Ancient Logic

For the past two months, Sarah Koenig, a journalist who works on the NPR program, “This American Life,” has produced a weekly radio non-fiction exploration of a single murder case called Serial .  The case centers on the murder of a young woman named Have Li occurred in 1999, and the eventual conviction for murder of one Adnan Syed. The format, an ongoing podcast, collects information from the original case, details the ways the Adnan’s defense was bungled or made more difficult by the stubborn refusal of the facts of the murder to cohere into one definitive shape. As new information came to the attention of Koenig she would plug that back into the unraveling story. Serial has created a mini universe of its own, people listening, straining to figure out the whos and whats of the case, spinning off their own theories. Really the closest another work came to the sheer complexity and involvement of Serial this year was True Detective, another sprawling murder mystery that seemed to a...