💰 A rich family's downfall, podcasting's hell house, dead duck, a Halloween party murder👻
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
Today is Monday, September 13. There are 261 days until I go on my next Disney cruise. If you don’t have time for the whole newsletter: This juicy little thing sent me on a wild Google search hunting down a rich New York City family that lost it all, I always say I don’t like true-crime but then I hear this, and after all that 911 content you saw last week, this was by far the best.
This week we’re getting to peek into the listening life of Emily Rudder, the Chief of Staff at Wonder Media Network (WMN), an audio-first media company with a mission to amplify underrepresented voices, inspire action and introduce empathy into politics, business and culture. WMN produces podcasts that center women such as Encyclopedia Womannica, The Brown Girls Guide to Politics and Moments with Candace Parker.
The app I use: I like to listen on many apps to see how our content looks on each platform and to get a sense of what’s being featured/what other people are listening to. This can make things very confusing as I often can’t remember where I’m listening to something
Listening time per week: I would say it varies greatly. I’m always listening to Wonder Media Network podcasts (check out our new original Moments with Candace Parker!) which is at least 10 hours per week and then when I find time, I like to add on a few other shows. Lately I’ve been trying to get more into fiction so hit me up with your favorites!
When I listen: Without my daily subway commute, I’ve been listening while I shower and cook.
How I discover: I still find recommendations from friends and colleagues to be the most valuable way to discover a great podcast.
Anything else? Please reach out if you’re interested in working with WMN in any capacity! I love meeting new people in the podcast world.
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Rebecca Nagle
Rebecca Nagle is a Cherokee writer and advocate and host of This Land. Follow her on Twitter here.
Tell us about the new season of This Land.
The second season of This Land uncovers how a string of custody battles over Native children turned into a federal lawsuit threatening everything from tribal sovereignty to civil rights.
ALM – as referred to in court documents – is a Navajo and Cherokee toddler. When he was a baby, a white couple from the suburbs of Dallas wanted to adopt him, but a federal law said they couldn’t. The Brackeens' case would have been a normal adoption dispute, but then one of the most powerful corporate law firms in the United States took it on and helped the couple launch a federal lawsuit. Today, the lawsuit doesn’t just impact the future of one child, or even the future of one law. It threatens the entire legal structure defending Native American rights. The second season of This Land is a timely exposé about how the far right is using Native children to quietly dismantle American Indian tribes and advance a conservative agenda.
How is it different than the first season?
Last season I had a story to share, this season I have a story to uncover.
The first season of This Land covered a Supreme Court battle over land and treaty rights here in eastern Oklahoma. At the heart of the case was one question. Did Congress ever disestablish, or in other words get rid of, the reservation of Muscogee Nation. Spoiler alert, it didn’t. And in July 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in the tribe’s favor. That ruling impacted the status of the reservations of four other tribes in eastern Oklahoma, including my tribe Cherokee Nation. The podcast goes into the story of the case, which started with a small town murder in the late 90s, and the history behind it.
The second season is also about a big court case. But its a different type of story. Big parts of the case, and the players behind it, weren’t public information. So our team spent a year investigating. And the story of that investigation is a big part of the season.
How much of the reporting and research do you do? Do you have a lot of help?
We put a team together and spent a year investigating. We submitted 60 FOIA requests, went through thousands of pages of court documents, and talked to over 100 people. We uncovered information that has never been shared publicly before. Both about the facts of the underlying custody cases, and the broader attack on ICWA. We had an amazing team that worked really hard! This season of This Land was reported by Martha Troian, Maddie Stone, Amy Westervelt and myself.
What other podcasts do you listen to?
One of my favorite documentary podcasts that came out recently was Stolen from Connie Walker at Gimlet. I also really loved Floodlines from the Atlantic. Some of my favorite more talk or chatty podcasts are All My Relations, Toasted Sister Podcast and You’re Wrong About.
Why is this case such an important one?
The court case is about the future of the Indian Child Welfare Act, a 40 year old law created to stop family separation in Native communities. When it was passed in 1978, 25 to 35% of all Native children had been removed from their families and tribes. Native children are still facing high removal rates from child welfare agencies, and without ICWA more children could grow up without knowing their family, tribe and culture.
And this case is really important for another reason. It’s making some big constitutional arguments about the legal status of tribes and tribal citizens. That, if the Supreme Court agrees, could impact more than just ICWA. It could impact everything from gaming, healthcare, tribal self governance, even land and treaty rights. So the stakes are really high.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
On The Just Enough Family, The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy is telling the story of the Steinberg family, once amongst the richest families in NYC. The juicy part of the story seems to be how Saul Steinberg, the head of the family, lost everything. But that's not why I'm hooked. The Just Enough Family drags you onto the pages of this family saga, which contains unfiltered moments with memorable characters, rich rich rich 1980's New York, and enough family drama to fill TWO podcasts. I have been googling everyone.
hey.
🎙️Last week, Ella Watts and I did a presentation at The London Podcast Festival, If / Then: Where Every Listener Will Find Something to Love. We went back and forth with non-fiction/fiction podcast recommendations. I cried and accidentally screen-shared a text from my dad, Ella got me pumped to listen to more fiction, and the good news is you can still watch if you missed it. Shows we recommended: Midnight Burger, My Year in Mensa, The Vanishing Act, Finding Fred, The Loop, It’s Nice To Hear You, and Love & Luck. It was such a fun conversation.
🎙️Sign up for my new podcast marketing newsletter, Podcast Marketing Magic. Issue one is coming soon. I am also tweeting a podcast marketing tip every day for 100 days as part of the #Tweet100 campaign.
🎙️Arielle Nissenblatt’s EarBuds newsletter and podcast are must haves for podcasters and podcast nuts. This week she’s spotlighting The Pitchfork Review, where Editor-in-Chief Puja Patel digs deep into the week's best new music and rising artists, plus all the industry news and culture you need to know. Subscribe to EarBuds here and here.
🎙️I made a Harklist about my favorite moments of people talking about Ted Lasso. There are interviews with Jason Sudeikis, Juno Temple, and Hannah Waddingham, and some in-depth discussions about Ted’s positivity and whether or not the show is one big ad for Apple products.
📬#Girlboss Cookie Passell (my mom) has started an I Love Italian Movies Film Club. Subscribe here ($5/month) if you want access to Italian movies that are restricted to everyone in the US except for Cookie and her friends.
💎BTW💎
🎙️As Dan Taberski (Running from Cops, Finding Richard Simmons, The Line) says on his new show 9/12, there are lots of shows with shocking audio from September 11th. That’s not what this show is. It’s about what happened the day after September 11th and how one day turned into an entire ethos for America. The first episode, This Strange Story, sets the scene perfectly: the crew for a reality TV show called The Ship, which was recreating the voyage that Captain James Cook made when he discovered Australia and New Zealand in the 18th century. To the crew, who was set in a world apart from the day’s news, 9/11 was just a strange story, and their strange story was living in a rare moment of knowing but not knowing, and if you don’t know it, is it even real? The second episode, Too Soon, ranks high on my list of favorite podcast episodes—it studies how comedians were able to make sense of the world beginning September 12th. Again, Dan finds a perfect tiny moment to pull it all together. An Onion staffer writes a headline, “Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake.” This is how The Onion masterfully marched head first into comedy with nuance and sensitivity, and made people laugh when we weren’t sure if we were allowed to. Dan has looked at a day that has become and idea and found stories that speak volumes, showing us how that happened.
🎙️The story of Arpana Jinaga seems torn from the plot of a horror movie. On Oct. 31, 2008, the 24-year-old dressed up in a Little Red Riding Hood costume for a Halloween party she was hosting at the Valley View Apartments in Redmond, Washington. Before the night was over, she was dead. Who killed Arpana? Was it the guy in the devil mask, the guy dressed as Jesus, the bank robber, the construction worker? And why did they do it? In Suspect, journalists Matthew Shaer and Eric Benson return to the scene of the crime and interview party guests and authorities comb through forensic evidence and DNA samples, and consult a psychic in an attempt to find out.
🎙️I love HiberNation and don’t think enough people are listening to it. It’s about sleep (brought 2 U by Headspace) but the priority seems to be just great, well-produced stories that end up talking about sleep. In Sleeping Together, Mallika Rao wonders why humans feel like they need to sleep in the same beds, even though many of them end up sleeping better when they sleep apart. She speaks to a widow who takes you through the experience of learning to sleep by herself. It reminded me of my friend’s mother, who recently lost her husband, and how I constantly thought about what it would be like to adapt to sleeping alone after all those years of marriage. But don’t we all love to hog the bed sometimes? In this episode you get a moving story and a lesson on why scientifically we might want to share a bed with someone.
🎙️Rabia Chaudry (Undisclosed, The Hidden Djinn, author of Adnan’s Story and Executive Producer of The Case Against Adnan Syed) is telling us bedtime stories to keep us awake with Nighty Night, a fictional anthology series that taps into legends and lore to create modern tales that are giving me goosebumps. I love this show, or what I’ve listened to so far, for the simplicity. It’s Rabia and her mic and some beautiful sound production, but nothing so complicated that you can’t just dip in to a story, and you can easily pick up one and be done. Kind of like Ghosts in the Burbs, I felt like a little kid sitting in the library, begging the librarian to tell just one more. Each story starts slowly to wrap you into a new world and set of characters, then delivers a situation that will leave you feeling unsettled.
🎙️Death Sex & Money’s When a Banker Becomes a Nun tells the story of Sister Josephine Garrett, who grew up Baptist and went on to lead a life that may feel familiar to many of us—she was a single career woman, a banker who managed about 100 people, and spent her money on her dog, brunches, clothes, and cigarettes. She was volunteering at a Catholic church when she heard a calling (she calls it “a brick in the face”) to become a nun. I was so interested to hear about her journey because there’s something so immense about someone so sure to take this path. (I wanted to be a nun when I was younger.) The stress she felt from her job and the solution she found. I loved hearing her describe the silence of the Catholic church, so different than what her Baptist upbringing provided her with, the power of confession, the definition of love, and how we spend our time. I don’t think this episode will drive people to the nunnery, but I do think it could make people reexamine their relationship with faith and living simply. (I know it did for me.)
🎙️I have enjoying The Sensemaker from Tortoise Media, a short show that offers a tiny story that gives depth to the day’s news. I was delighted to discover Tortoise has launched a show called The Playmaker, a show that makes sense of the world of football (or as we call it here, soccer) with tiny stories that (trust me, I kind of hate sports) are so non-sporty you’ll just think you’re listening to a nice little storytelling podcast. For example, Keith the Duck tells the story of a team that commemorated a dead duck named Keith with a moment of applause. (What is this, Ted Lasso? And why has nobody told me that this is the kind of cute shit happening at football matches? For this, I’d tune in!) I feel like The Playmaker is saying, “it’s okay, Lauren. We know you hate sports. But we are going to trick you into falling in love with soccer by showing you the heart and humanity behind it.”
🎙️Founded in 2019 by Ellen Scanlon and April Pride, How to Do the Pot began as a podcast that outlined important information about cannabis that women needed to know. Ellen and April aren’t working together on the show anymore—now Ellen is at the helm, honing in on the basics, helping women try pot, CBD, or edibles for the first time. The first six episodes are really good guides for…and this is where the brilliant name comes in…how to do the pot, like a novice. But the further you get into the episodes, the more nuanced the topics, like summertime strains to growing your own. There’s also a regular segment called “The First Time I Bought Legal Weed,” which lets women listeners tell the stories of their first legal weed purchases. Weed is such an unexplored topic, especially when coming from a woman’s perspective, and show is not just packing the facts, it’s telling great stories. It’s about people, too. And while you’re listening to them, you’ll learn a lot about pot.
🎙️John Hodgman was on With Friends Like These for an episode I never would have imagined working so well, but it did. John has been the “woke, white” judge on Judge John Hodgman for 10 years (you can listen to the episode that featured me and my mom here) and on Friends Like These, Ana Marie Cox interviewed him about his takeaways. The conversation made me think deeply about the show Judge John Hodgman, which is labeled a comedy show but is really about relationships. John says the questions haven’t changed a bit (they’re all basically about putting things in the dishwasher wrong) and shares his observations of the sexist nature of many of the questions. It’s never about the dishwasher, really, he says. It’s always about something else.
🎙️I received an interesting pitch for Valley Heat, it was more of a casual Apple Podcasts review than a pitch. Its strangeness piqued my interest and listening brought me to the fictional world of freelance insurance adjuster Doug Duguay, who is convinced that the pool guy is using his garbage cans to sell drugs. It’s a meta concept…the podcast is his fake podcast as he tries to get to the bottom of the case. You really get into his mind and hear a lot of his every day. It’s not laugh out loud funny, until you think about it too much, which I did, and in that case it’s very laugh out loud funny. The original music is relentlessly silly—it really commits to the joke. Billy Wayne Davis is one of the voices, and when I saw that I almost thought that I was dreaming. Listen if you’re in the mood for something pretty weird, and let me know if you laugh during the lengthy “frisbee golf” song.
🎙️Imaginary Worlds has an episode about Queer representation in children’s cartoons, beginning with Sailor Moon, which for many people, was the first place many queer kids were able to identify with a television show. The problem is it was a highly edited English-dubbed version, that did a clunky job trying to scrub away anything that hinted at queer content. Podcaster Dawn H and journalist Sara Century come on to recount their experiences watching Sailor Moon, and podcaster Thomas J. West and YouTube essayist Rowan Ellis join to talk about queerness in Disney cartoons, which is almost completely evil. It’s something I think about constantly, but I had never considered that when these characters are stripped of their queerness in remakes, they are often left to be completely flat. (LeFou in Beauty and the Beast.) Why we go over these hurdles to signal to kids that gay is bad is way too telling, and makes me think about that Revisionist History episode about The Little Mermaid I can’t shut up about.
🎙️I missed two entire seasons of Shirley Manson’s The Jump. I don’t know how this happened, but now I have tons of episodes to binge. (A batch of them dropped at the end of August.) On The Jump, Shirley invites artists to talk about one of their songs, and she’s such an emotionally intelligent, careful interviewer who is able to pick up on tiny nuances and things that only other songwriters can see and wonder about. I listened to the Alanis Morisette and Run the Jewels episodes. They’re sharp but substantial episodes that will give you new appreciation for the songs featured.
🎙️I was laughing my whole way through the Tig Notaro / Nate Berkus episode of the Spotify Original Can We Be Friends? On each episode, two celebrities meet for the first time to take a friendship compatibility test led by Spotify’s friendly A.I. system, Ruby. As they take the test, they have no idea who the other celebrity is. It’s like you’re on an awkward blind date but also listening to a casual interview show of the stars. The conversations feel really vulnerable and raw—the celebrities aren’t promoting anything or talking about themselves. The goal is to connect with the other person, and it’s fun to witness. (Spoiler alert: it did not appear to me that Tig an Nate would become friends, but the test proved me wrong. That initial what-I-perceived-to-be-awkwardness was fascinating to hear.)
🎙️If you missed Ashley Carman’s intoxicating article The Podcasting Hype House From Hell (how China’s biggest audio platform funded one man’s frat boy dreams,) Laci Mosley has an episode of Scam Goddess all about it. Along with Chris Gethard, she outlines the life of Peter Vincer, the man behind the hype house and the CEO of HiStudios, detailing all the wildly inappropriate things he did and what the Hype House was really like. I did read the original article (several times—do you have any idea how many people texted it to me in July?) but I was still tickled to hear detailed descriptions of the story through the lens of someone who is technically pro-scam, (Laci definitely draws a line between cool and uncool ways to scam, and this was definitely uncool.) Hearing Laci and Chris describe the people at the Hype House parties was better than reading it on my own—they had me laughing alone in the middle of a busy New York City street—as they point out, the people photographed at these events did not look like the podcasters I am used to seeing—they looked like fancy influencers who were probably really exited about Fyre Festival.
🎙️Catherine Monahon’s Material Feels is new to me—it’s a show that tells the stories about artists and their mediums. Podcast listeners and makers, I think you’ll love the episode I listened to with storytelling extraordinaire Hillary Rea, creator of Rashoman and a bunch of other beautiful things. Her tools are memory, voice and heart, and the stories she shares made me want to drop everything and write down a story of my own, yet wishing I was half as skilled as Hillary. She has such a distinct idea of herself and her craft, and her ability to create something with words from thin air seems magical. (Bonus recommendation: [re-]listen to Rashomon, a podcast where one family tells every side of the same story.)
🎙️Mementos is about the objects we treasure the most and the stories behind them, and it’s back with a beautiful episode called Crystal’s Hymm. Crystal’s grandfather was a Seventh Day Adventist preacher, and in her possession is the robe he wore for services. Hearing her talk about it, I felt like I was discovering it, too. But hearing Crystal talk about her grandfather was the meat of this episode—his passing, and how his death gave her a reason to celebrate him. The whole episode made me feel better about death, and it made me think about the objects in my life that may be cherished by the people I leave behind.
🎙️I love you!