👄 Lolita, Missy Elliot, Wolves, The Little Mermaid 🧜♀️ Wild Thing's Laura Krantz 👽
💌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 Aude White, who does communications for New York Magazine and Vox Media, and works closely with the podcast network. She also works as an illustrator as a regular contributor to Hot Pod, and has had drawings appear in the New York Times, The Believer, NewYorker.com, and many other places.
Shows pictured: The Daily, You’re Wrong About, Back Issue, Throughline, Resistance
App I use: Apple
Listening time per week: Maybe 10-15 hours a week? I’d say I spend a minimum of an hour a day listening to podcasts, often more.
When I listen: I love listening to podcasts on my bike! Biking is kind of what got me into podcasts in the first place -- and before you scold me for being dangerous, I should note: I only ever have one earbud in, and the volume is always low enough that I can hear what’s going on around me. But I think it actually makes me a safer biker, as odd as that sounds. Music amps me up a little too much and makes a little meaner and more dangerous than I already am, but podcasts slow me down in exactly the right way.
Podcasts are also the only thing that get me through my daily household chores. I’m pretty terrible at taking care of myself and my home as it is, but if it weren’t for podcasts I don’t think I would do a single dish or ever muster up the courage to clean the bathroom.
Finally, because my apartment gets no sunlight, and like everybody else, I have spent a significant portion of this year at home, these days I like to listen to podcasts on my stoop in the morning before work starts. There’s a colony of feral cats that lives on my block (my favorite, named Fluffy, had kittens about nine months ago), so usually I’ll sit outside and drink coffee while I listen to a podcast, occasionally pausing said podcast to coo at one of the cats (none of whom want anything to do with me). You’re Wrong About and Throughline are frequent stoop pods, but sometimes if there’s a series I’m obsessed with, they’ll get bumped for a binge (most recently: This Land).
How I discover: I’m extremely online and discover a majority of shows either through the 800 media and podcast newsletters I subscribe to (this one included), or from staring at Twitter and Instagram all day long. However, because podcasts are a part of my job at Vox Media and New York Magazine, I also spend a lot of time doing research on podcasts to pitch our hosts and journalists to, and often wind up discovering a lot of shows I love that way.
Anything else? A few shows I have been into lately: Scam Goddess, which is all about grifters and con artists, and is hosted by Laci Mosley, who is hilarious. I’ve also been enjoying Resistance, a new show from Gimlet hosted by Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr. about the fight for Black lives -- every episode so far has been a really thoughtful and insightful look into the lives of different people fighting for change, from Brooklyn to Nigeria. And, finally, one show that I’ve been promoting for Vox Media that I love: Go For Broke, which is hosted by Julia Furlan, and all about the dotcom crash of the early 2000s and the lasting repercussions decisions we made in the ‘90s have had on our society today.
xoxo lp
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Wild Thing’s Laura Krantz
Laura Krantz is the host of Wild Thing. Follow Laura on Twitter here. Wild Thing on Twitter here.
Kindly introduce yourself and tell us what you do!
My name is Laura Krantz - I'm a long-time journalist and the host/ creator/ producer/ reporter/ writer/ intern for the Wild Thing podcast. It explores some of the weirder things that capture our imaginations using science, history, culture, and a little humor. The first season drew on a family connection to explore the idea of Bigfoot—what evidence we have and why, even if we don't want to believe, we want something like Bigfoot to be out there. The second season, which launched just this past September, is about the search for extraterrestrial life, from NASA's astrobiology programs all the way over to the UFO Festival in Roswell. Additionally, I also run Foxtopus Ink, a teeny-tiny media company that my husband (a fellow journalist) and I began as a home for our own projects but that is now starting to work with other journalists on their cool ideas. Aside from Wild Thing, we also partnered with Imperative Entertainment and a local Denver journalist to produce The Syndicate, which tells the story of a sophisticated marijuana ring run out of Colorado, and how it fits into the question of marijuana legalization.
Fill in the blank: You will like Wild Thing if you like _____.
Trail mix. There's a lot of good, rational, healthy, science-based raisins and nuts in there but you can also dig through and pull out all the conspiracy theory, imaginative M&Ms if you want that sugar high.
What’s something listeners don’t understand about podcasts and what goes into making them?
It's funny - I'll tell someone I have a podcast and the reaction is usually, "Who doesn't?" Podcasting is great because it is simple to get one started and I like that so many different voices can make themselves heard without having to wait for a gatekeeper to let them through, as has been the case with a lot of traditional media. However, I always feel that I have to explain that the kind of podcast I'm doing takes a pretty specialized skill set, one that I've developed over the last fifteen years of my career and it is a lot of work and takes a lot of time and resources. I just can't pump new episodes out every week. I think that we need a word that differentiates between the kinds of podcasts like Wild Thing (long-form, narrative, highly-produced) and the more interview-style shows. One is not necessarily better than the other, but they are very different and it would be really nice to have listeners, and people in general (advertisers, especially, I'm looking at you), know what that difference is without a long-winded explanation. So if any of your readers have a suggestion for what to call podcasts like Wild Thing, I'm all, ahem, ears. Let's make it happen.
What do you hope the show does for people?
Oh man. There's a lot of ways I could go with this. First of all, I really wanted to approach these topics from a more scientific perspective and try to bring real, good science into the conversation. I want people to think critically about these ideas but also encourage them to be open-minded (although not so open-minded that their brains fall out, to borrow that phrase). But I hoped they might think about all the possibilities, and be more willing to consider different ones than they had before. And I think, above all, I want them to just get joy out of the journey. Learn new ideas. Meet new people. Think differently about things you might not have ever thought about before. The world we live in is a fascinating place; there are a lot of questions we just don't have answers for and we may not have those answers ever. But playing around with ideas, bouncing them around in your brain, thinking creatively and imagining "What if?"—it's all part of being human.
Why are you the perfect host for this show?
Perfect is a big stretch but I think I'm well-suited to hosting Wild Thing for a couple of reasons. I have a journalism background, which helps with thinking about how to approach people in a neutral way. I'm not there to make fun of anyone or knock their beliefs. I want to understand what makes them tick and why. I've really tried to maintain that neutrality and just be kind to people and hear what they have to say. Secondly, I love science but really struggled to grasp it in school, so I understand how intimidating it can be sometimes. I go into a lot of the reporting not knowing much about the science and learning along the way. I think that helps me at finding people to talk to who can explain concepts clearly, and also helps me be better at laying it out for the audience. I always worry that I'm dumbing down the brilliant work that scientists are doing but many of the ones I've interviewed have been really pleased with the final product, which warms the cockles of my heart.
What do Bigfoot-believers and alien-believers have in common?
This one's easy and I think it's actually something we all have in common, which is hoping there's more out there than just ourselves. I think we all want to believe that there are mysteries in the world—and the universe—that we may never solve. There's so much yet to explore and learn and be awed by, and the looking is at least as much fun as the finding.
Women in podcasting are constantly being criticized for their voices. What is your relationship with yours? How would you describe your voice?
I HATED listening to my own voice, especially when I first started. It made my skin crawl. Now I tolerate it and, honestly, part of that is because I think I've gotten better at reading. My husband, Scott, will sit in the room while I'm tracking my script and he has a good ear for how things should sound. We had a lot of stopping and starting in Season One as I struggled to have the right tone and emotion. Season Two was a breeze in comparison and took about half the time. There is still something weird about listening to myself when I'm editing/producing and I'm super critical and cringe at all the mouth noises, but I haven't ever had anyone say anything negative to me, for which I am eternally grateful because I am already so self-conscious about it. Oh. Except one thing. I don't know where this comes from, but I say "melk" instead of "milk" and "meletary" instead of "military" and Scott makes fun of me endlessly for that but I have embraced it.
What shows do you love?
I've loved everything Dan Taberski has done. Also, I really liked The Habitat which was essentially The Real World in a simulated Martian habitat with both science and anthropology mixed in. I loved the second season of APM's In The Dark, although I also cried like a baby, sitting in my garden, listening to one of the episodes. It still makes me tear up to think about it. Let's see, what else...Code Switch (because I think Shereen is the cat's pajamas—she is so good and conversational and real). Dolly Parton's America.Wind of Change. Bear Brook. Slow Burn (seasons 1 & 2—I haven't listened to the later ones yet). Against The Rules (season 1 is better). Bundyville, both seasons. And Leah Sottile has another podcast, Two Minutes Past Nine, that is excellent. You can probably see a pattern here—I'm pretty partial to the long-form, narrative podcasts.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Anything that emerges from Jamie Loftus’ mind is sharp, funny, and completely unique. The podcast that she released in January of this year, My Year in Mensa, was one of my favorite pieces of audio of the year. If Jamie is into something, if she dedicates time to creating art around something (anything from looking at films through a feminist lens to #girlbosses to Twerking Mummy) there must be a reason. There is something fucked up or curious or comical waiting to be deliciously unpacked. Her new project is The Lolita Podcast, which promises to “trace Lolita—the person, Dolores Haze—from her literary origin to current status as a doomed icon.” I was lucky enough to listen to the first episode over the weekend (it dropped today, go listen now!) and I was transfixed. As Jamie admits, discussing Lolita is a minefield. This book has made a huge impact on anyone who’s read it, anyone who’s even just heard about it, and the entire world, culturally. Lolita the character has been taken so far out of context. Jamie has set out to figure out how that happened and the impact it’s made. Episode one is a force to be reckoned with on its own. Jamie carefully guides us through the book (so no worries if you haven’t read it) with a sharp eye toward the things we should be looking for, she brings in how Lolita has made its mark on modern pop culture, there’s important information about pedophelia (which I don’t think enough people talk about) and dramatic readings of the text (from some of my favorite voices in podcasting like Shereen Lani Younes, Anna Hossnieh, and Robert Evans!,) plus her personal relationship with reading Lolita and voicemails from people with other perspectives. Because this podcast isn’t just about Jamie and Lolita, it’s about Lolita and all of us. And it isn’t even just about Lolita, it’s shining a light toward Dolores Haze separately from Lolita. Jamie asks us to think of Lolita as a true crime book and a document of the criminal Humbert Humbert. She admits that this project will be “too close-minded for some, too permissive for others.” There’s so much to talk about, I’m so excited for more.
💎BTW💎
🎙️On Switched on Pop, musicologist Nate Sloan & songwriter Charlie Harding are continuing their anthem series with an episode that I think is the best of the bunch—an ode to Missy Elliot’s Work It. I’ve always loved Miss Elliot, and this song, but this episode puts its complexities on display. Cultural critic Ivie Ani walks us through how it creates a futuristic sound by sampling tracks throughout past decades, is pepped with funny, playful lyrics, and is a nod to afrofuturism. (I actually think the overview of afrofuturism here gave me a better understanding of it than anything I’ve heard or read.) Work It is so rich I feel like you could fill a full-length feature unlocking individual beats, purposeful touches, the music video, the history, and the mold-breaking woman behind the song, Missy Elliot.
🎙️I was so touched by Snap Judgement’s episode The 2020 Gratitude Special. Inside are two stories that are each a celebration of animals. One follows the life (and spoiler alert: death) of a female fox with a reputation, a true hero, and the other is a tale about a woman and her birds. They are both really about a heartbreaking relationship between human and animal—examples of the intimate relationships we can build with animals. So intimate they almost feel human.
🎙️I was five when Disney’s The Little Mermaid came out, which I think was the perfect age to fall in love with it. I still cry during the last scene and I have see it possibly 100 times. I have heard all the teardowns, about how its messes up little girls in regards to the relationships to their physical bodies and love and selves. And I always roll my eyes and say, “well I turned out fine, so those girls that got fucked up by the Little Mermaid probably just got fucked up by their fucked up mothers.” I almost didn’t want to listen this episode, for the same reason I struggled to push play on You Must Remember This’ series on Song of the South. (But I’m so glad I did! One of the best pieces I’ve ever listened to.) This episode of Femlore, though, wasn’t just an easy teardown, but a really interesting conversation between Rachael, Mindy and guest Maddie about the important differences between the book and the movie, the meaning behind the details, and Hans Christian Andersen (a really interesting detail about him that made me think of The Little Mermaid in a new way.)
🎙️Hunting Ghislaine, a LBC podcast, is giving us the full story of this terrible person in all her #girlboss glory. To best understand her, we are taken way back to the fucked up story of her father, and how his toxicity kind of bled into her life. (He loved beating up and demeaning people, and particularly loved “peeing everywhere” and taking dumps on phone calls, a real power move.) His life and death are just as mysterious as Ghislaine.
🎙️Arielle Duhaime-Ross is back at Vice to host Vice News Reports, a show that completely possesses you with news using storytelling, interviews, audio diaries, and hard-hitting journalism. I’m listening to a series called Armed, which lets us inside a middle school in Ohio that has set out to arm their teachers. I’d spent a lot of time rolling my eyes at this idea, but truly had no idea what it would actually look like. This series takes us through it, beginning with how schools get to this point and what the training entails. Episode two includes real audio of teachers (who have almost no experience with firearms) learning how to become armed educators. It’s terrifying. Arielle was also on The Daily Zeitgeist last week, and it’s a great way to learn about her personal side. She’s so smart and fun and level-headed and entertaining.
🎙️When the latest episode of The Alarmist opens, you immediately sense that you’re headed into uncomfortable territory: The Trail of Tears, one of the most despicable pieces of our history. This story is shitty to talk about and remember. On top of that, the episode appears to have been recorded on Wednesday, November 4, when we couldn’t be sure who was winning the election. Rebecca, Amanda, Chris, and guest Tess Paras seem shell-shocked from what I assume is days of scrolling through frightening news and researching one of the worst things that has ever happened on US soil. But they end up setting aside their discomfort to fully dive into the atrocities of The Trail of Tears. If you don’t already know this story front and back, this is a good way to educate yourself. I actually found myself laughing a lot (especially at the end) and of course you should listen to the follow-up episode where you get a totally different perspective on “who’s to blame” from guest expert Dr. Adam Pratt. It’s one of my favorite Aftermath episodes EVER, a great, eye-opening conversation that gives entirely new context to the Trail of Tears and America in general.
🎙️Paula Mendoza told Nora McInerny the story of her tumultuous childhood on Terrible, Thanks for Asking, and despite the fact that I know Paola’s story well (she is a Tink client!) I was on the edge of my seat hearing her retell it, here. Nora allows the story to perfectly unfold, making ties between Paula’s childhood (being unhoused, in a gang, abandoned by her father) to her triumphant adult hood (organizing the Woman’s march, becoming a filmmaker and writer) and why it was so important to write Sanctuary, a thrilling dystopian YA novel that centers around immigration. It’s a book I finished in almost one sitting and it becomes all the more impactful once you know how Paula got here.
🎙️Nobody would be surprised to hear that in school black boys are disproportionately expelled from schools. But I can’t think of a more interesting way to try to wrap your brain around it than asking a teenager to report on it. That’s what VENT Documentaries has done! In one of my favorite pieces they’ve published, a student named Nora invites us into her life to hear the stories of people who have been expelled from her school and why. VENT Documentaries always has some of the most unique content I listen to. Each story is told by a young person from a borough in London, and each story is about something that’s important to them.
🎙️99% Invisible ran a fascinating piece on the safety briefing cards on airplanes. Reporter Mo LaBorde has been collecting them for years, studying the cartoons like religious texts. The evolution of these cards tells the story of airplane travel safety. I appreciated hearing this story because I don’t think people give much credit to the artistry inside these cards. But it is an art. You have to make the drawings simple and bold, they need to communicate movement. And they need to incite calm in airplane passengers. This will make you want to study these guides if we ever get to travel again.
🎙️This episode of Reveal opens with a haunting image—a man stumbles upon an abandoned building in Wichita, Kansas that once housed a facility called Riverside Academy. It was covered in haunting graffiti: “Burn this place.” “Youth were abused here … systematically.” “This is a bad place.” The rest of the episode is an investigation into the facility, which was run by the for-profit company Sequel Youth & Family Services, intended to help kids with behavioral problems. But it also was cited for using methods of excessive force by staff, poor supervision and neglect. There were so many jaw-dropping moments in this episode, I almost can’t believe how many were packed in. One anecdote tells of a child resident giving a tour to government officials, and how he dreamed of telling them the truth about the facility—that he didn’t feel safe and that he was living an abusive place. But he was unable to muster the courage to do it. This is a piece looking at the kids impacted by Sequel Youth & Family. Some of them aren’t alive or even able to be found to tell their own stories. The ones who are paint a desperate picture of the facility.
🎙️Wild Thing’s The Truth Is Out There explores why we even are in search of aliens and UFOs. With so many important, seemingly more pressing scientific issues at hand (like global warming,) why would we put resources toward something that might not matter? If aliens do exist, they clearly aren’t trying to murder us all because they probably would have already done it. So what are we searching for? As in all episodes of Wild Thing, Laura Krantz (read her interview above!) gets to the heart of our search for alien life, and what the search tell us about ourselves.
🎙️Last week American Hysteria ran a great Televangelist episode, and as a follow up, Chelsey dug even deeper to find something even more fascinating: Black evangelicalism and the Christian right. Chelsey spends so much time researching these subjects and it shows, and they brought on two scholars of religion (Professor Lerone A. Martin of Washington University in St. Louis and Professor Anthea Butler of the University of Pennsylvania,) who are the perfect people hear talking about this niche subject and it’s so cool that with podcasting, Chelsey was able to bring them together for this special conversation. This convo sort of blew my mind, particularly when Lerone talks about why white evangelicals understand racism so differently than Black people.
🎙️I’ve been spending months working on Hark, a new super exciting podcast discovery app that I can’t wait to tell you more about. (It’s not available to everyone yet, but I’ll have a code for you in an upcoming issue so stay tuned! Email me if you want to check it out NOW.) On When It Mattered, Chitra Ragavan interviewed the founder, Don MacKinnon. Don has an extensive music background and is using what he learned in music discovery to apply it to podcast discovery. The result, Hark, is beautiful and brilliant. It is what Lauren Passell’s brain would have created if it was trying to make its own dream app. Listen to the interview to get to know Don, one of my favorite people I’ve ever worked for, and join me in being excited for the launch of Hark.
🎙️Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak have joined forces for POOG, a podcast deconstructing the wellness industry. These two are so funny I initially assumed it’d be a parody of goop, but I was wrong—it’s an earnest, honest look at what two funny, smart women actually are willing to try/buy (into) when it comes to physical and mental health products and ideas. I would listen to anything hosted by Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak, and the first episode, Psychic Warfare, about mental health, made me feel like I was on a call with my two funny girlfriends.
🎙️The Constant consistently has in-depth episodes on pieces of our history that always make me think to myself, “how did I not know of this?” Such is the case of the story of Gregor MacGregor, who, in the 1800s, swindled British and French investors to buy into his fictional Central American territory called "Poyais." Hundreds of people emigrated to Poyais thinking they were seeking the promised land, only to find only an untouched jungle waiting for them. More than half of them died. Someone page Laci Mosley…Gregor MacGregor should have his name on a plaque in her scam artist hall of fame. As always with The Constant, this story is told with contagious enthusiasm for the history, and a detailed exposé of MacGregor, who sucks.
🎙️On Family Secrets, Dani talked to Lacy Crawford about being sexually assaulted at her boarding school as a 15-year-old by two seniors. It’s a really fucked up story about the power institutions have and where their interests lie when it comes to protecting students. This happened to Lacy in the 90s, and I went to a boarding school in the early 2000s. But I don’t think my experience would have been much different had I been raped there. It’s a really interesting experience to wonder what I would have done in Lacy’s shoes, what my parents would have done. What would I do if my child was raped at boarding school. Lacy describes the night of her rape, and I felt like I was there with her, running from the dorm where the incident happened in her sneakers. Terrified. This episode walks you through Lacy’s trauma, from being afraid to tell anyone, to being threatened by her school to be silent, to putting herself back together again enough so that she could tell the story now.
🎙️Listening to Skye Pillsbury talk about podcasts on Podcast Junkies made me love podcasts more, and I didn’t think that was possible. Skye is one of my favorite people in the podcasting community (though I have so many!) and she talks about first falling in love with audio, connecting and working with other podcasters, and her strategy for podcast journalism, which I wish I was 1/100th as skilled at. (She does shout out Podcast The Newsletter on the episode!) If you haven’t listened to Skye’s award-winning episode of Heavyweight, do it now. It’s a masterpiece.
🎙️On The History of Literature, Jacke Wilson talks to Anna North (a Tink client!) about Westerns—what about them is so romantic and how they are able to evolve in modern times. Anna’s upcoming book Outlawed is a feminist, alt-history Western story I cannot recommend highly enough. On the show, Anna talks about a reimagined western book that she loves, C. Pam Zhang's How Much of These Hills Is Gold.
🎙️I love you!