Bedugul Coffee: The true crime podcast you should be listening to 📻

Culture Shift is a weekly newsletter curated by the HuffPost Culture writers and editors.

This week we're talking about the true crime podcast that predates "Serial," a jazz genius, the books you should read in your feminist book club, how art history classes are changing today, and the artist behind Rihanna's new album art.

Before 'Serial,' Two People Set Out To Bring True Crime To Podcasts

To be human is to sort things into categories: right and wrong, good and bad, guilty and innocent. "Criminal," a podcast from Radiotopia and PRX, reminds listeners with every episode that the truth is many shades blurrier than that. "Our job is not to hold moral judgment," Judge (who plays off her apt surname in the show's ads; she uses sponsor Squarespace to create the free-advice site Phoebe, Judge Me) explained over the phone.

"I hope what we do is put forth an interesting story in as unbiased a way as possible and allow the listener to decide what they think," she added.

Sitting at the Venn diagram overlap of public radio listeners and "Law & Order" fans, the podcast, in so few words, is about crime. It's doesn't rest on the unedited voyeurism of the televised "Cops," nor does it offer the clear resolution of a fictional courtroom drama like "The Practice." Instead, "Criminal" covers the human aspect of the many roles -- perpetrator, victim, enforcer, witness -- that surround a wrongdoing. (Read more here)

How Art History Taught Me That I, A Woman Of Color, Could Create

"Elisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun, Mary Cassatt, Käthe Kollwitz, Frida Kahlo, Cindy Sherman -- these were all women who resonated with me deeply during that first art history class. They've also landed on the AP's revised list of required works, along with more women artists I didn't learn about until much later.

Still, looking down the list I couldn't help but burst with questions, like a detective in search of missing persons. Where's Artemisia Gentileschi? Louise Bourgeois? Yoko Ono? Eva Hesse?

Glaring as these omissions may be, any attempt to encapsulate art history spanning all humankind will feel incomplete. According to The Atlantic, the College Board plans to periodically revise its image selection to align with the art being studied in college courses, with up to 10 percent of the works changing every five to seven years." (Read more here)

Jazz Genius Vijay Iyer Had To Fight The 'Model Minority' Myth Too

Vijay Iyer is a celebrated jazz musician, Harvard professor, MacArthur "genius grant" recipient, and lapsed physicist.

This menagerie of impressive titles might not make him the ideal person to speak out against the "model minority" myth surrounding Asian-Americans. But, in a profile that ran in last week's New Yorker, Iyer revealed how critics' stereotypes of Asian Americans have affected the reception of his work over the years:

"To be a jazz musician is to express some American project, to be part of American history, to take in those rugged ideals to which improvisation is central ... Critical writing used to attempt to place me by othering me, by putting me outside the history of jazz. Everything I did was seen as different and not as the continuity of a tradition. Critics never describe black music as rigorous or cerebral or mathematical, although Coltrane was interested in mathematics. Since I was Asian, I was seen as having only my intellect to use." (Read more here)

21 Provocative Books By Women Every Bookshelf Needs

Here's a preview of the 21 books by women, about women, that are bound to make readers think about the world through a new lens:

1. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
2. You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman
3. Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
4. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison
5. Disgruntled by Asali Solomon
6. Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers On The Decision Not To Have Kids edited by Meghan Daum
7. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
8. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
9. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
10. Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi (Read more here)

Inside Rihanna's Weirdly Emo Album Cover

In short, this confounding cover -- and equally confounding interview with the artist who made it -- speaks to why so many of us will never be as free as Ri. (Read more here)

Book of the Week!