💰 Dumb crooks, Lonely Lingerie, Hello Clarise, 90 Day Fiancé, ghost shame 👻 Danielle Moodie ✊🏿
💌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 Megan Johnson, who connects with podcast advertisers about ad attribution and measurement for Chartable. (Outside of work, she enjoys long walks in Brooklyn with her dog, Kramer.)
App I use: Spotify, usually streamed on my Alexa. Or Amazon Music if I'm feeling lucky to let Alexa pick the episode.
Listening time per week: 5-10ish hrs
When to listen: I ease into my mornings with the news first — Up First, The Daily, What a Day. Between calls it's comforting to hear familiar voices. Shows like You're Wrong About and Pop Culture Happy Hour are perfect for this. I feel smarter and better every time I listen to Mike and Sarah and Linda, Glen, Stephen and Aisha. Outdoors I'm usually listening to music but will turn to podcasts like Design Time and More Than One Thing to take me out of my universe and keep me inspired.
How to discover: Word of mouth is powerful. I love when someone raves about a show they love. I also perk up when a celebrity or politician or royal announces they're making a podcast. It never ceases to amaze me who will turn to audio next! My job also allows me to learn about amazing creators from podcast networks of all sizes.
Anything else: Podcast listening has always been a way to gain perspective and process, and I've felt that deeply this year. I'll say a humble 'thanks' to everyone pushing great work into the world. It's so needed!
xoxo lp
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Danielle Moodie
Danielle Moodie is the host of the daily political podcast #WokeAF Daily and co-host of the weekly political podcast #democracyish. Follow her on Twitter here and on Instagram here.
Why are you the perfect host for Woke AF?
I don’t know about "perfect." :) But I believe that our politics needs to be served straight up. We are in our current political climate because we have neglected to make politics digestible and a part of our everyday lives, and instead made a taboo topic that we didn’t discuss. The more woke and conscious people we have, the better our society, and that is my goal with Woke AF Daily.
What's it like working with Touré? Can you describe your friendship?
Touré has become a big brother to me. I adore him and our banter. We have different perspectives on the topics we cover but a core belief in justice and equity. So while our opinions may vary from episode to episode, our foundation is the same.
Why are Democracyish and Woke AF necessary?
Democracyish started as a way to guide people through the election from a Black perspective and now it has evolved into more analysis on race & white supremacy and how we end systems of oppression. Similarly, Woke AF started as a show based in rage at the election of Trump. Now, I have evolved from rage to rest and how we stay conscious to social injustice without becoming paralyzed or hopeless from all the necessary work ahead.
Do you find yourself holding back on what you put out there, or do you think you wear your heart on your sleeve and leave it all out there?
I think it's a tricky balance for a lot of podcasters. I definitely put my entire self out there on a daily basis. It’s exhausting at times and deflating because the topics I cover are tough--but by me living my life out loud and unapologetically, I hope to inspire others to do the same.
What's your relationship to your voice, and how would you describe it?
My voice is my most powerful feature. I don’t mince words. I don’t hesitate. I tell the unapologetic and unvarnished truth.
What are hurdles that podcasting POC face that white people don't even think about?
The ability to monetize our work is oftentimes a lot harder for POC and women.
What shows do you love?
I love The 1619 Project, Gaslit Nation, and others that make you think.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
🎙️I was put in a good mood the moment I turned on the latest episode of Tea with Queen and J. (J. says, “Therapy is keeping me from putting a fucking hex on my family...My therapist is like, 'you don't have time for that hex. Do other stuff.’”) But the entire episode was great. (You’ll have to excuse my obsession with this show, that seems to be coming from nowhere…I have been bingeing old episodes.) Queen and J. call are calling out stories that aren’t getting enough attention and are saying what most people aren’t saying about those story with so much humor and sharpness and openness and compassion. I feel safe and loved in their care. On the most recent episode, they reflect on the Atlanta shooting in a way I don’t think many other podcasters have by hosting a conversation about performative solidarity that the Asian-American community deserves. (And that I haven’t heard anywhere else.) The episode closes up with a fascinating unraveling of the tale of a Black Instagram influencer who crossed a line when trying to support the Asian-American community and the conversation it sparked. It’s a story with a kind of startling resolution. This is the shit that makes me think, and it’s shit that I want to hear.
💎BTW💎
🎙️I was so sad to hear that Beverly Cleary died last week, I feel a little empty about it. Listen to this wonderful episode of Remember Reading about why what she did for young readers was so revolutionary, and how her work impacted writers today.
🎙️On episode two of Jason Concepcion and Renee Montgomery’s new podcast Takeline, The Athletic’s Chantel Jennings perfectly breaks down the gender discrepancies in the NCAA tournament and how they happened (it’s been happening) and gives some kind of shocking insight into why the NCAA doesn’t want you to think about it too much. This episode gets into each detail, from the lackluster weight rooms to the fact that NCAA women weren’t offered family support, and how much this differed from the treatment in the Bubble.
🎙️Hot Take is Amy Westervelt and Mary Annaïse Heglar’s funny, cool, smart show about the climate crisis. Every single episode I have listened to makes me think about climate change in a different way. I end up high-fiving myself for feeling like such a goddam genius. But I also love the back-and-forth between Amy and Mary. I wish there were other shows like, this, tackling something so poignant in an entertaining way. When the episodes aren’t turning my thinking on its head, it’s introducing something totally new to my brain. Like this recent episode on prisons and climate change. Between basketball jokes (don’t worry, they’re for people who know nothing about basketball) Amy and Mary talk to Drew Costley about the inhumanity of our prison system when it comes to the climate. Global warming is catching up with us but the way we handle prisoners in a climate crisis has not. We don’t have safe ways for evacuating people or keeping them safe in times of flooding, wild fires, or I dunno, global pandemics.
🎙️Spectacle has an episode about one of my favorite reality TV shows, and what seems to me like the most interesting, 90 Day Fiancé. We always wonder where the lines are blurred in reality TV—what is scripted and what is authentic? But this show is tricky because these are people actually in the process of getting a K-1 visa. The stakes are real. This show doesn’t make immigration look great, despite the fact hardly anyone would go to the trouble of maintaining a marriage to become a US Citizen. (The K-1 visa process is more complicated than it sounds.) This episode features the voices of Nicole Byer and Marcy Jarreau (and journalists Alexis Soloski and Shamira Ibrahim) and takes a close look at some of the relationships from the show to try to unlock who these people really are and what we are watching, how to decipher the tension between the couples and what the producers want us to see, and why 90 Day Fiancé is such an interesting social experiment. If these people are truly in love, does that make us the crazy ones for not taking them seriously? BTW if you love the TV show, check out Sofiya Alexandra and Miles Gray’s podcast 420 Day Fiancé.
🎙️QAnon Anonymous invited David Farrier, the documentarian behind Tickled and Dark Tourist, and someone who has done extensive research on the New Zealand brand Lonely Lingerie, to discuss what happens when a business owner becomes a QAnon believer and Covid denier. This episode explains the whole Lonely Lingerie fiasco, and hones in on how it used fake, digital spirituality to cloak their QAnon beliefs in what from afar seemed like harmless self-care tips. The biggest takeaway, here, is to see that QAnon doesn’t have to be planning coups or blowing things up, they can sneak into the minds of leaders, and that belief will trickle down to everything they touch, and impact the health and safety of people in the real world. This was especially surprising with the brand Lonely Lingerie, which seemed so cool and progressive.
🎙️Today is the last day Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama are voting on whether to unionize, and Vice News Reports has a story that explains why and how they’re doing it, and the great lengths Amazon is going to in order to thwart it. (Did you know where was such thing as Union Avoidance Firms?) Amazon has created websites that mislead workers about the union, is texting workers every day with reasons not to join the union, running anti-union ads on Twitch, putting anti-union signs in bathrooms, making anti-union t-shirts and pins, creating care packages for sick workers telling them not to join the union, and basically gaslighting the workers. If you didn’t completely understand the union, you could totally fall for these tactics. It’s extra confusing because Jeff Bezos wants to raise the minimum wage, because even $15/hour would save the company tons of money. We’re about to find out of hiring these Union Avoidance Firms was worth it for Amazon. This episode is packed with eye-opening facts about Amazon, and conversations with the people who are fighting it.
🎙️On Why Are Dads, Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed unpack The Silence of the Lambs, for both its strong portrayal of Clarice Starling for women (“Clarise’s superpower is being a woman”) and for Buffalo Bill, a character who victimizes trans people. To do this so perfectly, they are joined by trans writer Harmony Colangelo, who offers a perspective of the film that I don’t think we often hear. It’s conversation we were definitely not having when the film came out in 1991. Harmony wrote a powerful piece on The Silence of the Lambs for The AV Club about the movie’s transphobia that I urge you to read. This conversation far from urges us to “cancel” The Silence of the Lambs, it credits it for being masterful and full of strong performances. It forces us to have a real conversation about it.
🎙️After listening to Harmony on Why Are Dads, I started to scratch the surface of Harmony’s podcast, This Ends at Prom, which talks about of the role women play in coming-of-age and teen girl movies from the queer, feminist cisgender and transgender perspectives of Harmony and her wife BJ. I tapped into the episode on Promising Young Women, and what a doozie to start with. It was so intense and valuable. BJ is the survivor of a gang rape, and completely opens up with her story and what the movie means to her. I had my own opinions about Promising Young Women, but I threw all of my own thoughts out the window once I heard what it does for rape survivors. (Harmony is also a sexual assault survivor.) This was the most valuable discussion of Promising Young Women I’ve heard. The two also mention another podcast, Disaster Girls, which I immediately went to for the episode about Elephant Walk with Karina Longworth. This is another great film podcast. I’m so glad that Why Are Dads? sent me down this rabbit hole. I wish all podcasts would end recommending another one, so we could continue to discover new shows in a way that the apps do not allow us.
🎙️Jameela Jamila interviewed Michelle Buteau on I Weigh, and toward the end there was a great conversation on motherhood. Michelle had twins via surrogate, and opened up about IVF, her miscarriages, and about how much parenting sucks. (“You keep wondering, when is this going to be fun?”) The moment Michelle starts getting honest about being a mom, Jameela is like “hell yes, go on please,” because so many women are excessively positive about the experience. This is the perspective not all moms are willing to share.
🎙️When I saw that Eddie Huang was on WTF with Marc Maron, it stopped me and it took me a moment to figure out why. I think it’s because I’m so used to seeing white people being interviewed on WTF. This interview stood out. (I’m glad that Marc interviewed Eddie, I love him. But I wish he used his platform to elevate Asian voices more often, not just when Asian-Americas are in the news a lot.) Eddie is on to talk about his new film Boogie, but he also talks about his frustrations of the TV adaptation of his book Fresh Off The Book (which made me have empathy for his negative reaction to the show,) Asian de-masculinization (there is a great story about Eddie measuring his dick when he saw an article saying that Asians had small penises,) and he even talks about Lynn Shelton, who worked with him on Fresh Off The Boat. Maybe Marc doesn’t interview tons of Asian people, but I thought he did a good job with this interview, and was genuinely interested to hear Eddie’s story, which is remarkable. Eddie talks about his family, his Taiwanese culture, and growing up in an environment which made him angry to be maligned for being “other.”
🎙️W. Kamau Bell & Hari Kondabolu hosted Chase Strangio and Dr. Connie Wun on Politically Reactive to for two of the best conversations I’ve heard about state legislation targeting trans youth and the shooting in Georgia. These are two topics that are so disheartening that I often wonder what there is to really say. But Chase breaks down why exactly this legislation is not just transphobic and ridiculous, but sexist. And Connie beautifully articulates the sadness of the Atlanta shooting by sharing a personal story that hit her in the shooting’s aftermath. I never miss an episode of Politically Reactive, and this episode was a good reason why. It’s constantly packed with interesting voices and perspectives, and obviously Hari and Kamau Bell’s funny friendship and their willingness to hand the mic to someone else so that we can all learn something new.
🎙️Dumb crooks are hilarious, and Cautionary Tales takes a scholarly look at how and why they even exist. It can be blamed on something called The Dunning Kruger effect, a real thing that describes how morons aren’t even smart enough to know they’re morons, and that nobody can know what they don’t know. Even us. We are all Wile E. Coyote, running off a cliff with the confidence the air will hold us, until we realize that we are about to fall. Host Tim Hartford illustrates this with a story of some criminals who hijacked a plane and demanded it be rerouted to Australia, despite the fact that the pilot told them there wasn’t enough fuel for the trip, because there wasn’t. We might not be this dumb, and we might not be criminals, but in a way we are all the hijackers of flight 961.
🎙️There is nothing like Stories with Sapphire—using her storytelling and sound skills, Sapphire pulls you into her scary world in a way that makes you feel like you are being told a spooky campfire story. The show feels like a book. In Seeing Is Not Believing, she talks to podcasters (Rachael of Femlore Podcast, brother and sister duo Kristen Anderson and Will Rogers of Guide To The Unknown, and Jim Perry of Euphomet…all fantastic shows) about what Sapphire finds to be the most interesting storytellers—skeptics. These ghost skeptics grapple with how to explain away the terrifying things they have seen. The story with Jim stopped me. He saw a ghost but was afraid to admit it—he felt shame, insecurity, self-doubt, and self-consciousness. It’s ghost shame! Something I haven’t heard many people discuss. It reminded me of a recent episode of Euphomet, in which Jim talks about the difficulties that accompany experiencing he super natural. I think a real encounter with a ghost would be scary, would be difficult to explain, would test your belief system. It’s stories from theses doubters that give us the strongest cases that there’s something there.
🎙️Dan Pashman has done something kind of incredible on The Sporkful—he’s created a new pasta shape, Cascatelli, and has made it available for you to buy, and the whole thing has been a wonderful journey. The 5-part series takes you to Dan’s noodling on the noodle shape, to testing forkability, sauceability, and tooth sinkability. He talked to pasta makers and scientists and linguists and branding people to hone his idea down into what he think is the perfect pasta shape. And I am so curious about it. I think my favorite part was hearing him choose a name. (Fortunately his family talks him out of naming the shape millepiedi, which sounds gross.) Each of these episodes is special on its own, but all together, it’s really one man’s quest to do something kind of ridiculous—the highs and lows, the pride and frustrations. It’s like he built an entire business or brand—he put so much into this tiny waterfall-ish shape. I wonder how he feels now that this journey is over. I used to work with a lot of authors, and sometimes they experienced a low when their art was out in the world. Dan is finished. Cascatelli is here. Will other people like it? Will Cascatelli meet his expectations? I doubt this is the last time we will be hearing about it.
🎙️I loved to hear Elizabeth Day interview Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant, and now Klara and the Sun) on How to Fail. I don’t think I’ve heard enough from this mammoth author, and Elizabeth gets him to open up about his failures and weaknesses, and what he thinks of how his readers read him. His father was a scientist and has since passed, and Kazuo names one of his failures as the inability to understand science. This year in particular, we have seen what happens when people don’t understand science. It was touching, and a little sad, to hear Kazuo talk about how he regrets not asking his father about science, which could have changed him and made their bond stronger. Hearing that stopped me, actually. I don’t know where else I could hear vulnerability like this from Kazuo Ishiguro, and it made me think about my own life, and what I don’t want to say I regretted, what I didn’t bother to question or get to understand.
🎙️I must have had my head buried in the sand, because I had no idea that Nick Quah’s Servant of Pod was ending! I thought it would be around for the rest of eternity. For the last episode, Nick talked to The Verge’s Ashley Carman about the future of podcasting. There were so many huge moments in this episode for me, and for you, about Clubhouse, discoverability, social listening, and what may be in store for us all this year and beyond. It made me really hopeful because Ashley talked about the importance of audio clips that don’t rely on algorithms or random lists, but hand-curated ones. And that is exactly what we are building over at Hark. This episode was a must-listen for anyone who subscribes to this newsletter.
🎙️Some Arabic speakers have noticed a secret Islamic history hiding in Mexico and Puerto Rico. They see Arabic text on buildings, and Arabic influence in Mexican and Puerto Rican art. It’s something they can’t unsee. It feels random, but it’s not. An episode of Kerning Cultures explains that the Arabic signage and pottery in Latin America offer a rich history of Arabic culture and cultural hybridization. This is a hidden history that tells the story of the first Muslim ban and may explain for many Muslims why they feel so oddly at home in Latin America.
🎙️I just finished Behind Her Eyes, which had me going “oh my god!” at the end, I enjoyed it, and Soft Voice feels kind of like it, like a dark audio sitcom that has its own sense of humor. Lydia, a 25-year-old estate agent, has lived her entire life dictated by the voice, The Soft Voice, she hears in her head, and this has done her very well. In the end of episode one, The Soft Voice leaves and the sinister Dark Voice takes over. I’m on pins and needles. Like all Q Code shows, so much effort has been put into making an outstanding audio experience. Put those headphones on! I was listening in the darkness and found myself jerking my head around, sensing something was right behind me. This is a fiction show that is dragging you onto the pages of the script.
🎙️On Lost Hills, curious journalist Dana Goodyear is taking us to Malibu, California to tell the story of a 35-year-old father who was murdered in a tent in front of his two children in a state park in Malibu. This was part of a string of very strange shootings that law enforcement seems to be ignoring. There are random murders happening in places like my own neighborhood in the East Village, but this state park seems an unlikely place to be shot to death, and there don’t seem to be many ledes. The community was not even warned or cautioned. What makes this story shine is Dana and her ability to make you feel like you are tracking down clues right along with her, she is a fun and honest storyteller, and I loved hearing about her partnership with another woman, Cece Woods, who is conducting her own investigation and has her own ideas about what happened. There’s something lively and cartoonish about this show, despite the fact it’s tracking a real crime. The two women have started to suspect that the police are involved, which twists the story in its own direction.. It stands apart from other true-crime shows like it.
🎙️A show love dearly, Pessimists Archive, has a new look and name that is much more fitting—Build For Tomorrow. Years ago, the host, Jason Feifer, created the show from a Twitter account called @PessimistsArchive that was telling these stories of things we used to fear but now don’t, and kept the name of the handle for the podcast. But Pessimists Archive is a show that paints an optimistic future. I love the new name, it makes me feel like I am at the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT.) The last episode will twist and turn your thoughts about participation trophies. (I feel like everyone has thoughts on participation trophies.) It turns out, participation trophies aren’t new, and they seem to have a positive impact on younger kids and an extremely negative impact on older kids. But really, it’s all about the context of the kid in question. Jason interviews two women who have two completely different relationships to their participation trophies, which are more complicated than you may think. Who you are and what age you received your trophy will really change how they make you feel when you’re a kid. Like always, Jason takes a seemingly innocuous issue and makes it feel exciting and complex and worth a thorough exploration.
🎙️I love you!