Get Set For The Paris Paralympics With Tales Of True Grit And Determination

Olympic hero Michael Johnson and archer Matt Stutzman interview stars including Kadeena Cox in Rising Phoenix. Plus: five of the best podcasts about classic movies

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If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I am really, really interested in drugs. I read Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain earlier this year after it spent way too long on my “to read” pile, and found its tale of the rise and rise of the Sackler opioid dynasty genuinely terrifying (though isn’t artist turned Oxy campaigner Nan Goldin a total hero?).

Naturally, I got stuck into Scripts this week – a new miniseries from the Atlantic – about “the pills we take for our brains and the stories we tell ourselves about them”. It’s sensitively made, but scary, as much of this stuff is; the tale of two siblings who found themselves on the same treatment for heroin addiction, but whose lives took very different paths, will stay with me for a while. As with Dan Taberski’s recent series Hysterical, about a group of young girls who developed Tourettes-like symptoms in tandem, there are real characters in here dealing with some very difficult ailments, but we’re also never far away from bigger questions about how we think about mental health and selfhood.

Read on for our picks of the week, from scammer dads to a gritty Paralympics pod, and five of the best podcasts for fans of classic movies – from old Hollywood hits to Hammer horror history.

Hannah J Davies
Deputy editor, newsletters