🛍 Fake shopping 💃🏽 twerking 🐇 an international treasure hunt 🗺 high fives and handshakes 🙌
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
Today is Monday, July 26. There are 303 days until I go on my next Disney cruise. If you don’t have time for the whole newsletter: this made laugh HARD, this was so fucking good, subscribe to this right now.
This week we’re getting to peek into the listening life of Cindy Okereke, the founder of Essence of Cin, a boutique marketing agency where she’s the lead consultant, producer, and brand strategist. Cindy is a producer for the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, recently accepted a full-time role as Manager of Editorial & Publishing for Netflix’s Strong Black Lead. She has previously lead and contributed to content initiatives for Netflix, Andreessen Horowitz, and Wonder Media Network. And as a member of the founding team of Impact Theory, developed strategies for all digital platforms behind the Tom Bilyeu and Impact Theory brands. Cindy holds a BA in English and Creative Writing with a minor in Linguistics from Emory University. Cindy enjoys painting, hiking, exploring, and joyfully consuming media. She’s originally from Fair Lawn, NJ, and has called Los Angeles home for over 5 years.
The app I use: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher
Listening time per week: 2-10 depending on how much work-related audio I’m working on.
When I listen: around lunch or the late evenings
How I discover: in-app suggestions, Podcasts in Color, curated lists (EarBuds Newsletter), and friends
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
Everyone always asks me how many hours of podcasts I listen to per week (that’s private) and how I discover all the unusual shows I write about. The answer to the second question is complicated, but there is a database I use that is actually the sharpest tool in my podcast discovery belt--Listen Notes. It’s easily one of the websites I spend the most time in. Search a topic, any topic, and a flood of results come your way. (You can use filters to zone in on what you want.) After one simple search I find myself adding at least 5 shows to my library. You can save things in lists to keep organized. And because I have the premium membership, I can find the contact information for the podcasters I want to talk to. This newsletter is full of recommendations and here’s a genuine one: go to Listen Notes right now and type in a word, any word, and see what adventure it takes you on!
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Jason Sheeler and Andrea Lavinthal
PEOPLE's Deputy West Coast Editor Jason Sheeler and Style and Beauty Director Andrea Lavinthal are the co-hosts of PEOPLE in the ‘90s. Follow Jason on Instagram here. Follow Andrea on Twitter here. Follow PEOPLE on Twitter here.
Tell us about PEOPLE in the '90s.
Jason: It’s a love letter to our favorite decade in podcast form. We consider the ’90s a golden age of pop culture and wanted to create a show where we could talk about all of the people and moments that defined it.
Andrea: Also, we were looking for an excuse to dish some 30-year-old gossip because we are that obsessed.
What was your relationship to PEOPLE magazine in the '90s?
Jason: Growing up in Arkansas, I grabbed it at the Piggly Wiggly every Friday. I’d tell my mom I was going to “catch up with some friends.”
Andrea: My mom has been a subscriber for as long as I can remember and I loved to read about celebrity divorces when I got home from my ballet lessons.
Your favorite years in the '90s is 1994 and 1997, respectively. Why?
Jason:1994 was the year Friends and Cameron Diaz happened and when Bryant Gumbel asked Katie Couric, “What is the internet, anyway?” on the Today show.It was also the year I began watching Melrose Place in gay bars.
Andrea: It was the year I bought my first thong.
Tell us about your Fabio segment. How did it come about?
Andrea: Jason’s dream guest is Fabio. As he explains, “Fabio is the ’90s to me. Especially because back then, I assumed all men in Hollywood looked like that.” (And by the way, Fabio was on a PEOPLE cover in 1993!) We figured he would be an easy get. As it turns out, he’s, like, Angelina-level elusive. Then, our fabulous PR team heard about Jason’s quest, which by that point had become an obsession of the entire PEOPLE in the ‘90s team, and they encouraged us to turn it into a segment. Hence, “Chasing Fabio.”
Jason: By the way, you must listen to his 1993 album, Fabio After Dark.
I'm not sure if you can tell us this but...were you able to get a hold of Fabio?
Jason: The chase is still on.
Why is Fabio so elusive?
Andrea: Because he’s happy living his best Fabio life. Which we imagine involves a lot of unbuttoned linen shirts, candlelight dinners, and long walks on the beach.
If you were going to tell new listeners to dip into the show, which episode should they go to first?
Jason: The one about ’90s summer blockbuster movies, with Jamie Lee Curtis. She was incredibly candid and she had the absolute best answer to our favorite guest question, “Why can’t we move on from the ’90s?”
Andrea: Also, because she talked about “going commando north to south” at this year’s Golden Globes, so we just love her.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
The first two episodes of Sound Deals dropped last week and I was so angry when I finished them, I wanted more, more, more. It’s an improv comedy show / “Podcast Shopping Channel” in one. Hosts Max and Ivan give guests the names of made-up products and are prompted to try to sell them. The first episode was with Deborah Francis-White, who was tasked with selling “deep silk” and somehow ended up describing the patriarchy. This show is insanely clever and was packed with so many subtle jokes that I wanted to just grab them and roll around in them. On episode two, Max and Ivan sell us a “Lucky Pipe,” which “has the word ‘lucky’ in it so you’re hoping is going to be a lot of fun!” but ends up being a rolling isolation chamber, that for some reason, you must enter nude. I have no idea how Max and Ivan could host this show with a straight face, I am cracking up just thinking about it. Stop reading this stupid newsletter and go listen to an episode now.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Two weeks ago, George Mpanga of Have You Hear George’s Podcast announced a new project, Common Ground, an online platform that invites listeners to bring their own stories and relationships with the show onto the podcast, and to challenge the ideas George presents. George believes that Black music is a way for black people to succeed, and illustrates this with a beautiful episode that tells the story of Shawn Carter, revealing the blueprint he has made for Black artists to use creativity to break out of poverty. I simply wrote in my notes, “Jesus Christ the new George sounds so good,” which is not really helpful or thoughtful. This show is undeniably visual, and the sound and music of this episode in particular stuck with me long after I listened. Hear a clip here.
🎙️My first boss from 20,000 years ago, when I was a young dumbass frolicking around New York, was Rachel Fishman Feddersen, now Publisher and CEO of The Forward. Rachel reached out to me to see if I could support a new podcast for The Forward. Before she said anything I though I’d have to tell her no—as I told Skye in Hot Pod, I am not in need of clients. But then Rachel explained the show, and I thought, “dammit, Rachel! How can I say no to this?” The very cool premise is this: A Bintel Brief (“Bundle of Letters”) is the advice column that has been running in The Forward since 1906 and lets readers share their stories, seek council, and at one point even find relatives. It was a huge resource for Jewish immigrants trying to grapple with their American identities. On Thursday, the first episode of A Bintel Brief the podcast launches (you can hear the tailer here.) Each week, co-hosts Ginna Green (a Black strategist-consultant-movement-builder living in South Carolina) and Lynn Harris (a comedian married to her rabbi husband living in Brooklyn) will answer questions, go back through Bintel Brief archives, and bring the modern Jewish experience to the audio world. I am genuinely so excited for this show and I urge you to go subscribe now. Let’s talk about it later.
🎙️In Hot Pod, Skye Pillsbury wrote a fantastic and really important piece about podcast consultants (something I spend a lot of time doing—in case you are unaware, I own my own podcast marketing/publicity company called Tink.) Podcast consulting is kind of having a moment, a bit late if you ask me. There aren’t very many people doing it. Jeremy Helton is profiled and his story is fascinating. (I make an appearance, too.) Jeremy identified the need for podcast marketing before most people were even thinking of marketing their shows. And now that he’s taken an in-house position as Ten Percent Happier’s Director of Podcast Marketing, there’s one less person taking on individual clients. Jeremy has carved the way for many of us. This piece points out one way you can work in audio that doesn’t involve producing or editing. And there’s a huge need for it.
🎙️I sat down to write about Blind Guy Travels and I didn’t know where to start. I kept typing and deleting, wanting to express all of my feelings for it at once. It’s a great idea—Matthew Shifrin, who is blind, became known when he started creating LEGO instructions for blind people and the website legofortheblind.com. Blind Guy Travels allows you to imagine what it’s like to navigate the world through his experience. The stories are so unexpected (in one episode he explains how playing with LEGO helps him make sense of the world, in another he takes us to the movies and explains, somewhat emotionally, what it means to him that there are people who have made the movie theater experience accessible for blind people.) The sound is rich, Matthew is so likeable, and his friendly invitation to understand the blind experience is very much appreciated. You can’t but help start looking at things differently, with the blind in mind. This podcast was debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival. Hear a clip here.
🎙️The Skewer is a way to get your weekly dose of news in a twisted way. Think of Jon Holmes as your news djay as he stitches together audio from news items into a dream-like, well-produced snapshot of the week. The moments blend together seamlessly, so your news roundup almost feels like a song, or what it would look like if you were watching a montage in a movie. It makes the week feel like a blur, a wildly interesting blur. This comes from the BBC, and I wish someone would do this for the US. It’s artistic and trippy, and a wonderful way to capture all the interesting things we heard throughout the week. Hear a clip here.
🎙️“Twerkulator” by Miami rap duo City Girls might be our summer jam, and Switched on Pop unpacks its mastery and the way, using a single sample as a vehicle, it brings us on a tour of pop music history from 1990s house to 1980s electro to 1970s German krautrock. But that’s the nitty gritty. This song is getting attention for the traditional, cultural dance move in the title. But what you know about twerking is probably wrong. Kyra Gaunt, ethnomusicologist and author of Twerking at the Intersection of Music, Sexual Violence, and Patriarchy on YouTube unpacks the history of twerking, and why it’s a move meant for more than just girls on YouTube, having important cultural significance. I leave you with this quote from Kyra: “Throwin’ ass is spiritual.” Hear a clip here.
🎙️I’ve listened to every Tig Notaro interview I can get my hands on, but on Good One, Jesse David Fox asked her questions that seem so obvious and essential to who Tig Notaro has become, but were ones I had not yet heard her asked, which gave a fuller picture of Tig. How do you bounce back from a performance like Tig’s “I have cancer” set? Jesse gets specific about the different ways Tig has told her jokes, which makes me wonder if he sometimes spends more time unpacking comedy more than the comedian he’s talking to. I think the comedians get something out of these interviews, too. Tig tells a very funny story about The Rolling Stones that is one of those anecdotes that gets funnier the harder you think about it actually happening, a completely strange story about an interaction with Whoopi Goldberg, and has advice about not loathing yourself that I took to heart. In my humble opinion, Jesse has one of the best jobs in the world. I don’t think I could ever be envious of him, though. Nobody could do a better job. He mentions that this is the second time he has interviewed Tig for his show—the first interview is shorter and was done when the show was new and he couldn’t secure much time with Tig. But he’s grown this show into something so powerful and unique, now he gets his full hour with Tig. So the show is getting better and has become (in my humble opinion) the best comedy podcast there is. Comedy is hard, it’s tough to stay consistent. Good One is a masterpiece.
🎙️Throughline has the most necessary podcast episode on the Olympics I have found—it reviews the games and their alignment with money, which is really what has been driving the games for the past 100 years. From Montreal to LA to Rio, the games have become more and more favorable to rich people and detrimental to poor people. It wasn’t always this way, but now the impact of a city hosting the Olympics can be enormous, effecting the infrastructure in ways I never would have imagined. This is the story of how everything we do is driven by money and when things are driven by money, they end up completely out of control and so far away from the original mission. It made me nostalgic for the days when the Olympics was just a bunch of naked people trying to murder each other. The episode is beautifully done, tension builds the whole time, and the audio becomes increasingly intense as we reach the part of the story where we have an Olympic games during a global pandemic.
🎙️I don’t consider myself a true-crime head, but Criminal is one of my favorite shows—not just because Phoebe Judge is a great host, but the stories are always a little unknown, a little more complex than straight-up “he strangled his wife in the walk-in closet” stories, and episodes always share similarities with Phoebe’s other show, This Is Love. Like this one, which tells the story of a children’s book that launched an international treasure hunt by including concealed clues to the location of a jeweled golden hare that had been created and hidden somewhere in the UK by the book’s author Kit Williams. The comically mysterious man who won stirred up a lot of suspicion, and the disappointing (and weird) way the treasure hunt ended paints the picture of complicated criminal activity that spoiled the fun of all the kids (and adults, and scientists) who were invested in cracking the case. I don’t want to give it away, but it’s twisted and one of those stories that seems too strange to be true.
🎙️99% Invisible gives a beautiful introductory course on Hanko, the carved stamp seals that people in Japan often use in place of signatures. Hanko is a relic of Japan’s pre-1875 past, when Japanese people didn’t use surnames, but has had had its ups and downs over the years, until the internet, which has sent it on a path to near-destruction. (Start getting the obit ready, New York Times.) It seems like a big deal to me that something so influential, that I had no idea existed, could be about to retire. (What on earth did I LEARN in middle school? The Macarena in gym class? Yes!!!) The plot thickens, though, because of the ivory used to make the classy kind of Hanko. Some were hoping that tourists would come to Japan for the Olympics, see all of the Ivory, become outraged, and put an end to the Japanese Ivory trade forever. But with a spectator-less Olympics this year, we’ll all just have to sit home listening to podcasts, outraged about the Japanese Ivory trade, and do nothing about it, probably. Hear a clip here.
🎙️Haley O’Shaughnessy and Jordan Ligons of Spinsters invited Alex Wong on to tell the story of the Hong Wah Kues, a Chinese basketball team in the 1930s and try to answer the question: why aren’t there more Chinese players getting drafted in the NBA? China has a pro basketball league and a lot of people interested in the sport, but this hasn’t been translated in America. We’re basically looking at Chinese basketball players all wrong, and making it impossible to forge their own paths to the NBA.
🎙️You may have noticed an episode of Back Issue, the podcast that taps into your ‘90s nostalgia, in your feed today—it’s back for a new season and it feels SO GOOD to have Josh Gwynn and Tracy Clayton in my ears again. The first episode is about the history of handshakes and high fives, something I had never really thought of, but could have assumed that white people tried to steal from Black people, which it turns out, is true. Tracy and Josh point out important cultural moments in the handshake’s history and hilarious clapping games, for a run ride that will make you rethink what you’re really doing when you offer someone a handshake, and try to remember those old Miss Mary Mack hand-slapping games you used to play on the playground. (The lyrics to those songs are so strange.)
🎙️I assumed Unexplainable’s Moon Poop episode was going to tell me about some sort of waste substance found in space that can be attributed to the moon, and it does start with the idea of astronaut poop being deposited into space, but it was much more interesting than that. The episode unexpectedly takes a deep, philosophical, and religious slant, looking at how cultures throughout history have used poop in storytelling to tell creation stories, and what this tells us about creation in general. Like…what if creation doesn’t exist? And that is what our poop-obsessed ancestors have been trying to tell us all along? Listen here!
🎙️Problem Solvers has an episode about talking to strangers that will change the way you do small talk. We think small talk is horrible, but it doesn’t have to be. We’re doing it wrong. Small talk allows us to find a common ground with a stranger, it is not intended to be an endpoint in our conversations with them. So how do you go from “how’s the weather?” to something more interesting? That can be up to you. If you’re suffering in a small talk conversation, that’s all on you. After more than a year in quarantine, I am nervous about my social skills that will be tested at Podcast Movement in a few weeks, and will be keeping this in mind.
🎙️IdeaCast offers business advice inspired by Bowie, Beyoncé, Miles Davis, Lady Gaga and more. Panos Panay, incoming co-president of the Recording Academy, which presents the Grammys, and R. Michael Hendrix of IDEO, talk about how these artists succeed in reinventing themselves while staying true to themselves. Bowie seems to be the best example, he was constantly recreating characters for himself, but when asked about how he did it, he claimed he was always writing songs about a few key themes, loneliness being one of them. But he also didn’t believe in absolutism—he was constantly blurring lines between girl and boy, fiction and nonfiction. He knew who he was at his core, and this episode argues that if we can do that, too, we can find people to work with who can make us better and constantly evolve into more interesting versions of ourselves, all while staying in our own skin and feeling true to ourselves.
🎙️The Brown Girl's Guide to Politics, A’shanti Gholar’s one stop shop for women of color who want to hear and talk about the world of politics, is back. I love this show because it really serves as a guide for all of us, outlining the problems with our structural systems that are overlooking Black women. Investing in Black women isn’t just the fair thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. This is the show that makes that crystal clear. Episode two talks about the “She-cession--” the job loss and financial hardships that women of color faced during the pandemic, and the long-term effects it’s had on building wealth for BIWOC.
🎙️Lexicon Valley got my attention this week—it’s been renamed Spectacular Vernacular and has two shiny new hosts, Ben Zimmer and Nicole Holliday. Previous-host John McWhorter has started a new feed for Lexicon Valley, and promises to peg stories to current events in the future. But I’m excited about this revamp from Zimmer and Holliday. And if the first guest is any indicator of what’s to come, I’m very excited. They Might Be Giants’ John Linnell came on to talk about the new album he’s made, which is all in Latin.
🎙️The Olympics is whatever, but it’s kind of cool that for the first time, skateboarding will be included in the list of events. I made a Harklist on the history of Skateboarding that includes fascinating history (how a drought in LA led to a skateboarding boom,) interviews with Tony Hawk, a cool skater chick named Mariah Duran, and disabled skateboarders who hope to join the games one day. There is also a clip of Werner Herzog observing a skateboarding video that is so adorable I nearly passed away.
🎙️I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say the only good thing to come from the Olympics is this episode of The Constant about the worst Olympic event ever held, The 1904 Olympic Marathon. Mark Chrisler unwinds a wild story that includes sickness, death, racism, and ill-prepared runners. It’d be hilarious if it were fiction and seems too unbelievable to be true. And Mark’s storytelling brings this moment in history to life. Listening to this episode might make you feel better (?) about this year’s chaotic, problematic events.
🎙️I love you!