😈 A satanic ashtray 🍪 Snackwell's ⚰️ The man who refused to die 🏰 Buddy Duquesne and Alice White✨
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
This week we’re getting to peek into the podcast app and listening life of Kate Hutchison, my friend business partner of Tink and Lasso.
Apps I use: I'm a bit OCD and you can definitely tell if you look at my iPhone's home screen. In my "Audio" folder, I have many many podcast apps, each with a theme/purpose. For instance, Apple podcasts is my go-to for news ("The Daily," "Up First," "Pivot," "Today, Explained"). Overcast is what I use to binge mini series or one season of a narrative show at a time ("Wind of Change," "The Dream," "Nice White Parents," "Moonface"). Castbox is for my new-agey health, wellness, personal development podcasts (like "The One You Feed," "Tarah Brach," "Deliciously Ella,") that I listen to mostly at the gym. Oh! And Pocket Casts for EVERYTHING else.
Listening time per week: Oh, wow. This totally varies. I have been more intuitive about what I'm listening to and have been spending a lot of time discovering new music I love and less time on podcasts. When I'm feeling anxious, my attention is the first thing to go. And did you know we're living in really uncertain times right now and that anxiety is a natural response to uncertainty? I should tell everyone who knows me-- if I seem distracted, it's actually because I'm feeling anxious. That being said, I tend to listen to at least 1-2 hours a day of shows and consistently feel guilty for not listening to more.
When I listen: Walking. Cleaning my apartment. Doing the dishes. At the gym. [insert every other boring answer here]
How I discover: Through work! God, do I love my job(s). Everyday, I get to think nonstop about podcasts (hence the guilt about not being able to listen to all of them!). I also get to work with the most special human being to ever be born, Lauren Passell. Lauren is my favorite person and a personal podcast recommendation machine. Basically, I get access to this newsletter IRL 24/7. Yep. I'm one lucky gal.
xoxo lp
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Those Happy Places: Buddy Duquesne and Alice White
Buddy Duquesne and Alice White are the hosts of Those Happy Places. Follow Buddy on Twitter here. Follow Alice on Twitter here. Follow the show on Twitter here.
How did you originally make the connection between theme parks and literature?
Buddy: I think Alice might agree with me when I say that this is a case of, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” We both have a background in close-reading literature and media for analysis. It was after our thousandth conversation about The Haunted Mansion that we decided that we may as well record it for posterity--and a podcast was born.
Alice: We were very lucky that back when we were in school, Southern California Resident Annual Passes were very cheap and Disneyland was only a twenty minute drive away. Having constant access to Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, Six Flags Magic Mountain, and Universal Studios Hollywood as kids made us very aware of how theme parks were marketed and developed, we saw them change around us for decades and always cared a lot about our experiences there. Talking about theme parks and comparing them to literature was always a part of our lives, it just took us getting Masters degrees and microphones to really get us started.
What is different about the way Disney parks tells stories?
Buddy: We’re big proponents of the Studio Theory of Theme Park Authorship--explored in Episode 44 of the show! The short answer is that each major player in the Theme Park space has its own particular “flavor” when it comes to storytelling. Disney, at its best, is atmospheric above all else. The classic attractions we find ourselves returning to again and again--both during visits and on the show for analysis--are all about creating a lasting mood by engaging every sense. This contrasts with, for example Universal’s parks, which focus on novelty and thrills. Both approaches are totally valid, but I guess you could argue that Disney’s best attractions have more staying power than Universal’s best, because they’re so effective at transporting their audiences to fully realized worlds.
Alice: I don’t have anything to add, isn’t he brilliant? I love Universal Studios so much but he’s right, the repeat ridings and staying power just aren’t the same.
What does your friendship bring to the show, and what does the show do for your friendship?
Alice: We’ve been inseparable since we were thirteen. We went to middle school, high school, AND undergrad together. When we ended up moving to opposite sides of the country for work, we started using the podcast as a way to always have contact with each other. Being able to be creative with my best friend is almost as good as having him nearby.
Buddy: Alice is my best friend on this, or any other, planet. I would not do this show with anyone else. I feel genuinely thankful for every episode that we’re able to produce, because it gives us a chance to set time aside to do something creative together. This is a brilliant hobby, in that we can take it with us wherever we are--and it’s turned into something we get to share with the world!
Fill in the blank. You will love Those Happy Places if you like ______.
Buddy: Oh man, this is a great question. I guess it’s too obvious to say Theme Parks in that blank, isn’t it? Alice, do you have any ideas?
Alice: Obvious but accurate! If you like theme parks, you’ll definitely like Those Happy Places. But I think the show also appeals to anyone who likes analyzing any kind of art or media. We like to say that there are so many podcasts about movies and TV shows and books who all do the same thing we do, but few people realize the kind of work and care that goes into writing and designing a ride. Anyone who is interested in learning more about the world around them might enjoy our show.
Has doing the show made you like Disney more or less?
Buddy: That’s a complicated question! I think it’s changed the ways that I appreciate the parks and resorts, for sure; one thing I think we’re not shy about sharing is just how near-and-dear Disneyland has always been to our hearts. We practically grew up at the parks, we both had stints as cast members, and now we’ve got this podcast. In general, I’d say that my fandom has gone from surface level--knowing the rides and attractions like the back of my hand, knowing the locations of most hidden Mickeys, and such--to analytical. Because of the show, I’m much more concerned with design, story structure, and the ways that environments communicate details to the audience.
Alice: I agree with Buddy, but to be honest I think sometimes it does make me like Disney less. It’s been things like our episode about Rainbow Capitalism (episode 31) and our examination about colonial elements in the Jungle Cruise (episode 15) that have made us have to take huge steps back and think about how we have seen the world as privileged people. Disney is a huge corporation that has given us so many wonderful things but like most corporations has a difficult history to swallow. I still love the parks and the films, but I’m far more critical than I used to be. Sometimes I learn a fun fact or discover something new and I fall in love again, those are the best days. But I think there’s room for both.
Buddy: I agree with Alice. If nothing else, the relationship got more complicated-- but we weren’t exactly viewing the parks through rose-tinted glasses to begin with. I’d say that the experience that changed my view of the parks most dramatically was working as a cast member--not just looking behind the curtain, but living there. Of course, stepping back and analyzing the rides and attractions as texts has been yet another layer on top of that!
What do you hope the show does for people?
Buddy: Gosh, more than anything, I just hope that our show is a comfortable, interesting, positive place that folks can visit at their leisure.
Alice: Same, I hope that people find that they’re learning and engaging with the work, but mostly I want to be a positive voice in a community of fans often fraught with drama.
What other shows do you love?
Buddy: Too many to count. The one podcast I’ll always shout about from the mountaintops is Campaign. It’s an actual-play RPG that, in my opinion, is the best in the format.
Alice: Good call, Buddy, I love Campaign. I listen to so many it’s hard to narrow down to just a few! I’m a big fan of Crooked Media and listen to several of their shows every week. I love 99% Invisible. Audio dramas like Valence, The Far Meridian, The Amelia Project, and The Bright Sessions. And a show I love that I think anyone who likes THP should listen to is Iconography by Charles Gustine. He is so good at finding the meaning and story behind the most iconic images in our culture.
Buddy: Iconography is an absolute treasure. I’m also listening to Hit the Bricks right now--it’s a fantastic retelling of The Wizard of Oz. But, yeah, we could really go on.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
The Secret Room’s Haunted Ashtray: Tale of the Goat Head has to go down as of the funniest, most charming secrets ever spilled. I don’t want to spoil it for you, and I’m not even sure if I could give the story any justice here, but basically a librarian in Iowa accidentally convinces her colleagues that the library has been taken over by Satan, all because she was making a satanic “Baphomet-”themed ashtray for her son. I love picturing this midwest mom/librarian trying to make something nice for her son and totally freaking out her coworkers. I can’t tell you how much this story tickled me. I want the film version!
💎BTW💎
🎙️I’ve been working with Marshall Allen, bandleader of The Sun Ra Arkestra, a bit. (He’s a friend.) I felt some urgency to get him on some podcasts to promote The Arkestra’s newest album Swirling. There is nothing like Sun Ra’s music, which has deeply influenced some of the greatest music today—The Roots, Todd Rundgren, Solange. And Marshall is still kickin’ it at 96, playing music every day at his house in Philadelphia, creating new music, and before COVID, touring the world. (I was lucky enough to see him play in New York right before the world shut down in March.) How much longer do we have to hear his stories of 8-hour sessions with Sun Ra and traveling the world with The Arkestra? Ari Shapiro and Noah Caldwell gave him some space on All Thing Considered, and the result is a really important piece of audio. An interview with a man leading an afro-futuristic movement into his old age. Listen to it and appreciate Marshall while we still have him. Listen to Swirling. Thank you to Ari and Noah for making this conversation happen!
🎙️For this episode of Heavyweight, we hear a sweet story from a non-Jonathan Goldstein voice, Heavyweight Senior Producer Kalila Holt, who is so subtly funny I kept thinking of quirky things she said later in the day after I listened. The story (a woman feels that she is being left out of family outings, despite the fact she wants to be close to them and has a particularly close relationship with her uncle) isn’t the best part. Kalila is. At moments I felt like she was trying to do the story in Jonathan Goldstein style, which is fine, because Jonathan has mastered this art form of investigative storytelling / therapy. But the moments when she strayed from Jonathan’s path and added her own twists are the parts I liked the most. Kalila has an understated, humbled style, that makes her incredibly likeable. The fact that she is presenting the story like someone who is trying really hard is part of the story. I loved it.
🎙️This episode of criminal is begging for a film treatment. In the 30s, a group of down-and-out men in New York City set out to take out a life insurance policy on a loner named Michael Malloy who frequented their favorite speakeasy, and then tried to kill him, making it look like an accident, multiple times. At first, they simply tried to buy him bottomless drinks, hoping he would drink himself to death, but that plan quickly became too expensive. Because Michael Malloy refused to die, despite multiple, various attempts by the trio. They seemed to have picked the absolutely wrong person to try to kill, and this story is a dark comedy of errors that reminds me of one of my favorite films in high school, which I’m sure is now highly problematic, Dead Man on Campus. The cherry on the top is how Michael Malloy didn’t seem to notice that there were 3 people trying to kill him. I’d like to think that I’d at least be getting some bad vibes.
🎙️I should start a podcast called “I Don’t Like True-Crime, But…” because I feel like every time I talk about true-crime I like, I end up unnecessarily defending myself. There is a lot of bad true-crime but there is a lot of great true-crime, like In The Dark! And of course I always listen to Crime Writers On…, where I discover my next true-crime binge. Crimes of the Centuries presents, in each episode, the story of a crime that we’ve all forgotten but was earth-shattering to people at the time. I was 3/4 way through the first episode thinking about what a fantastic job the host was doing (very to-the-point yet likeable, and thorough.) And then I googled the show and realized that the host is Amber Hunt, author and co-creator of Accused and Aftermath. So if you think you’re someone who doesn’t love true-crime, trust me that Crimes of the Centuries is good. It’s well-produced, these stories are gems, and Amber is perfect.
🎙️Vice’s Source Material is a new video and podcast series that tells stories using user generated content only. It’s like they’ve passed the mics/cameras to the people on the ground, allowing those closest to the stories be the ones telling us about them. This results in a closeness to the people in the stories and content that you don’t get from a third-party. Source Material cuts out the middle man. The first story I listened to was set aboard a cruise ship during COVID, where two cruise employees, Cassandra Grimbly and Riley Tench, found them laid off but stranded on the ship. Cassandra was quarantined in her tiny room while Riley, along with his girlfriend, had the ship to himself. This second option sounds like it could be fun. But you can see how being trapped would start to whittle away your sanity. The second piece was about the killing of David McAtee by the national guard during the BLM protests in Louisville, Kentucky, at a neighborhood barbecue. Kris Smith, the man with the mic, was at the party and gives us the purest account of what the event felt like and sounded like. He sounds like a real-ass reporter! And you can tell he takes pride in the work he’s done.
🎙️Maintenance Phase’s episode on Snackwell’s Cookies was a FULL FAT TREAT. Michael and Aubrey give a comprehensive history of the failed company and the bogus studies on diets that created an appetite for it. God bless them, they even taste some Snackwell cookies on mic, which sounded like a form of painful, sacrificial journalism.
🎙️Where it Hurts uses personal stories to tell us about failures in the American health system. The first season is set in Kansas, where Mercy Hospital Fort Scott was recently shuttered. What does the loss of a hospital do to a community that’s already battling drug problems? You can hear stats and numbers all day long, but these stories about specific struggles that real Americans are experiencing raises the stakes. What I Was Raised To Do introduces us to Josh, a teenager who dropped out of school to take care of his sick grandparents. When I listen to this podcast, I feel like I’m flipping through a photography book, seeing real people up close, and the details of their everyday lives.
🎙️iO Tillett Wright (The Ballad of Billy Balls!) was on Culture Call with a really interesting perspective on the country right now. iO just wrapped up 10 years traveling across the country to photograph 10,000 people of LGBTQ America. And iO learned a lot about himself—visiting these places made him confront the stereotypes he had grown up with about people in the south, people he assumed would not accept them. Our attitudes have changed about the queer community so much in 10 years! And iO probably has a better sense than most about the United States that many of us feel we don’t understand right now.
🎙️Tiny Victories is a new show from Maximum Fun about exactly what you think it is—stories of the little ways we can win every day, brought to you in 15-minute installments. Annabelle Gurwitch (author and ex co-host of Dinner and a Movie) and comedian Laura House are loveable and positive. Episode one, The People of Prehistoric Instagram, felt so unexpected—it’s a look at cave drawings from a historical and cultural perspective. Why are cave drawings a big deal? And how can celebrating them make us happier?
🎙️Why Are Dads is Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed’s project that seeks out what goes into being the (adult) child of a dad by looking at how fatherhood is depicted in pop culture. The episode on Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was fun, and like all episodes of this show, got me thinking about the film in a new way. What does it mean that Wayne Szalinski shrunk his children and was unable to find them? What’s the moral of the story? And while Sarah and Alex mention this, they do sort of bury the lede: Rick Moranis the human is literally the second best dad ever. (He would be #1 but then there’s mine.)
🎙️Zombified covers topics that are taking over our brains, like memes, screens, drugs, competition, and disease. It’s a product of The Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting (ZAMM,) a group that studies zombie behavior, which they define as an entity that is fully or partially under the control of another entity. Zombified episodes are unlike anything else you’ll find, interviews with interesting people speaking to something very specific, so specific I often think “how can there be an entire podcast episode about this?” But then I listen and realize a new world has been completely opened to me. The most recent episode was with American Hysteria’s Chelsey Weber-Smith (a Lasso client!) who talks about conspiracy theories with Athena. As always, Athena asks “what does your version of the zombie apocalypse look like now?” And Athena seems surprised to hear Chelsey describe the world we are living in now. A divided country, armed militias, fearful people clinging to outrageous beliefs—I listened to this the morning after the election and it chilled me to the bone.
🎙️Prophets Over People from American Shadows starts with the story of William Miller, a religious leader who kept warning people of the second coming of Christ. And although his multiple miscalculations drove his followers to depression, he was able to begin a movement called Millerism. Compare that to the story of Rhoda Wakeman, who, after her husband almost beat her to death, she says she died and was turned into a prophet. These are strange pieces of our history that illustrates fire and brimstone thinking, and how fear can cause people to cling to irrational beliefs. I was just listening to Chelsey on Zombified, talking about how fear is dividing Americans and has basically created QAnon. These stories feel like faraway fairy tales but also extremely relevant at the same time. If Rhoda and William had had social media, they would probably be our President right now.
🎙️I love local podcasts for so many reasons. Listening to them is such a unique way to experience a place, and the hosts have likely started the podcast not because they want to make money or feel obligated to have a podcast, but because they really care about their subject. I have been talking to Jordan Gass-Poore' for a long time, and I’m so glad her show Local Switchboard is back for another season. It’s a local look at the news from NYC’s five boroughs, from a women-led team. Completely beautiful, underreported stories,. The first episode of the new season, The Ghosts Get Furloughed, covered what the New York City Village Halloween Parade looked like during pandemic, and interviewed the owner of the Lower East Side’s neo-burlesque venue, The Slipper Room, about what the future holds for a small entertainment space with so much to lose.
🎙️American Hysteria looks a little difference this season. Chelsea is still curating perfectly produced, well-written pieces on “the fantastical thinking and irrational fears of Americans,” but they’re interspersing interviews with people who will deepen your understanding on the subjects. Chelsey just talked to Jason Stanley about fascism, and this episode, like all of the latest episodes, feels eerily relevant right now. (Full disclosure, Chelsey is a Lasso client.)
🎙️So many podcasts sprung from George Floyd’s murder, and many of them felt so important at the time but probably won’t stand, or they will return to regular programming. Resistance, a new show from Gimlet about the front lines of the Black Lives Matter movement, is the most powerful snapshot that somehow captures the anger, hope and energy of movement with incredibly personal stories. Incredibly personal. Coach G is such a sweet surprise of a story—the only Black man in Harvard, Nebraska talks about organizing the town’s first BLM protest. Another episode stars 22-year-old Chi Ossé, who went from helping to organize BLM protests to running for a seat on New York City Council next year.
🎙️If you’re missing Lovecraft Country Radio, there’s a tiny bit of Lovecraft content with this episode of Dope Labs: Presently Futuristic. (Actually a lot of content—Dope Labs pointed that there’s a show called Black GirlsWatching which covered the show season by season.) The HBO series is so rich with historical references and tiny nods and secret messages, I need all the help I need to capture every bit it has to offer. Presently Futuristic talks about how Lovecraft Country afro-futurism, black horror, and science fiction.
🎙️I relistened to one of my favorite episodes of one of my favorite podcasts this week, Lizard People’s PETA is a Sham, and I recommend you listen to it. Brona C. Titley and Tom Neenan try to convince Caitlin that the reason PETA is so boldly in-your-face annoying about veganism is because Big Meat is behind it, driving people to hate vegans and eat more meat. I have listened to this episode so many times and always laugh through the whole thing. And I’m not kidding—I think Brona and Tom are onto something.
🎙️Most people I know are relieved that Joe Biden won the presidency so now we can all go back to worrying about COVID only. Starting Friday, Story Collider will be releasing Stories of COVID-19, real human stories from all across the spectrum of experience of the pandemic. I listened to episode two, which is the story of a woman who was laid off from her marketing job and found herself working as a contact tracer. One of her anecdotes about keeping in touch with an elderly man is a reminder of how in trying to stomp us out, COVID allowed us to hold on to each other. It’s one of the most beautiful COVID stories I’ve ever heard.
🎙️I don’t think we use the words “yoga” and “cultural appropriation” in the same sentence enough, and I was grateful for this episode of Immigrantly, Decolonizing Yoga. (Also grateful for the podcast Yoga Is Dead—listen to White Women Killed Yoga.) This episode gets into a lot of stuff I did not know about yoga, but the part that struck me was about colonization. Susanna Barkataki talks about how when she enters a Westernized yoga studio she feels “a stranger in her own land," how this experience parallels India’s dehumanizing time under British occupation, and the weird dichotomy that colonization created, breaking the ancient lineage of a practice that developed not from one religion, but alongside Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Islam.
🎙️I love you!