🏆 2020's best podcast moments 🏆

💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌

Bonjour!

I’ve been relatively lucky during this god forsaken year, but in early December, my wrists and hands went on strike from typing nearly 24/7 since the pandemic began. They’ve been swollen, knotted, constantly throbbing, and there are days I can’t sleep or pull clothes on or shower. It’s why there was no newsletter last week, why I’m not responding to any of your emails, and why we have a short newsletter today. 

ICYMI, I am helping to launch Hark, a (n exciting, beautiful) podcast discovery app and catcher, that lets you browse podcasts by listening to their greatest moments. There are so many year-end lists of best shows and episodes, and since Hark is all about moments and I wanted to show off how beautiful it is, I created a Harklist of my favorite podcast moments of 2020. Press play to hear 32 clips (the whole thing will take you two hours to hear but you can dip in and out) from Short Cuts, Endless Thread, The Allusionist, Brought To You By…, The Story Collider, Vice News Reports, Wild Thing, and more. The full list is below. You can listen on your desktop but if you’d like to try it on the app, which is a much better experience, let me know and I can send you a code. (It will be available to everyone in January.)

I recorded audio introductions for each clip, so you can hear me explain why I chose it. There are many great moments that didn’t make this list for one reason or another, so I guess it should be called “some of the best podcast moments of 2020.” But that doesn’t sound so exciting.

Hope you all are having a restful end of the year. See you in 2021.

• Arlie Adlington’s The Toilets At Home Are All Gender Neutral (Short Cuts)

• A Protest in Washington (Endless Thread)

• “I Refuse To Flush My Mother’s Ashes Down the Toilet at Walt Disney World” (Judge John Hodgman)

• A Wardrobe Full of Ways to Refute the Deniers of the Singular “They.” (The Allusionist)

• How Pan Am Flight Attendants Helped the Troops in Vietnam (Brought To You By…)

• The Donner Party Wasn’t That Hungry (Lizard People)

• On The Phone With A Contact Tracer (The Story Collider)

• Michael Malloy: The Man Who Just Wouldn’t Die (Criminal)

• The Biggest Mistake in Maria Hinojosa’s Journalism Career (The Confessional)

• “The Good Guy Never Dies” (Vice News Reports)

• The Fastest, Smartest Wolf Yellowstone Has Ever Seen (Snap Judgment)

• The Doner (Nice White Parents)

• Sending Messages Into The Universe (Wild Thing)

• Missy Elliot’s Afrofuturism (Switched on Pop)

• An 11-Year-Old’s Quarantine in a Pizzeria (Radio Diaries)

• One 72-Year-Old Man’s Gardening Tweets Go Viral (This is Love)

• Disney World For Adults (Greetings from Somewhere)

• The Little Mermaid as Queer Allegory (Femlore)

• Relative Unknown: The Beginning (Relative Unknown)

• Skin Hunger (Telescope)

• Bear Witness with Love and Humor (Sugar Calling)

• On Lisa Turtle (Zack to the Future)

• Lauren Gets Banned From Election Profit Makers (Election Profit Makers)

• Black American Women (I Weigh)

• The Visitor (Monsters Among Us)

• Richard, David, and Wolfgang Puck Lunch in LA (Welcome to LA)

• Escaping the White Nationalists (Sounds Like Hate)

• World of Warcraft Virus (Imaginary Worlds)

• The Real Reason White Homeless People May Receive More Help Than POC (According to Need)

• Recreational Policing, Then and Now (The Gatekeepers)

• The Hammer and the Dance (The Daily)

• The Origins of the Michelada (Richard’s Famous Food Podcast)

xoxo lp

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