A struggle to finish...

First and foremost, Erik speaks slow, sounds like he's struggling to breathe while narrating and will often leave seconds of silence or "dead air" between sentences. I found putting the speed on 1.15x helps with the slow talking but the breathing and even the silence, are still heard. The entire quarterly to me sounds like he wrote up sentences in bullet point on word and then just "cut and pasted" them into paragraphs that just don't go well together.

The editing and better structuring of his chapters could have made this quarterly less confusing and more enjoyable. Perhaps if the chapters were structured to only have Morrison, or Shorten, then the constant jumping between them wouldn't have been leaving me wondering, "who said what..."

And the swearing. Now I'll admit, I cuss myself; but when you're listening to an audio book from Quarterly Essay, you don't think it's something you can't listen to in the car while taking the kids to school. A forewarning (even just in the description) would've been nice.

Overall, the poor editing and narrating made it hard for me to take much from this essay. The facts spoken were things publicly known and the author/narrator comments on people were judgemental and sometimes cruel. This was a difficult essay to finish and personally not one I'd have been sad to miss out on.

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