'Missing Richard Simmons' And The Nature Of Being Known

The six-episode podcast Missing Richard Simmons dropped its final episode on Monday, two days ahead of schedule. For a project nominally devoted to finding out more about what happened to onetime fitness guru Richard Simmons, it wasn't very satisfying by that standard. Host Dan Taberski concluded, in effect, that Richard Simmons was safe and physically healthy and had withdrawn voluntarily from public life without much fanfare, which is ... pretty much what we already knew. That's what Simmons had said in a call to Today that Taberski played again and again. That's what the police had said after they checked on him. Stripped to the frame, the beginning of the podcast gave the back story, the ending mused about the anticlimax of it all, and the middle largely traced a couple of more sensational theories for which Taberski ultimately didn't find any evidence.

But as unsatisfying as