🥬 Cabbage Patch Kids, walking, prison riot, newsies 🚶🏼♀️ The Constant’s Mark Chrisler 🔎
💌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 Ricardo Osuna, Business Manager of Bello Collective, Producer of Copper & Heat, and Partnerships Manager of FFW digital agency.
App I use: Pocket Casts and NPR One
Listening time per week: Probably averages out to around 10 hours per week. Depending on the week it may be less or it may be a lot more.
When I listen: I use the morning to catch up on the news podcasts I subscribe to. Right now my line-up for that time of day is a rotation of NPR and local public radio news shows that I listen to via the NPR One app. I’m also an avid music listener and that makes up most of my listening during working hours.
I usually use evenings and weekends to catch up on everything else I listen to. Similar to a lot of people my listening happens while I’m doing chores or going on a walk. But there are some shows that I really love carving out time for to give my undivided attention to. For those podcasts (which right now includes Appearances, De Eso No Se Habla, and Other Men Need Help) I usually listen to later at night, sitting alone on the couch, maybe with a cup of tea for company.
How I discover: Newsletters like this one and Twitter have pointed me to many shows I love. But the single biggest source for new shows on my feed is definitely through the Bello Collective and specifically our Slack. We have a Slack channel for our community (shout out to our amazing patrons and supporters!) and folx share all sorts of interesting shows they’re listening to there.
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
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The Constant’s Mark Chrisler
Mark Chrisler is the host of The Constant. Follow The Constant on Twitter here.
Kindly introduce yourself and tell us what you do!
I’m Mark Chrisler (pronounced like the car) and I tell stories about bad ideas, mistakes and failures.
How did you get introduced to the audio space? Have you always loved it, before podcasting?
When I was a teenager my sister-in-law lived with my brother for a while in the family home. She insisted that any radio other than NPR made her have nightmares. So, NPR ruled the roost. In the late 90s and early 2000s, I fell asleep every night to episodes of This American Life, which I sideloaded onto my PC. And I spent years trying to get in with TAL--the stories of my pitches and interactions with them in my early twenties are absolutely mortifying.
But I never pursued audio seriously. I was always a playwright first, and a monologist second, and it wasn’t until The Constant that it occurred to me that I could probably monologue outside of a theater.
I was introduced to your show via The Foolkiller, which is such an exciting series. Particularly the ending! How did it feel, when you were close to the end without a real resolution? Were you worried about how the episode would pan out? And then how did it feel to finally stumble upon one?
It was a really strange experience. For anybody reading who doesn’t know, The Foolkiller was a mysterious submarine that was pulled out of The Chicago River in the middle of downtown back in 1915, and I spent an obnoxious amount of time trying to figure out where it came from and who built it. For a couple of months I was on the scent of one particular inventor, and kept searching for the “ah ha!” piece of evidence that would seal the whole thing up, Hercule Poirot style. On the show, I manage to pull it out of the fire in just such a fashion, but in my actual real-time research, I didn’t get that moment; I felt I was still missing something, up until the point that I laid out everything I had learned and realized “oh, I guess I’ve pretty much solved this after all.” I was blinded by the quest for a smoking gun to the point that I didn’t realize I was already holding one (or maybe several).
Have there been episodes you wanted to start, but for one reason or another, couldn't finish?
So many. I’m a one-man shop, and I produce a new episode every two weeks without many breaks. It’s an insane production schedule that I wouldn’t recommend for anyone. The one virtue it has going for it is that it keeps me constantly on deadline, which on the one hand is stressful and on the other pushes against my natural slothfulness.
But it does frequently mean that I get a few days into researching a story before realizing that I won’t be able to put it together in time. Those tend to pile up in a list of “some day” episodes that I dream of making on the mythical day I get ahead of the game.
There are also episodes that I get a ways into before realizing they’re not a good fit for me. The first bar that every story I tell needs to clear is that it is, well, a story. There are tons of interesting factoids out there that don’t ultimately conform to the strictures of narrative, and while I’ve gotten pretty good at finding story-shaped vessels to pour facts into (it’s probably my only real skill), there are times where that’s simply not possible.
For instance, if you go searching for them, you’ll find that there are a lot of medieval European drawings and paintings of crocodiles with human faces. And if you look into it you’ll discover that the reason for this is the most obvious one: a bunch of medieval scholars were confused about what crocodiles looked like, and thought they had faces (sometimes upside down). It’s a really weird and wacky and wonderful thing, but it doesn’t have a shape; it reads as trivia rather than a journey.
What do you hope the show does for people?
This is the question I try to keep asking myself. At the most fundamental level, The Constant is at cross-purposes with itself, because on one hand it’s about breeding skepticism, and on the other it’s about appreciating what we’ve learned.
If you lean too far over the former edge, you get a cynical sort of nihilism, where there is no truth, where everything is wrong and you can build a reality out of whatever your prejudice wishes. But if you fall off the other side, you end up in much the same situation: you default to believing in one or another sort of inerrant corpus of Knowledge or Science or Dogma. Naturally, whatever that thing is also tends to confirm our prejudices, too.
For instance, I did an episode about the early days of the twentieth century, when people used radiation for just about anything they could think of, including a lot of medicine and health supplements. It’s easy to take that story and say “see? Medicine doesn’t know anything, and that’s why I think vaccines cause autism.”
Or, you can look at science as a progressive process that’s constantly improving and heading towards truth. That’s closer to correct, but it can lead to an unearned level of certitude; our past errors become simply things to cluck our tongue at and say “I can’t believe what people used to think.”
While The Constant is ostensibly a history podcast, and frequently a science history podcast, I think of it as really being an epistemology podcast: it’s about why we think we know what we think we know, and why we’re often wrong.
I hope that means that people walk away understanding why what we think we’re right about today is different from what we were wrong about yesterday, but also why we’re still likely to be surprised tomorrow.
Why are you the perfect host for this show?
I’m sure I’m not! I’m not a historian, or a scientist, or a researcher. I’m a pretty good storyteller, but that’s a double-edged sword: narratives can be compelling and insightful, but they can also be manipulative and misleading. The fear of the power of storytelling, especially in a non-fiction setting, is something I grapple with all the time, and I’m only crossing my fingers that I come out on top most of it.
Aside from that, the best qualification I can dredge up is that I’m obsessive-compulsive, and have dealt with that since I was a teenager. OCD manifests itself in myriad ways and shapes, but for me--especially as an adolescent--it means a lot of intrusive thoughts.
If you just see the phrase “intrusive thoughts” it might call to mind hallucinations or delusions--voices in one’s head--but intrusive thoughts aren’t like that. They don’t seem to come from an external entity; there’s no voice to talk to you. They’re just things that you don’t want to think, but think anyway.
The version of this that a lot of people know is being afraid of heights because you’re afraid you’ll jump. You don’t want to jump--that’s why you’re afraid--but there’s a thing that seems like a part of you suggesting you will.
For me, dealing with a rather constant barrage of intrusive thoughts for the last twenty-odd years has meant forming a break in my mind where I regularly stop to ask myself where the thing I’m thinking comes from, and whether I can trust it. I do that because it’s necessary for me to function, but the habit also leaks out into higher-order questions: “Do I really know that? What makes me think so?”
Then I get a little cocky and think “I’m probably less likely to be mistaken, since I’m running all these checks,” and I have to remind myself that it doesn’t work that way, either! You can’t proof against error; you can only dampen your surety a little, and probably never the right amount or in the right places.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
I always joke with my friends that although I am practically forty, I still feel like a child. On Rough Translation’s Welcome to the New World, we meet Syrian refugee Naji Aldabaan, who says he hasn’t felt like a child since he was ten. That is when his father was arrested in Syria, leaving Naji to be “the man of the house.” The decision to flee Syria was a heavy burden placed upon Naji’s tiny shoulders. And because life in America was far from dreamy, Naji felt a lot of guilt and questioned if he did the right thing. Many moments in this episode were, pardon my language, punches to the nuts. From Naji’s grandmother calling him from Syria when Naji landed in the US, right after Trump’s travel bans, to say “I hope we see each other in heaven, because we will probably never see each other in this life,” to Naji’s family receiving racist death threats in the states, to young Naji asking his father to buy him a gun. It’s not the story of a boy you hear every day. Gregory Warner talks to Jake Halpern, who has been following the Albadaan family story from the first day of their arrival. He created a Pulitzer-prize winning comic strip chronicling the Albadaan’s journey, which is now available in graphic novel format in a book called Welcome To The New World. Jake talks about what goes into telling a story like Naji’s, comparing it to other stories of children with innocence lost.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Yesterday afternoon, just as I was putting the final touches on this thing, I lost my entire draft in Substack, the whole thing. I didn’t waste a single second trying to figure out how it happened, I just started writing it all over again. I didn’t think I could recreate it—I have no idea how many hours I dedicate to this stupid newsletter per week, but finding out and admitting this number to you would probably embarrass me. If this newsletter seems rushed or less loving, I apologize, that is why. But this whole incident has reminded me that I should thank you for reading Podcast The Newsletter! I do put a lot of time into it. Thank you for making me feel like it isn’t a complete waste of time.
🎙️Hark, the podcast discovery app that I have been hashtag blessed to be working on for the past few months, has soft-launched. It’s so beautiful and powerful, I can’t wait for you to see it. It will be available to everyone in early 2021, but you can download it in the app store with a code, which I can give to you. Let me know if you’d like to play around with Hark and I’ll send a code your way! lauren@tinkmedia.co
🎙️Over the weekend, Justin and I put up our Christmas tree to the tune of Jamie Loftus’ table read for her screenplay Santa University, the story of a University where santas (Glory Hole Santa, Conjoined Twin #2 Santa…) come together to fight to the death to be named Grand Santa. Jamie adds to this story every year (listen to parts one, two, and three) and I’m hoping we get another installment this year. It’s one hundred million miles away from any Christmas content you’ve ever heard, shows off Jamie’s sharp writing skills, is hilarious, and showcases the voices of some of my favorite podcasters. (Caitlin Durante, Edgar Momplaisir, Anna Hossnieh, Shereen Lani Younes, Jack O'Brien, Miles Gray, Robert Evans, Jacquis Neal…) If you were charmed by the first two episodes of Jamie’s newest project Lolita Podcast (and I’ll say it again…listen to My Year in Mensa) then you’ll love hearing this other side of Jamie. Santa University is slightly less academic, but just as funny and smart.
🎙️I am a huge fan of Chelsey Weber-Smith of American Hysteria. [Full disclosure: Chelsey is a client but I loved the show before I met Chelsey…for the writing, the humor, the energy, the sound, and the way Chelsey is able to let us into their mind to make sense of things that often have never really made sense to me before.] Their new project Walk With Me is taking a totally new direction. It’s a podcast (on the American Hysteria feed for now, but will be Patreon-only) that lets us accompany Chelsey on their walking route. We get to hear Chelsey crunching through leaves and battling through wind, but this is also reflective and vulnerable. The podcast’s name is accurate—it feels exactly like you are walking alongside Chelsey. I write to you sitting on the couch with an injury that has kept me on my couch for a week (and writhing in pain all night...feel free to text in the middle of the night. I'll be up!) Walking with Chelsey was a little escape. Hearing them talk about the yellow fall leaves gave me intense flashback to walking across my boarding school campus in Doc Martins.
🎙️There are too many good podcasts to waste time writing about the bad ones, but I don’t think I’m punching down when I say what the fuck is going on with Bill Gates and Rashida Jones’ podcast? On the first episode with Dr. Fauci, Rashida Jones actually asks Bill Gates, “do you take precautions, are you careful not to get COVID?” The entire episode felt like a PSA for washing your hands? (I’ll save you some time: yes, you should.) Hard-hitting stuff. I imagine this podcast was insanely expensive and had to pass through the hands of a few smart people. I would like to start a podcast called “How Did Bill Gates and Rashida Jones Ask Big Questions Get Made?”I have no idea for whom or why this podcast happened.
🎙️I was completely underwhelmed and disappointed with the Unsolved Mysteries television reboot, but I have found that Anatomy of Murder has stepped in to meet my need for quick, satisfying true-crime stories. The stories are intriguing and the episodes are tiiiiiight. (And I mean, like, both well-edited totally cool) I think what makes this show stand out, though, is the hosts. Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi (career homicide prosecutor and host of True Conviction) and Scott Weinberger (three-time Emmy-award winning Investigative Journalist, and founder of Weinberger Media, which produces true-crime content) bring themselves into the stories but not too much, the perfect amount. They arm you with everything you need to know to understand the story. Start with: The Evil That Lurks.
🎙️Femlore pulls out the old Norse mythology text book to tell us about that one time Thor’s hammer (penis?) was stolen, and how he had to dress as a bride to try to get it back. I don’t know what the story’s true intention was (I was not paying attention for most of high school, when I was probably supposed to learn about it at one point) but it seems like a completely cool gender-bending story that speaks to masculinity and male vulnerability. If I had known these stories were this cool I would have paid more attention to my required reading! For Thor to get his hammer (penis?) back, he had to do something incredibly feminine. It’s a story that paints a picture of an ancient world that plays with gender lines. The guest is Shu Matsuo Post, who wrote I Took Her Name, a book about the decision to take his wife’s last name after he married.
🎙️If you’re into the recent wave of cult/scam genre podcasts, or if you loved Jane Marie’s The Dream, I think you’ll like The Orgasm Cult. At the center of the story is One Taste, an organization founded by Nicole Daedone that intends to help women achieve a state of orgasmic meditation, at a very steep price. (One of the retreat packages is $60K for all-inclusive.) Praised by some (goop,) but questioned by most, One Taste is made up of instructors across the country who are paid almost nothing to entice others to join by having sex with them. So it’s a show about cults, but also an expose on the wellness industry, and more evidence that the reason women will go to outrageous lengths for their health is because they often aren’t believed by their regular doctors.
🎙️Are you all caught up with Family Secrets? It’s SO good this season—each episode feels better than the last. On Pulp Fictions, Dani talks to Julia McKenzie Munemo, who for years harbored a secret about her late father—he authored a series of slavery porn books. It’s a secret she didn’t want to admit to her husband Ngoni, a black man from Zimbabwe, or herself. And parts of her secret seem to have been wiped from her memory. Grappling with this was an interesting journey. Is it easy or impossible to sweep shame under the rug, especially when the shame is not yours alone? How would she tell her children about their grandfather and the racist legacy in their family? Dani tees Julia up to release everything about her story. And somehow this very bad thing ends up feeling quite good.
🎙️Source Material reports on stories without the reporter, using real audio and interviews, and a bit of narration. The resulting pieces feel current and urgent, and listening, you feel like you’re in the front seat. Or even in the middle of the action. Ware State Prison Riot opens with a Georgia teen named Riley Brown, who saw some Facebook and Tik Tok videos being broadcast from inside a nearby prison. The videos, which were taken on inmates’ contraband cell phones, showed an uprising happening in live time. Then the livestreams went dead. Sources from all directions came together to fill in the blanks of the story—an inmate’s wife, a correctional officer, and a local teenager who aggregated the videos. I love this unique format of storytelling, and listening is experiencing the news in a way I don’t think has been done anywhere else.
🎙️On Last Day, Stephanie Wittels Wachs traces the last day of Tali Kritzer, who took her life and left behind emotionless, thorough, almost clinical documentation explaining why she left. Lots of people who lose a loved one to suicide say they wish they knew why. But what happens when you get what you asked for? Stephanie talks to Tali’s mother and sisters to put together the portrait of a tortured woman who felt compelled to leave her family with tough answers to any questions they might have. This type of informative suicide is rare, and there is a lot to learn from it, and a lot to learn from Tali’s family, who have been forced to figure out what all of this means.
🎙️On The Colored Girl Beautiful, Aseloka Smith tells stories about Black womanhood with personal narrative, interviews, and letters to Emma Azalia Hackley, who wrote the 1916 book also called The Colored Girl Beautiful, a book which talked about Black women and love, personal acceptance, marriage, work and motherhood. The result is a collection of deeply personal pieces that match up Aseloka’s own experience as a Black women with the messages in Emma Azalia Hackley’s book. Aseloka is back for a new season, the first episode is a powerful interview with Morgan Jerkins (a Tink client!), author of This Will Be My Undoing and Wandering in Strange Lands. Morgan feels like a warm sage, doling out sensible advice from her heart and life experiences, as she talks about growing up with lighter skin, attending Princeton, and deciding to put her experience to words. I think you will listen to this interview and feel an urgency to read all of Morgan’s writing, and listen to all of The Colored Girl Beautiful if you haven’t already.
🎙️I had no idea that one way American Indians were assimilated into American culture was in part through the game of American football. This Radiolab story documents The Carlisle Indian School, an institution formed in 1879 to turn (basically kidnapped) American Indian children into…Americans, a process that stripped them of their humanity and past. Like man of our American stories, this one is so convoluted, starting in a potentially well-meaning place before turning into another racist part of our history.
🎙️Toy crazes come and go, but the Cabbage Patch Kids frenzy in the 80s seems to have broken the mold of toy crazes that came before and after them. People were paying ridiculously inflated prices or knocking each other over in toy stores to get their hands on one. But these dolls weren’t even cute. I mean scientifically, they do not possess the characteristics that we think of as endearing. What made us go crazy for these strange toys? There’s a real answer, outlined in an episode of Decoder Ring.
🎙️On Public Intellectual, Jessa Crispin tackles a question that has been lingering in the air for four years, since Trump came to office: where is all of the good art we were promised we’d get? Historically, hard times are often times when art flourishes, and in 2016, lots of people said that although the world may be collapsing, art could not be stopped. Jessa is joined by Caesura’s Allison Hewitt Ward to discuss why this time, we couldn’t turn pain into beautiful art, and why the state of the art world today is so unappealing to and out of touch with so much of America.
🎙️On I’m Not a Monster, journalist Joshua Baker is trying to sort fact from fiction in the story of an American family who found themselves in the heart of the Isis caliphate in Raqqa, Syria. A woman named Lori receives an email from her sister, Sam Sally, who claims her husband has trapped her and her son in Syria, and has become a sniper for Isis. Hearing from Lori illustrates how strange and terrifying the situation is. Joshua is talking to everyone, from Sam’s family to Isis fighters, using FBI recordings to put this puzzle together. I was hooked on this show in the first five minutes of episode one, and I cannot wait to find out what Sam is hiding.
🎙️VICE News Reports has done such a great job with this Armed project. It has made the idea of arming teachers in schools go from seeming very strange and cloudy and not real, to very real colorful and scary and happening right now. The last episode had a conversation with a principal of a charter school in Florida, who, thanks to a new law, must arm someone in her school. This means she can hire someone (which is too expensive) or arm the teachers who are already there (she doesn’t want to do this.) So what does she do? She gets a gun for herself.
🎙️Why Are Dads? ran a bonus episode from their Patreon about Saved By The Bell that was so much fun. It’s taking a look at Zack Morris’ two dads—his real father and Mr. Belding. I have never seen an episode of Saved By The Bell but I have picked up a lot of it from paying attention to the zeitgeist. I am obsessed with talking about it. One of the first podcasts I fell in love with was April Rich’s Go Bayside! (which I can only find on YouTube now) and I swear to god Zack To The Future is one of my favorite podcasts that came out this year. There is just so much to unpack, and Sarah and Alex are able to perfectly sum up the zaniness of Zack Morris’ relationships with his enormous-cell-phone-toting father and the kind of pathetic but technically good natured Mr. Belding.
🎙️So many times, listening to this episode of Pessimists Archive (How To Communicate With The Future) I thought, oh my goodness! I had never thought of that before! It’s all about why communicating with the future is so hard, why time capsules don’t work, and why we aren’t good at listening to messages from the people who came before us. There’s a great interview with Jon Lomberg, a specialist in “long term and extraterrestrial communication,” about how he was tasked to warn future people away from nuclear waste.
🎙️I don’t always listen to Dear Therapists, but when I do, I make sure that it’s a good one. (My mom calls me up and says, “Lauren, you simply must listen to today’s Dear Therapists.”) We both were drawn into Molly’s Father’s Suicide, a story about a cruel mother and her damaged daughter, and how they are healing after the suicide of Molly’s dad. Molly’s mom told her that in a suicide note (that Molly did not see,) her father blamed Molly for killing himself. This seemed to be the tip of the iceberg when it came to all of the toxicity Molly and her mom had to work through. It’s a painful story that hosts Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch handle with care. Every once in awhile, you hear someone on a podcast and their story and voice stick with you, you think about them later and wonder how they are. I have found myself doing that with Molly all week.
🎙️”If a giant blood-sucking monster were ravaging the country killing thousands of people and terrorizing millions more, the media would never provide us “hacks” or “plans” or “tricks” to cope with the giant blood-sucking monster. It would ask the obvious question: What are those in power doing to stop the monster from killing and terrorizing in the first place?” On Citations Needed, the giant blood-sucking monster is mental illness, and Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson take a sharp look at how our media and politicians are completely tone deaf when it comes to helping Americans through feelings of depression and loneliness during a pandemic. We’re often told repeatedly, in the same media sources, to take “Me Time,” to journal it out, to take a bubble bath, but depression can’t be solved with cutesy life tips. It’s going to take something nobody wants to talk about, big policy changes. It’s not just hard to be happy when you don’t have enough money to feed your family. It’s impossible. This episode is a thought-provoking look at how our country deals with mental health, and includes a conversation with Colette Shade, who writes about mental health, that drives home the fact that social problems require social solutions.
🎙️I love you!