“Slow Burn,” the popular Slate podcast about Watergate hosted by Leon Neyfakh, will soon reach its exciting conclusion, in which, one assumes, Richard Nixon resigns in disgrace. Each week, in half-hour-ish segments, “Slow Burn” seeks to illuminate for the modern listener what it was like to live through the Watergate scandal, beginning with the aftermath of the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters, in June, 1972, and following the wild story’s circuitous path, illuminating its basic elements—the burglars’ connections to Nixon’s reëlection campaign, the secret White House recordings, Deep Throat, and the like—as well as less familiar characters and crazy minor details, involving everything from stolen shoes to dune buggies.

“Slow Burn” manages all of this with aplomb, vivid writing, deft use of archival and recent audio, and a zesty theme song that evokes seventies TV. Neyfakh, a Slate staff writer, narrates in careful but excited tones, sounding like a wonk who’s truly enjoying himself. All of this is key to what makes listening to “Slow Burn” feel vital: a sense of political drama, hope, and the comfort of knowing that justice was served. It’s both escapist and invigorating. You listen with attention, as if you’re searching for answers. After the first episode came out, Chris Hayes of MSNBC tweeted, “it blew my mind”; Neyfakh appeared on Hayes’s show in late December and on Rachel Maddow’s in early January. Both hosts asked him about Watergate’s relevance to today. The answer to that question is complicated—and less fun than listening to “Slow Burn.”

Watergate has “this long, wonderful story that people only know a little piece of, and it has certain resonances with our current political moment,” Neyfakh told me recently. “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 movie based on the 1974 book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, he went on, “only covered the first five or six months. It begins with the burglary and then it ends with the Inauguration—June to January. There’s all this other stuff that happened afterward that is not covered. And that I personally knew very little about.” Neyfakh is thirty-two. “All the President’s Men” ends with a shot of the Washington Post newsroom, Nixon on TV getting inaugurated for his second term, and a great clattering of typewriter keys: journalists writing, and then a montage of teletype headlines culminating in “NIXON RESIGNS.” That resignation happened in August, 1974, two years after the break-in. “Slow Burn” explains what was going on during that montage, and it’s as bonkers as it is revelatory.

“I’m going to start with a story that you’ve probably never heard,” Neyfakh says at the beginning of the first episode. It’s the story of “the mouth of the South,” Martha Mitchell, whose husband, John Mitchell, is a former U.S. Attorney General and, at the time of the Watergate break-in, in charge of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Martha Mitchell, Neyfakh says, enjoyed snooping on her husband and talking to the press, and was “treated by Nixon’s men as someone who knew too much.” First, Neyfakh says, “she was kept against her will in a California hotel for days. Then she was forcibly tranquilized while being held down in her bed. Later, when she went public, Nixon loyalists tried to discredit her in the press as an unreliable alcoholic.” She was called crazy; she seemed crazy. “But it turned out that she was onto something.”

Imagine John Mitchell’s conundrum, Neyfakh says: “You’re the President’s closest confidant, and you’re in charge of all kinds of political skullduggery. Meanwhile, your wife is famous for listening in on your meetings, getting hammered on whiskey, and blabbing to reporters.“ When John Mitchell heard of the break-in arrests, he and Martha were in California. He didn’t want Martha to learn the identity of one of the burglars, because she knew him: James W. McCord, a former C.I.A. officer who had worked in security for the Mitchells. “So when he left for D.C., Mitchell put a former F.B.I. agent named Steve King in charge of Martha, and he told him to keep her away from newspapers, TV, news, any coverage of the burglary,” Neyfakh says. She was “literally held a prisoner within four walls,” we hear Martha telling David Frost, in her languid Southern accent. She managed to get a copy of the L.A. Times and call her friend Helen Thomas, the longtime White House correspondent; midway through the call, Thomas says, she heard Mitchell say “Get away! Get away!” We hear Mitchell say that King “rushes in and jerked out the telephone”—tore the cord out of the wall. Later, Neyfakh says, Martha and King got in a scuffle and she put her hand through a plate-glass door. King, now the Ambassador to the Czech Republic, appointed by Donald Trump, did not respond to Neyfakh’s request for comments.

Everybody knew about Martha Mitchell at the time, but if you weren’t of news-consuming age in the early seventies, it’s fascinating to meet her now. Remembering such figures and anecdotes, Neyfakh says on the show, helps us get a feel for the moment to moment, life in the time as it was lived. Martha Mitchell reminds him of Anthony Scaramucci: they are florid, larger-than-life characters who reveal much about the political moment and then are quickly forgotten. Watergate, he says, has “dozens of Scaramucci-level stories.” He goes on, “I think that’s why hearing Martha Mitchell’s story gives me such a vivid sense of what it was like to live through Watergate. It lets me inhabit that moment when no one knew what was going to happen, when the people involved didn’t know, the reporters covering it didn’t know. Nixon himself certainly had no idea.” Most of us listening are hoping that our unknowns will be resolved as definitively as Watergate’s did.

Though I am older than Neyfakh by more than a decade, I realized while listening to “Slow Burn” that I didn’t know Watergate well, either, despite my feeling that I did, having been a kid in the seventies. It seemed to be everywhere growing up: in the Doonesbury anthologies I read, in songs like Arlo Guthrie’s “Presidential Rag,” in “S.N.L.” ’s legendary “Final Days” sketch with Aykroyd as Nixon and Belushi as Kissinger, and so on. I’d also studied Nixon in high school and watched “All the President’s Men.” But “Slow Burn” provides a fine-grained understanding of both the anecdotes and the political atmosphere. At first, I was unnerved by having Watergate explained to me by someone born in the mid-eighties—at one point in the podcast, I was startled when Neyfakh indicated that he didn’t know what a Princess phone was—but I came to realize that his perspective, backed up by his intelligence and thoroughness, is an asset. He’s not assuming that we know it all, and that’s a good thing.

The reason that Watergate was a slow burn, and that Nixon doesn’t resign during the typing sequence at the end of “All the President’s Men” but after the headline montage that follows, is that for a long time it didn’t catch on as a story. Other news dwarfed it; connections between the dots weren’t clear; it seemed to be politics as usual, and not necessarily connected to Nixon himself. In 1972, Nixon was otherwise doing statesmanlike things: making his historic diplomatic visit to the People’s Republic of China, negotiating major nuclear-arms-control treaties with Brezhnev in the Soviet Union. A major bombing campaign was going on in Vietnam and Kissinger announced that peace there was at hand. And Nixon’s people aggressively went after stories about Watergate—“fake-news” style.

“There was an attempt by the Nixon White House to spin Watergate as a ‘third-rate burglary,’ which is the famous line,” Neyfakh told me. “But to me the more telling spin that they tried to use was that this was just a ‘caper.’ One of my first goals in plotting the arc of the season was finding turning points where it went from one kind of story to another.” He continued, “That’s how I landed on the James McCord letter that he sent the judge in March of 1973 that really kind of pushed it into its second phase.”