Short (1 to 3 minute) video narrative fragments from Season One, tarted up with images and captions for distribution on YouTube and other social sites.
https://www.youtube.com/@Effigypod/shorts

From Episode 5 (also available via this Substack post.)

We consult the thoughts and opinions of Kierkegaard, Poe, Taine, LeBon, and Walter Benjamin, the lattermost in connection with the question of Barbarity, a consuming interest of this season and perhaps seasons to come.

From Episode 3, we make the acquaintance of a certain machine gun.

From Episode 2, featuring the longest cold open in podcast history, grippingly read by Colm O’Reilly, from Homer Green’s Coal and the Coal Mines (1889).

Episode One of our series (“Glück Auf!”) begins with a cold open from “The Coal Catechism” (1898), read by two British-inflected AI bots (subsequent cold opens all employ human talent, well compensated). The intro that follows has a slow-burning fuse, strolling unhurriedly through the cultural anthropology of coal from antiquity to the industrial age, with some detours that explore, for no apparent reason, adjacent lapidary anthropology, particularly those of baetyls.

The timeline of our central narrative starts at exactly 28:15, and closes out the rest of the episode. Those interested primarily in how I treat that historical narrative should start here, with my hope that it will instill sufficient trust and curiosity to rewind back to the beginning at a later date, to experience the wholeness of the enchilda.

We won’t go as far aground as we do in Episode 1 for several more episodes. Digressions in Eps 2 through 5 should feel more pointedly pertinent to the central narrative, drilling into: the skills and perils of coal mining; the history of collegia, guilds and trade unions; a brief history of modern European ethnic identities and the bigotries that became ensnared with them; a history of policing, and the rise of private detection & industrial espionage; among other topics. Then things get weird in Episode 6 before we snap the leash tight for the climax in Episode 7.

Episode 7 (“The Bosom of Abraham”) treats the events of April 20, 1914—known to history as the “Ludlow Massacre”—as a set piece spanning from the ominous disruption of an Easter baseball game in the tent colony the night before to the discovery of the death pits the morning after. There is a brief prelude at the top covering Marie Ganz’s alleged assassination attempt, and a brief interlude between climax and denoument, at 32:08, digressing on the parable of Dives and Lazarus