🐘 Dirty Dancing dads, ancient elephants, Somalian letter tapes, bananas 🍌 California City's Emily Guerin 🏜️
💌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 Ashley Lusk, editor of Bello Collective.
App: My day job is also in audio, so I have all the apps on my phone, which allows me to see how shows present differently on different platforms. It’s also a great way to see how platforms help listeners discover new shows.
My personal go-to listening app is Pocketcasts. The “listening history” feature alone makes it worth the effort of subscribing to your favorite shows on a new platform, and Darian Muka curates one of the best Discovery pages anywhere.
Listening time per week: 10-14 hours a week
When I listen: I listen to short news shows on the smart speaker while getting ready and then I pick a long-time favorite to listen to while I’m in the shower. I’ll listen to something quiet as I try to fall asleep. On the weekends, I listen exclusively to new shows and will decide which ones to recommend for The Bello Collective.
How I discover: Using a very complicated workaround between Kill the Newsletter and Feedly, I subscribe to many, many publications about the industry. On Sundays, I read them all cover-to-cover, like a magazine. I find endless joy in the publications that look at podcasts thematically, or from a particular point of view. Right now I’m trying to find more international publications so I can discover more shows from outside the US, but in the meantime, I’ll often switch the location of my podcast app to another country for a week or two just to see what’s popular in other parts of the world. I also subscribe to The Listener recommendation feed, which fills my queue with episodes that are surprising and wide-ranging.
Notes from Ashley: For Bello Collective, I’m listening to as many new podcasts as I can—I’m in constant discovery mode. That creates a challenge when I find a podcast that I really enjoy: Where do I fit it into my routine?
1.2x is the perfect listening speed. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Up next in Ashley’s queue…
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
California City's Emily Guerin
Emily Guerin is a senior reporter at KPCC, the NPR station in Los Angeles, the host of the LAist Studios podcast California City. Follow her on Twitter here.
How did you get introduced to the audio space? Have you always loved it, before podcasting?
I didn’t start making radio full time until I moved to North Dakota in 2014 to cover the oilfield for Prairie Public Radio. For five years before that, I’d been doing the bad economy hustle: alternating low and unpaid journalism jobs and internships with similarly low-paid gigs leading wilderness trips and teaching environmental education.
So I had a weird resume, and I think I got the job because almost no one else was willing to move to North Dakota. But I got lucky there, because I had a wonderful editor and talented colleagues who taught me how to write for the ear, how to sound like myself while recording, and how to gather good tape.
I realized that making radio just worked for my brain in a way that print did not. NPR-style radio stories felt like little form poems: I found the boundaries of the format freeing. I also liked the intimacy of it. I liked that gathering good tape required me to sit in people’s kitchens and hold a microphone six inches from their faces as I asked them personal questions about their lives. I liked physically hearing people’s voices, versus reading their quotes. I also liked that I got to put people on the radio who almost never were on the radio.
How did you become aware of California City, and why did you decide it was an excellent topic for a podcast?
When I first moved to LA I was the environment reporter at KPCC. It was summer 2016 and the drought was still going strong. I learned that this little city in the desert I’d never heard of before, California City, was having a really hard time saving water. So I went out there to find out why, and ended up learning that it had to do with the fact that this real estate developer had planned the city’s infrastructure for half a million people, but very few of them every came. Now, there were all these rusted water lines snaking beneath the empty desert, bursting spectacularly.
While I was there, someone I met mentioned two interesting things: a) many people thought the original developer, Nat Mendelsohn, had never intended to build a city, that he was a con artist trying to sell as much land as possible, and b) that salespeople with a company called Silver Saddle were still making a very similar sales pitch today.
I went home and finished my little 4-minute story on California City’s water woes, and then I began googling Nat Mendelsohn. I read all about his dream to build a city from scratch, and how he’d gotten in trouble with the FTC for deceptive advertising and fraud.
Then I googled Silver Saddle. There was hardly anything written about them at all, so I ended up on their Yelp page. Lots of people left reviews saying they’d been tricked into buying a worthless piece of desert land there. Their stories were so similar to each other…and the pitch was so similar to Nat Mendelsohn’s. I couldn’t believe that this same dream had been sold for sixty years. It seemed insane. I knew immediately I couldn’t tell the story in four minutes. But there was no other option, because KPCC didn’t have a podcast team then. So I waited. A year and half later, producer Arwen Nicks was hired to create a podcast department, and during her first week in the office I pitched her the show.
I have noticed that several of the people you've interviewed have complimented you on your interview style. How would you describe it? How did you hone it?
There is a big difference between interviewing for broadcast radio and interviewing for a narrative longform podcast. When I first started making California City, I didn’t know the difference. But fortunately the producer I was working with, James Kim, did.
We’d do these 3-hour long interviews in which I spent a lot of time getting information and asking people how they felt about things. Because, in 4-minute long NPR pieces, that’s all you have time for: information and emotional reactions to that information. You don’t have time for stories.
At the end of these interviews, I’d turn to James and ask, “James, what did I miss?” And he’d be like, “Ok, tell me the story of the moment when you realized X. Where were you, what were you wearing, what was the weather like, etc.” And I realized, when I got back home and began writing, that that was the tape I was using. Because James had gotten them to speak in stories, which you need for long-form narrative podcasts, whereas I was just getting their reactions to things that had happened. From then on, I copied James.
If you were going to create another podcast, don’t worry about the logistics or whether or not anyone would like it, what would it be?
This is kind of impossible right now because of coronavirus, but I’ve always wanted to make an audio reality show set inside an assisted living facility. My grandmother lived in one during the last few years of her life, and there was SO. MUCH. DRAMA. I’m also interested in making a fiction podcast (or maybe a TV show) that fictionalizes a few real things that happened during my time in North Dakota: a high-profile murder, corruption in a local sheriff’s department, and a huge oil spill. And I’m interested in making some kind of investigative memoir about this weird cult-like experience I had in New Zealand when I was 18.
Women in podcasting are constantly being criticized for their voices. What is your relationship with yours? How would you describe your voice?
It’s evolved a lot since I first got into radio. Back then it was higher, less confident, more formal. I was trying to mimic people on NPR. When I lived in North Dakota, I started experimenting with putting more of myself into my pieces: micing myself when I asked questions, including my reactions to things people said. But it wasn’t until writing and recording California City that I really developed what I consider my authentic voice. Arwen Nicks really pushed me to stop writing NPR-style scripts, which made the voicing sound more natural automatically. I think people often underestimate how much what you’re reading influences how you sound. If you write a formal, NPR-style script, you will read it that way.
What shows do you love?
I think S-Town is the greatest podcast of all time. It inspired my work on California City more than any other show. Running from Cops is a close second. I think Dan Taberski is one of the best writers in audio, and I love how he makes investigative reporting about shit that matters fun to listen to. That is so hard to do.
I listened to the beginnings of a lot of podcasts when I was trying to figure out how to start California City. The first 15-30 seconds of any limited-run series are critical. I was especially impressed by how The Butterfly Effect and the first season of Serial begin.
James Kim has gotten me into fiction shows. His show, Moonface, is unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. I also love Passenger List. They’re both so fresh and original.
I’m a huge fan of Desert Oracle. I listened to it a lot while driving around on lonely Mojave Desert roads at night.
I love the direction Reply All has gone in recent years. It’s always a must-listen for me. And I really miss Another Round!
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Two daughters of Somali refugees have joined forces to create On Things We Left Behind, a podcast about the hidden afterlife of war, examining the lives of people who had to start over in new countries and what they left behind in war’s wake. On episode one, Nadifa tells the story of her family’s letter tapes, which was how people in Somalia communicated long-distance, recording on tapes and sending them back and forth. The tapes she found were accidental memoirs of her family, correspondence between her grandmother, in Somalia, and her father, who had moved to the UK. She found the tapes out of order and has tasked herself with putting the tapes together like puzzle pieces. This is her detective story, explaining how she found the tapes, pieced them together, and tried to listen for clues about how Somalia went from a safe place for her grandmother to live, to a dangerous one.
💎BTW💎
🎙️One of the best things I listened to this week was an episode of Sarah Marshall’s new show Why Are Dads? (a show she producers with her friend Alex Steed) that looks at fatherhood through the lens of Dirty Dancing. After listening to this episode, which…sure…is about dads and Dirty Dancing, but also Jerry Orbach’s nipples (it’s a smart conversation, I promise) I started to realize how Baby’s relationship with her dad is really the movie’s centerpiece. Baby’s father set her up to change the world, but then was disappointed when she tried to do it. Moment by moment of this film is dissected with intelligence. It’s a fresh look at the movie’s plot lines, cast, context, and metaphor for sex and revolution. When people roll their eyes about their film they are really underestimating it, and here’s the proof.
🎙️One of the best compliments I can give a show is that it reminds me of Disney World—it makes me feel wonder and excitement for something I’m learning about. Kerning Cultures’ Elephants in the Desert, was one of those episodes. Palaeontologist Faysal Bibi talks zooms in on one of the best moments in his career, a discovery of a moment that took place in the Abu Dhabi desert seven million years ago. Before the desert was the desert, before humans had evolved to have the capacity to live in a social society, gigantic elephants roamed, and they had much in common with modern elephants today. This means they were technically more evolved than humans. This episode also talks about how all of human existence is only a teeeeensy tiny percentage of the earth’s existence, a fact that highlights how little we can possibly know about the world.
🎙️Dope Labs released my favorite episode, Signed, Sealed, Delivered, which is technically an attempt to get us to try to write more letters in order to save the post office, but it’s really about the alphabet and language. Titi and Zakiya talk to Dr. Bob Wiley, Director of the Cognitive and Neural Science of Learning Lab at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He talks about where the letter in our alphabet came from, and what we lose when we stop enforcing handwriting in schools (which is happening.) Writing things by hand and reading hand-written things helps us learn better. This episode made me want to write a hand-written note to everyone I know.
🎙️I almost peed my pants when I saw that Very Amusing exists—it’s a show that explores mostly Disney theme parks, and feels like it was made just for me. Host Carlye Wisel has written extensively about the parks, but because she’s a journalist often has to form pieces based on the needs of media outlets. This podcast is her opportunity to talk about what SHE wants to talk about, which turns out (a one-hour episode about Stacey J. Aswad, famed host of Walt Disney World Resort TV in-room programming?!*) is what I want to listen about. Carlye is so bubbly about Disney, me listening to her talk about it is what I imagine it feels like for regular people listen to me talk about Disney, if that makes sense. I am a Disney enthusiast, but Carlye is next level. I listened to her for almost two hours talking to Paul Sheer about Disney secrets and nostalgia, and I relished every second of it. It’s a show that makes me feel like I’m at the parks. For you, that might be a nightmare. But for me, it’s heavenly.
*Because I realize you might not be as big of a Disney nerd as I am, I will try to entice you with the Stacey J. Aswad episode in another way. Richard and Nicky Kraft join the conversation…do you recognize those names? They are the super Disney collectors who were featured in the episode of Invisibilia, Kraftland. The documentary the Krafts made, Finding Kraftland, features Stacey.
🎙️ Each week I sit down and watch HBO’s Lovecraft Country, and am struck by how frightening, emotional, loaded, twisty, and revolutionary it is. I then turn on the companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio and that’s when I realize it’s possibly the most brilliant thing on TV. I recommend watching the show, but I do not recommend watching without listening to the podcast, too, which explores tiny moments and beautiful nuance (with Ashley C. Ford and Lovecraft Country writer Shannon Houston) that I might miss if I was watching on my own.
🎙️This episode of Tonya Mosely’s Truth Be Told, It Is Not In Your Head, was so good that when it was finished I swung it back to the beginning, slowed it down, and listened again. Resmaa Menakem talks about the insidious nature of trauma, particularly when Black people lack the protection or support needed to deal with it. This might be why some Black people are currently sharing a communal physical pain or tension, or numbness. It’s this weathering, built-up ancestral trauma I keep hearing people talk about. Menakem explains this with a term that’s new to me—white body supremacy, a structural rule that says the white body is the supreme standard by which all bodies' humanity shall be measured. He says, “if you don't start with white body supremacy as a notion for what is happening to our bodies, then whatever you come up with is going to be skewed.” This episode taught me new things and emotionally drove home the things I’d already known.
🎙️If you enjoyed California Love, Walter Thompson-Hernández’s personal audio memoir of Los Angelos, listen to Walter talk to Tonya Mosley on Truth Be Told. Walter is a phenomenal storyteller, and his am in California Love was to tell a story of the city we’ve never heard before. A story not from a celebrity, not from a rich person, not from a white person. It’s a different, more rich Los Angelos. In this interview Walter talks about his purposeful attempt to make a podcast for non-white people, and how to create content that’s universal.
🎙️Writer Laura Cathcart Robbins was the only black woman in the room at Brave Magic, a famed writer’s retreat. She wrote about her experience and found that many people have been The Only Ones, and started a podcast to explore these stories, The Only One in the Room. There are so many great conversations (I recommend this one with Misha Euceph) but the one I listened to this week was with Deb Besinger, a white woman, a daughter of the south, and a fundamentalist Christian who adopted four Black children, some of them with disabilities. Deb talks about her untraditional family in a way that is encouraging to anyone who rejects the idea of American family norms, but there are some disheartening parts, too. Deb talks about experiencing racism through the eyes of her kids—the fact that they weren’t treated like other white kids, and seemed to benefit by having a white mom.
🎙️The United States of Anxiety is doing live episodes on Sunday nights, letting people call in. On Scared in the Suburbs, Kai calls Trump supporters living in the suburbs. This is the show that did a great job exposing the true motivations of Trump supporters in earlier episodes, which is important for people living in a bubble, like me. Trump supporters are out there, they’re intelligent people, and as it turns out, they believe he will protect them from the violence and danger that he himself has incited. And they don’t even like him. But they will probably vote for him.
🎙️Last week I wrote about a podcast episode about Tyra Banks, but I forgot to mention the show’s name. So I will say it now: Tracy Clayton and Josh Gwynn’s Back Issue is this new, totally cool show that’s mining our nostalgia for moments in pop culture to find real meaning. On the second episode, In Living Color, Tracy and Josh review the cultural legacy of the TV show, revealing how monumental In Living Color was (and still is) and that television today would look nothing the same without it.
🎙️On Where is George Gibney? host Mark Horgan and producer Ciaran Cassidy have tracked down a man called George Gibney, Ireland’s national and Olympic swimming coach from 1984-1991 who was sexually abusing several of his swimmers. (So far, he has not been brought to justice.) They’re not stalking him to nail him down, that’s not what this story is about. Horgan and Cassidy are podcast detectives, setting out to explore an unremebered and unrealized history. The show’s focus is Gary O’Toole, who was not abused by Gibney, but who witnessed it all, and he’s currently grappling with only recently realizing what was going on behind closed doors. He’s now seeking justice for Gibney’s victims, and Horgan and Cassidy are seeking to understand the truth for once and for all, and who George Gibney really is. They’re not aggressive in their reporting and storytelling, this is not like most true-crime shows. They’re sitting back and leaving open much of the story to unfold on its own, delicately guiding it on its grim but engaging course.
🎙️I have to thank Jenna Spinelli for pointing me toward this episode of Trillbilly Worker's Party, Dollyology for the Masses, which features an interview with Dr. Jessie Wilkerson, who wrote an explosive piece about Dolly Parton. This episode turns the whole Dolly cult following on its head, by explaining her true legacy for Appalachia. Bougie New Yorkers see her as a feminist, a leader, a savior of her backwoods people. But that’s just the story we want to believe about Dolly, and not necessarily the truth. Around the 43 minute mark, there is an interesting story about the popular show Dolly Parton’s America. Jessie was interviewed for a segment, but her words were taken out of context and Jessie’s stance on Dolly was too unpopular to make the cut. This story illustrates an example of the problem Jessie sees in our worship of Dolly Parton—when we think about Dolly, we don’t really think about racism, social justice, or sexism. And we are only able to put her on a pedestal if we are willing to overlook these things.
🎙️At the end of the first episode in this two-part series of Latino USA, The Strange Death Of José De Jesús, I turned off my podcast player and said, “come on, Maria!’ (Maria and I are not on first name basis.) I was so eager to hear what happened next I couldn’t stand it. Part one sets up the story of José, a Mexican man whose mysterious suicide in a US immigrant detention center raised eyebrows. In part two, Latino USA got their hands on some video taken right before José died. What they saw was shocking and revealed disturbing truths about how we treat people in detention centers who are displaying signs of mental illness. They share the tapes with José’s family, and listening to them process what they learn gutted me.
🎙️This Throughline episode on the history of mass incarceration starts with the story of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, which was opened in the 1700s by Quakers, who believed the purpose of prison wasn’t just to be a holding cell, but a place for solitary penance. The architecture has religious undertones and was intended to inspire spirituality. It was beautiful, and it had running water and central heat before the White House. (I should note some of the reading is done by Steve Buscemi, whose voice is used in the audio tours of Eastern State.) The prison’s goal was to set a high standard for penitentiaries, but obviously we have failed to hold up. Today, our prisons are more likely to kill people than actually reform them. The episode then goes on to illustrate how prisons became an extension of slavery with ties to the KKK. The United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world, and a disproportionate number of those prisoners are Black. How did we get here? This story is a wild ride about black criminality and an important part of American history we don’t hear enough about. I also listened to Throughline’s piece on the history of bananas, which is more fascinating than you could imagine, and a snapshot of the unintended consequences of colonialism. It tells the story of Minor Cooper Keith, the American entrepreneur who made the banana market happen, (it sent me down an internet black hole Googling Minor Cooper Keith) though it could be argued the banana market never should have existed in the first place. The banana is somewhat taken for granted, yet producing mass amounts of them is a delicate business. Why are bananas so cheap? How can the banana business survive as it is, and should it?
🎙️UGH once again Brené Brown heals my heart and soul with Unlocking Us. Every episode is transformative, and this one speaks directly to this strange time, when we’ve managed to kind of get past the first COVID wave, but still have a treacherous road before us. It’s kind of like a “Day 2,” which Brené says in tough to maneuver in any story. On Day 2s you don’t have the vigor you had on Day 1, and the finish line is not in sight. Brené compares this to the hero’s journey, and how since the beginning of time, protagonists struggle on Day 2 and cannot get to Day 3 unless they are able to get vulnerable. You can’t skip the uncomfortable Day 2, and you cannot skip being vulnerable. It’s a hopeful aha lesson for all of us. And as Brené points out, if we can name Day 2, if we can say to ourselves and each other, “we are in Day 2 and this is going to be rough,” we can have an easier way handling whatever Day 2 brings. This reminded me of the “hammer and the dance” analogy put forth in the New York Times. You can listen to that excellent episode of The Daily here. And I recommend that you do, because it was produced in early April 2020, but many of the predictions it made have come true, and it has a whole new meaning now.
🎙️Due to popular demand, Science Vs has finally done an episode of astrology. Unfortunately for most of the astrology die-hards who were requesting this episode, the verdict is in and it turns out astrology is not scientific. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important for us, or can’t help us navigate through life. And that’s what the episode is all about.
🎙️Season three of Motive is here, opening with an interview with Christian Picciolini, who in his youth was part of a group of neo-Nazi skinheads in the early 1980s. The series’ goal is to reveal how the organized white supremacist movement recruits young people in America. How he got there is interesting—he came from Italian immigrants in Chicago and felt “othered” by white people who disapproved of his Italian background. This put him in a perfect place for white supremacist manipulation. Listening to Christian revisit his past, you are able to experience his shame. (The episode is called “The Hate Crate” because Christian opens a sort of memory box of his nazi knick-knacks, which gave me icky chills and want to gag.)
🎙️Bad People is a smart, funny show that investigates true-crime through the lens of psychology. I think the show description (“Dr Julia Shaw and comedian Sofie Hagen dissect the criminal cases that shock, intrigue and scare us the most”) sells the show short. Sofie and Julia aren’t just peppering us with facts about shocking, scary cases, they’re going deeper to help us understand why we commit crimes in the first place. When Children Kill begins with the story of two young boys who attacked their playmate and left her to die in the snow, which opens up a conversation about whether or not people are born evil, and how different countries deal with kids who kill.
🎙️I love you!