When Jonathan Goldstein started his podcast series Heavyweight in 2016, he pitched himself as a solver of problems. Goldstein, a writer and veteran contributor to This American Life, would help people with feuds, regrets, estrangements, grief and other complex interpersonal or psychological obstacles.
Friends, acquaintances and listeners come to him with questions existential and eccentric, while Goldstein, “after a few of my patented hems and trademarked haws”, tracks down long-lost friends and relatives, and offers emotional support and advice, all interspersed with comic personal tangents, like a hesitant, rambling agony aunt, or a “therapist with a time machine”.
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