🛷 Iditapod, Chuck E. Cheese, The Shining, Gen-Z, spaghetti 🍝 Kerning Cultures' Hebah Fisher 🕌
💌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 Emily Tafur, an actress, host, multi-media creator, podcaster and Spanish language interpreter originally from Cali, Colombia. She currently is an intern on WNYC studios’ show Death, Sex and Money, as well as the creator of her own travel blog Globe for Good and podcast The Globe for Good Podcast.
App I use: Apple Podcasts to listen and Anchor.fm to publish my own—what used to be NYIT International and starting this month is re-launching as The Globe for Good Podcast – find it wherever you get yours!
Listening time per week: Anywhere from 3 – 7 hours on average (some of that is work related too, how lucky am I that I get to listen to amazing and new material for work!?).
When I listen: I love listening to NPR’s UpFirst over Coffee and breakfast, it helps me feel like I have received news essentials for the day without getting too overwhelmed. Also love to listen on long commutes – whether that’s long drives, train rides or even walks, narrative pods especially like Radio Ambulante. But honestly, when I find something that hooks me, I kind of binge listen shamelessly after work and even on weekends while cleaning around the house – like Serial, La Brega, Through the Cracks…
How I discover: Apple Podcasts’ New and Noteworthy is pretty good and I find that what they suggest for me tends to be spot on. Also, I try not to forward through ads and pod promos in the ones I already listen to, have found some of my favorites by listening to recommendations in the ones I like. Also, at the Podcast I am interning with for this semester at WNYC – “Death, Sex and Money” we suggest two great podcasts every single week in our newsletter. You should sign up for our newsletter and listen to the show, it’s awesome.😀
Anything else? Fun fact, one of the main reasons I started listening to podcasts was to practice simultaneous interpreting and diversify my vocabulary for my work as a Spanish Language Court interpreter. I’d start interpreting and it was useful at the start, and then I got so engrossed in the stories that it ended up just listening. It was a win-win either way.
xoxo lp
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Hebah Fisher
Hebah Fisher is the cofounder and CEO of the award-winning Kerning Cultures Network, which produces Arabic and English shows that regularly top the podcast charts across the Middle East, with stories that have appeared on Radiolab, Gimlet Media, PRI The World, and NPR.
How did you get introduced to the audio space?
Radiolab. The love of my life.
Why was it important for you to start the network Kerning Cultures?
We started Kerning Cultures Network 6 years ago to tell better stories from the places we call home. Mainstream media in the Arab world doesn't speak to us youth; it's created for our parents, which is quite alienating. And we're a very young population - 65% of the region is under the age of 35. So we wanted to tell the kinds of stories that we connected with, stories we'd want to turn to friends and have a conversation about, stories that make us laugh, cry, and bring us all a little closer together.
I like how you often mention on Kerning Cultures how long it takes to make an episode...approximately 50 hours! I agree that probably surprises some people. Can you itemize that time?
Oh dude yea each episode is quite the undertaking. We do a lot of up-front research, pre-interviews, the actual interviews themselves, transcribing the audio, a lot of versions of scripts, and then a lot of versions of the audio draft before it goes out into the world.
Do you have any interesting fan stories you'd like to share with us?
We had one American listener write in to tell us that everything he knew about the Middle East prior to Kerning Cultures was hummus. But after binging several of our episodes, he sold his motorcycle to fund a plane ticket to visit the Middle East for the first time. (He went to Casablanca). That's pretty incredible to us.
What is your goal for Kerning Cultures as a network? In which area(s) would you like to grow?
We're building the premier podcast company for the Middle East. We've really opened the industry in the region (we're the first company to raise venture funding for a podcast company in MENA), and we keep getting more and more ambitious with our storytelling: we just wrapped a first-of-its-kind Arabic fiction thriller series :) I'm so excited for our journey ahead: we're building a media company from the Arab world we can all be proud of.
What shows do you love?
For our English audience, we have 2 shows I love: our flagship Kerning Cultures show where we tell stories like the renegade operation to bring about justice in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, to the contested history of the invention of the Arabic typewriter, to the time elephants reigned in the UAE desert; and al empire, where we tell the stories behind the Arab icons like Jad Abumrad (Radiolab), or Nadine Labaki (Oscar-nominated film director). Also Constellation Prize. It’s such an unexpected style of production that translates beautifully.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
WNYC has released all episodes of the bilingual show La Brega, stories of the Puerto Rican experience. Each episode focuses fully on one subject (its US-style suburbs, surveillance of US citizens from the US, colonialism, and cultural identity) and through engaging stories, investigative journalism, and history, you get a really complete story of the events that have shaped Puerto Rico, how the things that make the island so special are also what have set it up for so many challenges. “La brega" loosely means “the struggle” or hustle, what Puerto Ricans do when they are faced with a challenge or an imbalance of power, something that seems to define its rich history. I like learning about a group of people who are working against a constant struggle, but it sounds frustrating and exhausting. Yet this series feels joyful.
💎BTW💎
🎙️The Iditarod started this weekend, which means Alaska Public Media and KNOM Radio’s Iditapod is back, and you should subscribe ASAP so you can keep up with the race. I fell in love with this show last year, which was a very unusual year for the Iditarod. It started pre-pandemic and by the time it was over, the world was in shock over Coronavirus. Reporting on the Iditarod will be a bit different this year, too, but I took forward to listening to this show this year, which brings you up close to the race. I love it when they talk about the dogs, the sleds, the mushers and their outfits (seriously this show is so much FUN,) and I imagine that stuff will all be covered, albeit in an unusual way. Listening to Iditapod brings The Iditarod’s excitement to life, making you feel like you’re on the sidelines, or sometimes a participant in the race. We all need something to excite and unite us right now. Let it be this.
🎙️On Pod Spotter, Zack Robidas does such a good job interviewing podcasters about their work. He asks the questions that I am always thinking about, and he truly appreciates the effort that goes into making a podcast good. He also has such a great guest list. On a recent episode he interviewed Ian Chillag about Everything Is Alive (“a ridiculous premise taken with absolute seriousness.”) Hearing how Ian structures this show makes you appreciate its artistry and how profound it is. The style is completely unique, and the sound production is so thoughtful, the conversations almost feel like whispered secrets. It’s a show you want to be gentle with, if you’re holding in your hand. This interview made me want to go back and listen to Everything Is Alive all over again. It kept making me think about why, exactly, it resonates with people. How can something so jokey perfectly tap into universal human emotion? (There is also a fun fact from EIA that Ian said had to be cut—that Disney paints things like trashcans and lampposts, things they don’t want you to see, a color they call “go away green.”)
🎙️Kerning Cultures’ Whose Genizah? tells the story of the Cairo Geniza, a collection of about 400,000 Jewish documents that were found in in one of Egypt’s oldest synagogues. Jews in Egypt at the time thought it was blasphemous to throw away anything with God’s name on it, so they kept them here. Almost 100 years ago, Egyptian Jew Jacques Mosseri discovered the Genizah manuscripts and when he died, the manuscripts disappeared. When they were discovered, a question popped up: where should the manuscripts live? Egypt? Israel? Or the UK? With digital technology, how much does it matter? Where will the documents be safe? This is a beautifully told story about what it was like for Jews in Egypt, and the idea of finding these documents feels a little Indiana Jones-ish. I want this to be a movie. It’s an issue that is far from resolved.
🎙️I love Rachael King. I don’t even know how I met her, but listening to her on Pod People’s brand spankin’ new show Pod People’s Podcast, hosted by Tyler Greene, made me realize that Rachael is just one of those people who knows and connects everyone. She makes an impact on everyone she meets. If you are involved of podcasting in any way, you must know about Pod People, a network that can hook you up with the world’s best audio producers, writers, journalists, editors, engineers, sound designers, and more. So if you are planning a podcast and need help, Rachael’s your girl. On the first episode of Pod People’s Podcast, Tyler talks to Rachael about how and why she founded Pod People and what we can expect from the show. It’s impressive and inspiring, and I’m so excited for Rachael, Pod People, and this new podcast.
🎙️You all know I listen to The Daily Zeitgeist every morning, and they did something interesting on a recent episode. They are owned by iHeart Radio, and iHeart had inserted some dynamic ads for crisis pregnancy centers that did not jive with the tone of the show. (This has happened before, it’s why Jack and Miles start every episode saying “Fuck the Koch brothers and fuck Fox News,” two things that have been advertised on The Daily Zeitgeist before.) Instead of just saying “oops” or ignoring, they are turning it into their content, spending time covering the dark background of crisis pregnancy centers, which is an interesting way to address this problem. I must also point you to Monday’s episode, where American Hysteria’s Chelsey Weber-Smith was guest. It was a fun episode. Chelsey talked about hacky-sacks and skateboarding, and why non-binary people don’t give a shit about Mr. Potato Head.
🎙️After an informative episode about children’s programming, Chelsey Weber-Smith had a conversion with Gen-Zer Gael Aitor of Teenage Therapy, for an episode of American Hysteria. When I was a teenager, I assume that people in their 30s thought that I, and my entire generation, were complete shit-heads. But I am so impressed with this Gen-Zer—he seems miles more evolved than I was when I was seventeen. This conversation is funny (hearing what annoys Gen-Zers about millennials, including “mustaches drawn on fingers,” which…yes, Gael. Please roast us for that.) But this conversation was also insightful and hopeful.
🎙️Good Sex is a new show from Lemonada about just that, and episode one features Stacey Daniels, who talks about good sex for everyone, especially fat people like her. This podcast is playful in its writing and production. It transported me for a few minutes. There are a lot of sex podcasts, but this one stands out in what it’s trying to say and the juxtaposition between the serious content and the cartoonish, inventive nature of the sound.
🎙️Since The Simpsons debuted in 1989, little has changed about their family—Homer has the same job, Marge is a stay-at-home mom, they live in the same house and have the same cars. In the 90s it seemed like they had a pretty comfortable life. But our economy has changed a lot—how comfortable would the Simpsons be today? The Indicator looks back at 30 years of median income, the cost of college tuition, women in the workforce and manufacturing jobs, (and they even track down how much Homer made and how much money that is in 2021 money) to see how Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie would be living now. This is a fun episode that paints a picture of how American families are making it (or not making it) in 2021.
🎙️I think one of the best things about podcasts is that they give you the chance to listen to voices that you don’t necessarily agree with. So sure, I will listen to Dan Pashman talk about the overrated nature of spaghetti on of The Sporkful. (I think that spaghetti is the most perfect food, and I come from a long line of spaghetti-worshippers. I want to name my first child Spaghetti. One of the biggest fights I’ve ever had with my family was at a dinner, over how much spaghetti we would eat. Listen Dan doesn’t even like bucatini, and if you cannot overlook that, I’d understand and this series may not be for you.) For the series Mission: ImPASTAble, Dan is setting out to invent a better, more perfect pasta shape, and I’m curious to see him try. I thought listening to this would be like when I try to listen to right-wing news shows to try to legitimize QAnon. But this is more than just spaghetti-bashing (which actually could be pretty funny.) Dan is doing the work to research shapes and textures of the perfect pasta, and what exactly goes into making it reality. And then making it reality.
🎙️Extra Spicy has an episode on Chuck E. Cheese, and how it is a “portal into America contained in one crazy building” for many immigrants. Journalist Liana Aghajanian, who was a child of Iranian-Armenian refugees, talked about how the games, the music, and the other kids at Chuck E. Cheese were so uniquely American that a trip there was almost like going to a citizenship class. A kid of immigrants, who might be growing up in an un-Americanized home, who might not have access to many public places, can go to Chuck E. Cheese and, for not too much money, explore what it’s like to be an American kid. This piece is about Chuck E. Cheese as a sacred space. Liana talks about learning social cues that she wasn’t learning anywhere else, the diversity of the kids she found there, and even admits to liking the pizza when she revisited as an adult.
🎙️Episode one of a two-part series of Imaginary Advice about The Shining dropped last week, and I am so eager to hear part-two that anticipating it is giving me something to live for. Ross has a “conversation” with “prop artist” “Graham Owens,” the “true” author of the famous manuscript prop used in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Graham explains what it was like to be forced to write a book that made Jack Torrence go insane (“all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,”) which is a mini horror story inside a horror story. I know this is a joke, but thinking about it literally frightened me. This fake interview speaks to method acting and set design, and the fact that Stanley Kubrick would lock someone away to create an authentic insanity-inducing prop for a film is hilarious on so many levels. Although this is a piece of fiction, there’s a lot of truth inside. And it doesn’t sound like a joke, it feels so real that it’s kind of a mind-fuck experience. I kept having to remind myself that this is Imaginary Advice, not It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders.
🎙️At the beginning of the pandemic, Shira Moskowitz & Arielle Counter started Counter Programming to give us a break from all of the coronavirus content we were getting by exploring topics with the word “count” or “counter” in the title. (I loved episodes about The Count of Monte Cristo and Count Chocula.) I thought it was a joke at first, but the show has endured and is so much fun to listen to. The show is about Shira and Arielle and their friendship, but each episode is a window into a subject you might not have thought about much, but Shira and Arielle have. The new season just dropped, with the beginning of a four-part series on countertops. After quartz, laminate, and recycled glass, we can expect a special episode featuring a female stonemason, who works with high-profile clients to create custom pieces for kitchens and bathrooms. There will also be Beyoncé’s Countdown and Counting Crows, and Counts and Countesses like Sophie, the Countess of Wessex.
🎙️When I listen to almost anything, my brain is constantly scanning for something I either want to tell someone about, write about, or clip for Hark. It’s kind of a problem, the result of something I enjoy also being my work. It’s rare that I truly escape into an episode. I was talking one of my Hark colleagues, Cory about Switched on Pop’s interview with Kaytranada, and Cory said, “do you think there was a good moment we can clip for Hark?” I realized I had no idea, I had just been lost in the great conversation, selfishly listening for my pure entertainment. If you love Kaytranada, you will leave this interview loving him more. It becomes obvious that he is hard-working but also was born with this insane talent of creating beats. And with their appreciation for the music and knowledge about what exactly Kaytranada is doing, Nate and Charlie are the perfect people to talk to him. If I were a musician, this interview might depress me. I might think, “oh I’ll never have this kind of talent.” It makes sense that Kaytranada takes inspiration from J-Dilla, I was getting J-Dilla vibes, in Kaytranada’s understated brilliance and his ability to innately and seemingly effortlessly do magic.
🎙️I can’t get over how necessary 1 in 5 is—it’s a show that presents diverse stories of student parents. (1 in every 5 college student is also a parent.) It makes a strong case that we don’t support this huge chunk of people and is informative and compelling in so many ways. But this week, it got me thinking about the nature of college in general. We all started thinking about college in a new way when the college scandal broke in 2019. Is college bullshit? Should I go into debt for life to go to college? Should I make my kids go to college? Did I even go to college? This show is teaching me a lot of things, but one of those things is that the college experience doesn’t have to look just one way, a lot of it is bullshit, and some of it is not. These people are changing their lives with their bare hands.
🎙️So 1 in 5 students are parents and 1 in 4 cowboys were Black what ELSE will podcasts teach me today? Black Cowboys is a podcast that is telling the stories of Black people who were lassoing the wild west and have received almost no recognition for it. It is so strange to hear these stories and match them up with the wild west of my mind, my childhood, my imagination. I am going to have to rewrite my brain, and this show is helping people do that. So it’s interesting and full of stories I haven’t heard but want to. But there is also a nice personal touch. Host Zaron Burnett’s dad read him these stories when he was a kid, so Zaron would realize a huge, overlooked way Black people have shaped the United States. And Zaron’s dad is the voice of some of these stories. So each episode is a tribute to a dad who did something really cool for his son…I think those storytimes paid off.
🎙️Cautionary Tales has an episode about Florence Nightingale that offers an unusual twist to her story. Florence Nightingale is famous for being a nurse, but most people don’t know that she spent a lot of time making public health charts—she was a total geek addicted to statistics. She used charts to convince the British establishment that filth and poor sanitation were to blame for so many British deaths during the Crimean war. Which is good. But Florence probably had no idea she was setting the precedent for the power of digital visualization and how much influence it should have on us. Fast forward to now, we often think any claim with a graph attached must be true. (Think: Twitter.) Graphs can be a tool or a weapon. Do they have too much power? I left this episode with an eerie feeling.
🎙️Have you ever had a friend on The Master Cleanse? I feel worse for these people than the people actually on the cleanse. It is truly challenging. I had two friends who did it together years ago, and it was hard to watch them do it. All they talked about was food, they made lists of things they dreamed of eating, and for awhile, they didn’t seem like my friends. Maintenance Phase looked at The Master Cleanse, which obviously presents how dangerous (and ineffective) this diet is, but it also gives helpful advice for what to do if you are the friend on the other side of it. As Aubrey says, you don’t want to be the “human embodiment of a reply guy” when your friends pick up the diet, obnoxiously pointing out how damaging it may be. There are ways to gently express concern if you think you need to intervene. I was kind of hoping this trend was over, but Aubrey and Michael point out that The Master Cleanse has been around forever, and it’s popularity has waxed and waned depending on the amount of chaos happening in the world. (More chaos = more cleanses.) Considering that, I wonder if people went to The Master Cleanse in 2020, the year of pandemic, presidential madness, and protest.
🎙️Good One’s Jesse David Fox had a fascinating interview with a comedian that had completely missed my radar, YouTube star Def Noodles (Dennis Feitosa’s online persona,) a guy who has invented a kind of comedy that I’m not sure I know how to describe. Dennis’ YouTube videos are a critique of YouTube videos and his satire is a critique of satire. In the interview, Jesse is trying to break through Def Noodles to get to Dennis to find out whether or not satire, or this Andy Kauffman-esque work can work on the web and, if people will get Dennis’ irony on the internet without any context. Jesse is interested in Dennis, but Dennis is interested in people on YouTube, and he seems genuinely interested in the way people are consuming his content. I don’t know if I’m making any sense, but I urge you to listen to the conversation, especially if you’re like me and enjoy having your eyes opened to the world of this strange form of comedy, and the culture of YouTube in general.
🎙️Kesha (yes that Kesha) interviewed Insane Clown Posse on her show Kesha and the Creepies, and it was so packed with memorable moments for me, I think because to me ICP is so hidden from mass media. We never hear from them, or really about them. (They have a theory about why this is so.) Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope talk about The Dark Carnival, the world they have created (and that has been taken over by their fans in a good way,) and why they feel like industry outsiders. And they say that people who say, “your music saved my life” are wrong. I don’t think you can listen to this interview without loving Insane Clown Posse just a little bit. You cannot deny that they have created something incredible.
🎙️Ezra Klein has an interview with Cal Newport, author of the new book, A World Without Email, in which he argues that things like Gmail and Slack are making us all miserable. Cal makes a comparison of email technology and acceptance to the Ford factory assembly lines, how it took about 30 years for that system to lock into place. Because that’s how long a structural change like this takes to work. With that thinking, it should take 30 years for digital communication to start working, which is now, and Cal argues that we are on the precipice on an email revolution. He strongly believes that we spend too much time in our inboxes, and talks about how work specialization plays into that. He and Ezra don’t see eye to eye on everything, and it’s interesting to hear where their opinions align, and when they differ.
🎙️I love you!