Long Shadow - Podcast Rankings and reviews

I just finished listening to 'Long Shadow' Season 3: In Guns We Trust, a well-executed follow-up to their Season 2, The Rise of the American Far Right. While Season 3 is somewhat more meandering, this mirrors the complexity of the subject it covers. Garrett Graff excels as a host and documentarian, adeptly handling complex topics across all three seasons. He provides essential context to current American dynamics by highlighting pivotal moments that have subtly shifted American culture one event at a time until looking back it feels like a massive shift.
One memorable quote from Season 3 comes from Robert Moses, who explains how power and change converge: 'Things happen when leaders are available, ready, and eager to take advantage of the logic of events. And even then, the entire result is only achieved through a series of limited objectives over a surprisingly long period of years.'
All three seasons are captivating and definitely worth a listen. Personally, I found Season 2 to be the most compelling overall."

Season 3 of Long Shadow achieves the same magic as the prior two. With nuance and care, Graff and the entire Long Shadow team deliver another engrossing, necessary look at the American-only epidemic of gun violence. The finale episode, Generation Lockdown, proved most fascinating to me. Throughout the entire episode, I wished for Graff to write a book about Gen Z and gun violence, exploring pivotal life moments that, in a lot of ways, robbed them of traditions every generation longs to experience. I know in my gut that this generation will help resolve and end the mass shootings committed against school children. As a millennial, I feel far too cynical to hope. When we did not change after Sandy Hook, it became harder to understand what would have to happen to spark a redirection in gun policy. Graff’s writing style would do this subtopic immense justice, and those in older generations, like me, need to understand Gen Z’s conditioned peril.

Highly recommend!

Each season of Long Shadow is like a beautifully crafted documentary film. I discovered Long Shadow a few weeks ago, and since then have dedicated every free moment of my time to listening exclusively to this podcast. I just finished all three seasons, and cannot wait for future seasons. I feel like I learned so much about my own country. Things that I have lived my whole life without knowing, despite serving in the Army, and living in the United States for my entire life.

This may be one of the best podcasts I’ve ever listened to; deeply researched, well-paced and just the right amount of dramatic narrative. Listen to this podcast if you want to learn about what’s brought us to our current state of affairs.