clear that they don’t share the same vision of what “best” means.
For more information about this show, visit nytimes.com/nicewhiteparents
February 2016: Sarah Koenig ducks back into the Adnan Syed case for a few days. There’s a hearing in Baltimore—a court proceeding that’s been nearly sixteen years in the making. Syed’s attorney will introduce new evidence, and present a case for why his conviction should be overturned. Sarah and producer Dana Chivvis will discuss what happens, day by day.
February 2016: Sarah Koenig ducks back into the Adnan Syed case for a few days. There’s a hearing in Baltimore—a court proceeding that’s been nearly sixteen years in the making. Syed’s attorney will introduce new evidence, and present a case for why his conviction should be overturned. Sarah and producer Dana Chivvis will discuss what happens, day by day.
February 2016: Sarah Koenig ducks back into the Adnan Syed case for a few days. There’s a hearing in Baltimore—a court proceeding that’s been nearly sixteen years in the making. Syed’s attorney will introduce new evidence, and present a case for why his conviction should be overturned. Sarah and producer Dana Chivvis will discuss what happens, day by day.
Bergdahl’s first year in captivity starts with an escape and ends with an escape. In between, he learns necessary, twisted lessons of survival.
On the move with Bergdahl, the Taliban slip past the U.S. Army’s massive effort to find him. During those days and weeks, each side is asking, what is Bergdahl worth to us?
In the middle of the night, Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl grabs a notebook, snacks, water, some cash. Then he quietly slips off a remote U.S. Army outpost in eastern Afghanistan and into the dark, open desert. About 20 minutes later, it occurs to him: he’s in over his head.
On January 13, 1999, Adnan Syed was a hurt and vengeful ex-boyfriend who carried out a premeditated murder. Or he was a bewildered bystander, framed for a crime he could never have committed. After 15 months of reporting, we take out everything we’ve got - interviews and documents and police reports - we shake it all out, and we see what sticks.
Almost everyone describes the 17-year-old Adnan the same way: good kid, helpful at the mosque, respectful to his elders. But a couple of months ago, Sarah started getting phone calls from people who knew Adnan back then, and told her stories of a different kind of boy.
Adnan’s trial lawyer was M. Cristina Gutierrez, a renowned defense attorney in Maryland – tough and savvy and smart. Other lawyers said she was exactly the kind of person you’d want defending you on a first-degree murder charge. But Adnan was convicted, and a year later, Gutierrez was disbarred. What happened?
New information is coming in about what maybe didn’t happen on January 13, 1999. And while Adnan’s memory of that day is foggy at best, he does remember what happened next: being questioned, being arrested and, a little more than a year later, being sentenced to life in prison.
The state’s case against Adnan Syed hinged on Jay’s credibility; he was their star witness and also, because of his changing statements to police, their chief liability. Naturally, Adnan’s lawyer tried hard to make Jay look untrustworthy at trial. So, how did the jurors make sense of Jay? For that matter, how did the cops make sense of Jay? How are we supposed to make sense of Jay?
Adnan told Sarah about a case in Virginia that had striking similarities to his own: one key witness, incriminating cell phone records, young people, drugs - and a defendant who has always maintained his innocence. Sarah called up one of the defense attorneys on that case to see if she could offer any insight into Adnan’s case, and got much more than she bargained for.
The physical evidence against Adnan Syed was scant - a few underwhelming fingerprints. So aside from cell records, what did the prosecutors bring to the jury, to shore up Jay's testimony? Sarah weighs all the other circumstantial evidence they had against Adnan, including curious behavior, a disconcerting note, and an unexplained mid-afternoon phone call.
Adnan once issued a challenge to Sarah. He told her to test the state’s timeline of the murder by driving from Woodlawn High School to Best Buy in 21 minutes. It can’t be done, he said. So Sarah and Dana take up the challenge, and raise him one: They try to recreate the entire route that Jay said he and Adnan took on January 13th, 1999.
A few days after Hae’s body is found, the detectives get a lead that opens the case up for them. They find Jay at work late one night and bring him down to Homicide. At first, he insists he doesn’t know anything about the murder. But eventually he comes clean. He tells them what happened on January 13th. A few weeks later, he’s back at Homicide and his story has changed. In some ways, these changes are small and understandable. In other ways, they’re big and confounding.
It’s February 9, 1999. Hae has been missing for three weeks. A man on his lunch break pulls off a road to pee, and stumbles on her body in a city forest. His odd recounting of the discovery makes Detectives Ritz and MacGillivary suspicious. For instance, why did he walk so far into the woods - 127 feet - to relieve himself? And that’s just the start. A look into the man’s past reveals some bizarre behavior.
Their relationship began like a storybook high-school romance: a prom date, love notes, sneaking off to be alone. But unlike other kids at school, they had to keep their dating secret, because their parents disapproved. Both of them, but especially Adnan, were under special pressure at home, and the stress of that spilled over into their relationship. Eventually Hae broke up with Adnan. And then, depending on who you ask, Adnan was either understandably sad and moping around, or full of rage and plotting to kill her.
It's Baltimore, 1999. Hae Min Lee, a popular high-school senior, disappears after school one day. Six weeks later detectives arrest her classmate and ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, for her murder. He says he's innocent - though he can't exactly remember what he was doing on that January afternoon. But someone can. A classmate at Woodlawn High School says she knows where Adnan was. The trouble is, she’s nowhere to be found.