👻 Ghostly photographs, harp seals, acorn bread, Guy Fieri 🔥 Rough Translation's Gregory Warner 🌎
💌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 Andre Doughty, Adjunct Professor and DJ, Podcast Producer, Twitch Streamer and Videographer.
App I use: I'm an Android user, so we don't have a built-in podcasting application (to my knowledge). Pretty straightforward app with a visual interface.
Listening time per week: I haven't had committed as much listening time to podcasts, but I make sure I listen to roughly 4 hours a week. This semester at work I'm teaching a podcasting class, so I've got to keep my ears sharp.
When I listen: I generally listen when I wake up and get into my day or when I'm getting ready for bed. Having something play out over a speaker while you jump into a meal or while you're winding down with a cup of tea? Bliss.
How I discover: I generally look for website recommendations or friend recommendations. When websites put up their EOTY (end of the year) lists I usually take my time to explore from there.
…Just some quick shout-outs to my podcast partners Miles Graves, Jelani Carter, Justice Ramos, Jonathan Casanova, Anthony Cosme and David North.
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
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Rough Translation’s Gregory Warner
Gregory Warner is the host and creator of Rough Translation, an NPR podcast with “stories from far off places that hit close to home.” Follow Gregory on Twitter here. Follow Rough Translation on Twitter here.
How did you get introduced to the audio space? Have you always loved it, before podcasting?
“Act V,” an episode by Jack Hitt on This American Life. I must have listened to long-form radio before then but that episode was really my introduction and my gateway drug. A lot of that has to do with the particular place I was at in life. After college I’d taken a series of odd jobs, ending with an assignment to visit all of the medium- and maximum-security prisons in New York State and write a report on the condition of prisoners with mental illness. The person who gave me that job had met me teaching writing on Rikers’ Island, and felt that I had a relaxed manner with inmates and could draw them out. The prison visits were eye-opening, but the report-writing was harder than I’d expected, and I soon fell behind deadline. I started coming in to the office on Saturdays to get in a few extra hours of work undisturbed.
All that is to say, one Saturday morning I was in the office working on my report while listening to WNYC. This was before podcasting. Plain old radio. Jack Hitt’s voice came on. If you haven’t heard that episode, check it out. It’s great storytelling on many levels, but I think what hooked me is that the distance between what Jack had been doing that year and I was doing didn’t seem insurmountable. He’d spent months in a high-security prison in Missouri. I was spending my time visiting high-security prisons in New York. He was talking to inmates, hearing their stories. I was too. Not long after, I did my This American Life story -- from a Missouri correctional facility.
I think it’s really important not just to fall in love with something but to have some way to imagine yourself doing it. My path to podcasts was through prison.
How is a Rough Translation story born?
Since the pandemic, we’ve been having regular Zoom meetings with NPR’s international correspondents. Some RT stories are born there, out of conversations or questions. For example, our “From Niqab to N95” episode began with a conversation with my friend Elizabeth Spackman, who was wondering aloud how the coronavirus rules around mandatory facemasks were perceived by Muslim women who wear religious face coverings. Had the public health rules around covering our faces mitigated the stigma that those women feel when they walk in Western countries? I took this question to the Zoom meeting, and it turned out to be something that Eleanor Beardsley and Diaa Hadid were thinking about. I like how we did that episode because we really tried to preserve the spirit of the Zoom call conversation in the actual recording, without making it overly focused on the journalists.
What's a story that resonated with people so much that it surprised you?
“Liberty, Equality, and French Fries” is about a fight by some McDonalds employees in a poor, mostly immigrant neighborhood of Marseilles, France to save their restaurant. The stakes of the story are relatively small, but the story touches on bigger things like what is a job really supposed to mean and what happens when people take corporate catchphrases close to heart. Oh, and also the good and bad of American-style capitalism. I feel like that story resonated with an incredibly wide range of people.
Fill in the blank: You will like Rough Translation if you _______.
You will like Rough Translation if you have to pause when people ask you the question, “Where are you from?”
Which episode was the most fun to make?
Maybe Hotel Corona, our episode about the Jerusalem hotel that became a Covid-recovery center / real-life-reality-TV-show. Or ourUkraineseries. Though on the theory that fun comes in waves and anything that takes time is bound to have significant stretches of no fun, maybe the most fun was our election episode, “All Eyes on US.” It was right after Biden won and we set ourselves a goal to hit 25 countries in 25 minutes. There was no downtime.
What do you hope the show does for people?
I think we’re trying to give people something akin to a really good travel experience. Not so much of the beaches-and-museums variety but more like that time you found yourself in a random and slightly unnerving situation with strangers and ended up finding out surprising things that shifted the way you see yourself in the world.
What is your relationship with your voice and how would you describe it?
I feed it tea and hope it shows up for work.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
🎙️There are over 1,750,000 podcasts, which is a lot, but it’s not so many that we are out of ideas. Phoebe McIndoe and Redzi Bernard have created Telling Stories to ask storytellers about their craft, and then they close the episode with a mini challenge based on what they learned. If the first episode is any indication of how good this show will be, we all have something to be very excited about. It’s with Arlie Adlington (creator of one of my favorite pieces of audio of all time,) who shares a piece he made for The Dig’s Antibody series, International Trans Person Helpline (it’s amazing,) and his challenge to the hosts: to create an audio piece which features a sonic transition: from one location to another. You can listen to Phoebe and Redzi’s homework assignments here. (And they urge us to all join in.)
💎BTW💎
🎙️Arlie’s story originally appeared on the first part of The Dig’s Antibody series, which is about underappreciated ways Covid is changing us. Listen to the entire episode to hear the story of Nikil Saval, who had to resort to digital canvassing running for state senate, a fiction piece that illustrates what it’s like to try to get unemployment benefits, and a conversation with a man named Patrice, who is avoiding Covid while serving a life-sentence in Joliet, IL. (Patrice was also on this powerful episode of Citations Needed.) This episode doesn’t waste a second of your time. The show in general is fantastic—each is packed with elegantly designed stories, all rich with sound that introduce you to a kaleidoscope portrait of how Covid is impacting the world.
🎙️The newest Snap Judgment starts with a trigger warning—do not listen to this episode of you are sensitive to stories of animal death, and lots of animals, lots of harp seals, die in this story. Jennifer Hayes is a photographer for National Geographic who tells a story about setting out to capture the births of harp seals with her camera, which ends up being a complicated and dangerous task. She experiences a moment with a mother and pup that changed her life, moments before the seals were crushed to death by ice. I love animals so much that I don’t eat them, and this story made me glad I’ve made that choice. Animals are so smart and emotional, and in this story, kind and selfless, even to humans who put them in danger. I don’t wait to spoil what happens because being surprised by Jennifer’s encounter was a treat.
🎙️This beautiful piece from Outside/In tells the story of two Ohlone people, Louis Trevino and Vincent Medina, who have set out to bring back acorn bread, a staple unique to their Ohlone ancestors. They’ve opened a restaurant that serves Ohlone food, but the center of this piece is the acorn bread. Louis discovered a recording of one of his ancestors describing her longing to eat it and the bread’s importance to the Ohlone, and that is where the journey began, of Louis and Vincent working to bring their culture, language, and history to life. They talk about their memories of the language and how they can feel it in the landscape from the East Bay of California to Monterey and Big Sur.
🎙️I have been waiting for a project like Odessa to come out. The New York Times is taking us to a high school in Odessa, Texas, to find out what going to school is like during a pandemic. In episode one, we enter a classroom where some students are in person, and some are remote, and what this does to the psyches of their teachers. And also, (kids these days!) many of the remote students are pulling off jobs while they are in class. Literally making smoothies for customers while they are listening to their biology teacher talk about protein synthesis. “Did your colleagues find it strange you were in class while you were at work?” The reporter asks. “No,” the student says. “They were all in class, too.” Listen to my favorite moment from this episode here.
🎙️If you were an Unsolved Mystery kid (or adult) like me, I don’t think you should pass up the Unsolved Mysteries podcast. The original theme song at the beginning had me hopping around like an excited child. I felt like I was eight-years-old, eating manicotti TV dinners on the floor with my mom before bed. And that is EXACTLY how you will feel listening. Or really, you will feel exactly the way you felt watching Unsolved Mysteries in the 90s. But I think this show is kind of like Disney World. If you don’t have nostalgic ties, it might not be your thing. The first episode contains a very eerie story about a haunted graveyard. I look forward to future episodes about motorcycle gangs kidnapping young girls. (Those are the episodes of the television show that always stuck with me and gave me nightmares when I was young.)
🎙️teikirisi released their last episode (sad) but it was the perfect ending to this season, which is one of my favorite shows of the past twelve months. Carmen and Fryda just spent seven (amazing) episodes filling our brains with funny stories, heart-wrenching histories, and unique perspectives about the Cuban-American experience, and they sum it all up in the cuban-american dream. When you’ve lived through episodes 1-7, about family and sacrifice and Cuba today, how does that impact who you become? How will your parents parent you? What will you strive for? Carmen and Fryda promise they’ll be back for more teikirisi soon, and I’ll be waiting eagerly with my pom poms.
🎙️Crime seemed so much more silly and fun in the olden days. One of my favorite Criminal episodes ever, The Many Lives of Michael Malloy, is about three friends who try to kill their friend by convincing him to drink himself to death. Which is wrong! But come on…these guys…what cards! I’d much rather listen to a 9-part podcast series about that instead of the story of another white woman who was murdered by her rich husband, who was sleeping with his private trainer. Then we have Criminals’ Spiritual Developments, about a con artist (or was he?) named William Mumler who would sell photos to people with their deceased loved ones in the background. Were these people being visited by spirits on camera? Or was William Mumler doing something to the photos? This episode is his story, but also the story of Spiritualism. And a criminal who was smart enough to almost get away with fraud.
🎙️The Allusionist’s Helen Zaltzman talked to Lory Martinez (Ochenta Studios, Mija) and James Kim (Moonface) about what it’s like to translate stories into other languages. It’s such a treat to hear three of my podcast heroes together in one room. Listening to Lory talk about Mija made me want to stop listening to The Allusionist and start bingeing Mija all over again. Both Lory and James get into something I hadn’t thought much about…making sure emotion doesn’t get lost in translation, and even giving up some control of your story when it’s moved to a new language. Lory and James also talk about why they decided to create fictional projects that are heavily based on their own histories, which speaks to the power of fiction, something that’s hugely undervalued in the podcast space. And if you think fiction shows are not for you, Mija and Moonface will change your mind.
🎙️Cautionary Tales is back and it feels so good. This time, it’s the tale of two public speakers who have a lot in common—Gerald Ratner, a jewelry store owner, and Martin Luther King Jr. King’s I Have a Dream speech became one of the most beautiful, most quoted speeches in history. Ratner’s speech destroyed his life. One might assume that Ratner hadn’t prepared and that King had, but I Have a Dream was improvised and Ratner’s speech may have been more intentional that it seems at first glance. What does this say about what goes into the words we use? How can we avoid “doing a Ratner,” which is a phrase still used in the UK today?
🎙️Everyone has been bringing up Tuskegee lately, and I get it, I get why. But Code Switch produced an episode that will change the way you think about it. Shereen and Gene talk to Harriet Washington, who is like, “helllo! It’s not just TuskEEEGeeeee.” Racism has always had a big role in health care. Did you know that Black communities were hit less hard by the opioid crisis because doctors were often ignoring their pain and assuming they were drug addicts? Blaming everything on Tuskegee is the easy way out and a big health problem Black people can’t fix. Tuskegee was not an outlier. If we want POC to feel safe getting the Covid vaccine, we have to change the whole system. As Shereen says, “this distrust is a real public health crisis for everybody, but we need to remember that people who distrust the medical establishment arrived here honestly.”
🎙️Poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti died last week, at the age of 101. (Lawrence also opened City Lights bookstore in 1953, and published Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other Poems,” which was brought to trial on obscenity charges, a case that paved the way for the publication of other banned books.) For his 99th birthday, The Kitchen Sisters visited him in his home in Big Sur, and the piece they produced makes you feel like you are going on a walk with him in the woods. Between reading poetry and talking about life and death, you really get to know how he operates. This is a really special piece that speaks volumes of Lawrence, and it’s an incredible listening experience in general.
🎙️Speaking of The Kitchen Sisters, they had a piece about Nomadland that you shouldn’t miss if you watched the film. You get to hear Frances McDormant and director Chloe Zhao (who just became the first Asian woman to win the Golden Globe for best director for Nomadland) talk about about how the movie was adapted from a book, and how Frances’ character, Fern, was born. The episode is an elegant mix of sounds from the film, personal stories from Frances, and audio from Chloe about what went into making the movie.
🎙️On Death, Sex & Money, Anna interviewed a man, *Tony, who discovered he was not the biological father of his daughter. What I thought sounded like a straight-forward story ended up taking some unexpected turns. Initially Tony accepted his role and worked hard and sacrificed his own needs to provide for his daughter, then he became suspicious she wasn’t his, and then eventually he knew. There’s an equally complicated story going on, here, running on a parallel line to Tony’s—the story of the biological dad. Both men are totally open about the roller coaster experiences they had as they adapted to new ideas about paternity and what it was like to meet in the middle. This story is not about the mother or child (and we do not hear from them,) it is about the different ways two men struggled with identity during a shocking life event.
🎙️I love the way Vice News Reports delivers news—they always pass the mic to the people who should be telling the stories, the people closest to them. And they use a lot of real-time audio, so you never feel like a reporter is separating you from the story. You feel like you’re standing next to them as they take everything in themselves. The episode Hostile Territory starts out interestingly enough, telling the story how a video game became the Army’s number one recruiting tool. Recently the Army started an e-sports team on Twitch to recruit, like, 12-year-olds on Twitch (they call it outreach.) The story really kicks in when an anti-military Twitch user named Jordan started a digital backlash movement to troll the solders’ stream, asking them about war crimes and the My Lai massacre. This is story that touches the military, the gaming world, and the First Amendment.
🎙️In the wake of recent assault allegations against Armie Hammer and Marilyn Manson, the topic of kink and its implications has been rising to the surface. At the same time, a new collection of stories called Kink from R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell was published, that explores how kink can be consensual and healthy. So what’s the difference between dangerous and good kink? On this episode of The Cut, Avery Truffleman talked to Kwon and Greenwell, as well as Roxane Gay, who writes in Kink that BDSM helped her deal with her own experiences of sexual assault and rape.
🎙️Thrillist Explores had a piece about a couple who has mapped every single Diner, Drive-In, and Dive featured in the 13-year-old history of Guy Fieri’s TV show. (\Regular readers of this newsletter know that I basically have a Guy Fieri Google alert set up and will gobble up anything that mentions him. But even if that’s not you, I think you will get a kick out of hearing about people who dedicates their lives to documenting Flavor Town spots and visiting them IRL. And from the restaurant owners, how a visit from Guy Fieri ends up changing their lives.
🎙️The Artist and the Athlete launched two weeks ago, but I was eagerly awaiting episode two, with Alanis Morissette and Danica Patrick. This is why I love podcasts. Where else can I hear two women with so much in common yet two completely different backgrounds talk about fame, being angry, and being the only girl in the room? This episode wanted to make me get to know both women more, and I was feeling exceptionally grateful for Lindsay Czarniak, who is hosting the conversations. It will be so exciting to see who else she matches up. This episode inspired me to relisten to one of my favorite episodes of Punch Up the Jam…You Oughta Know with Jake Weisman. I can remember going into this episode the first time I heard it, having zero appreciation for this song. But listening to Jake talk about it made me listen to it 100 times in a row full blast and have a new appreciation for Alanis. It also made me laugh VERY hard. Punch Up the Jam is hilarious.
🎙️Austin Kleon (a Tink client!) was on Working to give advice to people who strive to be creative and how art works. I love Austin because he is an influential creative who is so not full of shit. He talks about how when we create, we are inspiring creativity in others, and how our day job can enhance our creativity. This week in my podcast listening, I kept noticing the theme of archiving and collecting kept coming up. (Probably because I was listening so much of The Kitchen Sisters.) Austin is an archivist of creatives. He collects advice from other people making things, so he is a great person to listen to.
🎙️Made of Stronger Stuff is touring the human body, with Psychologist Kimberley Wilson and Dr Xand van Tulleken. Each episode is a new stop on the tour, focusing on eyes, the spine, the lungs, and more. But these aren’t surface explorations—they go beyond the physical to reveal how our bodies shape our society and the way we interact with the world. The eye episode explores the difference between sight and vision, how our eyes truly deceive us, and offers an exercise to prove it, that will drive you nuts (in a good way.) The spine episode has a fascinating discussion about pain and consults a contortionist. And the appendix story talks about why we actually might need our appendixes, and offers a terrifying story of someone who woke up during an appendix-removal operation.
🎙️Through the Cracks is investigating the story of eight-year-old Relisha Rudd, who disappeared from a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. where she had been living with her family. 18 days after she was last seen she was declared missing, and she was never found. The question is: how did she slip through the cracks?, but usually when I think of things slipping through the cracks, I think of them as mysteries. It’s heart-wrenching to hear how system after system failed Relisha and her family. I made the mistake of Google image searching Relisha, which transitioned the story in my mind from distant to up-close and made the story harder to hear. But it’s a good reminder that this isn’t just a story of characters in my podcast library. It’s the story of a real family, and a real girl, who is the victim of layers and layers of neglect.
🎙️On Sideways, Matthew Syed looks at huge ideas that shape our lives from an angle we aren’t used to be seeing, using two seeming different stories to illustrate. My favorite episode was The West and the Rest, which talked about how the shift from marrying our cousins to choosing our partners led to the dissolution of tribes and the ability for us to change the way we think about social organization and cross-pollinate ideas across the world.
🎙️I love you!