🧜♀️ Malcolm Gladwell vs The Little Mermaid 🐟 economics meets healthcare 🌡️ lesbian icon Peppermint Patty🌈
💌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, here’s this: this sent my brain on a spiral, this had a great first episode, I can’t stop thinking about this.
This week we’re getting to peek into the listening life of Ella Watts, a podcast producer at BBC Studios and an audio fiction expert. She's best known for a 10 year overview of the english-language fiction podcast industry that she was commissioned to write for BBC Sounds back in 2018. In her day job, Ella's the producer of BBC Radio 4's Quote...Unquote, but in her free time she's an advocate and community coordinator for the international audio fiction industry. She co-founded London Podcast Festival's Audio Drama Day (#LPFAD), she runs monthly virtual meetups for audio fiction creators (#UKAudioFiction), and she's a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 Extra's Podcast Radio Hour. When she's not evangelising about audio fiction, she's developing a Tabletop Roleplaying Game with her partner and MacGuffin & Company about sailing on a magical river, which is due to Kickstart this Autumn. You can find her next at London Podcast Festival, recommending audio fiction shows at an event with Lauren called "If, Then: Where Every Listener Will Find Something We Love." Tickets are free and it will be streamed online.
App I use: I'm using Castro for now - I like the alphabetisation, queue options, and listening history features. But I try to change it up every year or so. When necessary, I'll use Spotify and BBC Sounds for exclusives to those platforms.
Listening time per week: 14-20 depending on whether I'm editing or recording my own work. I keep a 'pilot season' of first episodes in my queue for whenever I know I can block out a good chunk of time to find new shows I like.
When I listen: All the time! In the morning when I'm getting up, whilst I eat, when I go for walks, when I'm knitting, when I'm playing video games, when I'm doing chores, when I'm doing admin, when I'm on the move. The only time I don't listen is before bed - I really can't fall asleep listening to podcasts and am amazed by people who do.
Discovery tools: Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook - I track various hashtags, threads and groups, as well as key creators, listeners and reviewers. I also find new shows through Ely Fernández's Audio Dramatic, Discover Pods, the Fiction Podcast Weekly, Podnews, Black Audio Dramas Exist, The Cambridge Geek, Bello Collective (and especially their monthly Fiction Debut roundup), You're Gonna Love This Podcast, Podcast Radio Hour, this newsletter (!) and word of mouth. I essentially keep a little black book stuffed with newsletters, Facebook groups, digital magazines that do podcast coverage and podcast review shows that cover fiction. Whilst I adore Radio Drama Revival, I've normally listened to a show before I hear it showcased there, and the excitement for me is hearing from the creators rather than finding a drama that's new to me.
Anything else? Consider trying a fiction podcast! Audio drama is a medium, not a genre. In the same way that you're unlikely to dislike all novels but you might dislike romances, if you've heard an audio drama you didn't like it probably had more to do with that specific drama than the form as a whole. Try to identify what you disliked and find something different. Too many confusing voices? Try Gospels of the Flood , Unseen or Vega: A Sci-Fi Adventure, they're single voiced podcasts, so it's like listening to an audiobook. Don't like Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror? Try Seen and Not Heard, it's kind of like Fleabag, if Fleabag was about a deaf, Jewish woman. Love an investigative series? Try The Message or The Big Loop. Want more comedy in your life? Midnight Burger, Everything is Alive, Wooden Overcoats and Victoriocity are all brilliant. There's so much incredible drama out there by amazingly talented new voices. Give it a chance.
xoxo lp
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I hope by now you have visited Listen Notes and are having fun playing around with it. I always loved it but gained appreciation for it when I read this blog post by Listen Notes’ founder and CEO Wenbin Fang about how he thought it up—it all began with Wenbin wanting an audio version of Wikipedia. When he started to work as a software engineer full-time, he found himself wanting to make the most of his time coding by searching for knowledge. This sparked his interest in podcasts, which he found made knowledge accessible, like Wikipedia. Read the story from Wenbin himself to find out who he built Listen Notes for (himself!) and how exactly he uses the tool as his own Wikipedia.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
LZ Granderson
LZ Granderson is the host of ABC News’ Life Out Loud with LZ Granderson. Follow him on Twitter here.
What has making the show taught you about yourself?
That I prefer working where I am valued as opposed to where I am tolerated. Being out in certain media spaces, tolerated was the best I could hope for and even that was a struggle at times. But ABC in general, and ABC Audio specifically, value my experiences, talents and vision. It’s been wonderfully foreign to me. My wish is that everyone who feels tolerated at work has an opportunity to experience being valued. It’s quite lovely.
What's a moment from what you've recorded so far that will stick with you forever?
Daniel Newman was the first person I interviewed and thus the first person I asked a question. And on the very first question of the very first interview, this tremendous thunderclap interrupts Daniel before he could answer it. I still don’t know if God was blessing it or telling us to stop. I went with the former.
Fill in the blank: You will like Life Out Loud if you like _______.
Honesty. That defines almost everything I do – being as honest as possible.
If you were going to start a new podcast about something weird or niche that you love, don't worry about the logistics or about whether or not anyone would like it, what would it be?
Background singers dishing on who can and can’t really sing as well as what it’s like to work with the best.
Who do you wish had a podcast?
God… so folks can stop using His name to give cover for their prejudices.
What's the secret to giving a good interview?
Listening, preparation, listening, empathy, listening.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
A Bintel Brief is here! Ginna Green and Lynn Harris are bring back the century+ Jewish advice column from the Forward (A Bintel Brief = Bundle of Letters in Yiddish) to your ears, with this advice show that guides Jewish Americans through their most pressing personal problems. Lynn is a comedian living Brooklyn with her Rabbi husband, and Ginna is a Black Jewish mom in the South. The first question on the podcast dealt with something not often talked about—so let’s talk about it! (A man worrying he is too old to be a father, but he always thought he’d have a family.) This got me thinking about the stigma men face about even admitting this, and how it’s kind of looked down upon for single men to adopt. Ginna and Lynn offer good advice, pulling in the Bible (shoutout to Sarah!) and set us up for a comfy, fun, and interesting show that will prove that these universal questions can be answered with a little bit of timeless, old-fashioned guidance. (Some things, like advice, never age.)
💎BTW💎
🎙️We need to talk about Malcolm Gladwell and Disney. Malcolm took up three whole episodes of Revisionist History to tear down The Little Mermaid. I was afraid to listen to it, but ended up loving it. I’ll say it—The Little Mermaid is my favorite movie. For years I have been telling people, “I loved the Little Mermaid and look at me now. I’m a feminist. I was smart enough to know it was a fairytale and I knew fairytales aren’t real. We have to give kids credit and let them see fucked up things, knowing they will take things promises of Prince Charming with a grain of salt.” But listening to Malcom, I started wondering if I was the equivalent of a Boomer woman saying, “I was sexually harassed too, millennials. And look at me, I’m fine. Calm down and stop it with the #MeToo stuff.” Can’t these dicey subjects act as a launching pad for more nuanced conversation? But maybe The Little Mermaid damaged me and I don’t know it. Maybe I shouldn’t expect kids to have to parse out reality and fantasy like I did. Maybe it’s like the student loan debt argument. Maybe I shouldn’t punish younger generations just because I paid the dues of watching The Little Mermaid unscathed. Am I unscathed? Or maybe it’s just a really fun movie with great songs. Regardless of whether you love or hate the movie, it’s fascinating to hear someone intelligent approach it academically and philosophically. In episode one, Malcolm gets into the legal sloppiness of the contract Ariel signed with Ursula, which taught me about unconscionable contract and led me to a deep dive as to this pertains to Ursula. Episode two is a great conversation with Angus Fletcher about storytelling, the danger of presenting kids with moldable minds fucked up stories like The Little Mermaid (which reminded me of this great episode of The Ezra Klein Show with Ta-Nehisi Coates,) the history of how we have told our fairy tales, the science of how our brains react to poetic justice in stories, and why The Little Mermaid is an example of poetic justice on speed. Then Malcom and Brit Marling unpack the injustice delivered to Ursula and the tyrrany of King Triton, and wonder if The Little Mermaid is fixable. This segment made me WISH I had thought of tying my feet together and pretending I was a mermaid when I was little, like Brit did. But I guess it’s not too late. On episode three, Brit and Malcolm try to fix the ending of the movie (with help from the voices of Jodie Foster, Glenn Close, and Dax Shapard) asking: why is Ursula the villain in the first place? Their correction is great (different, but feels very Disney—Prince Eric is a gay vegetarian and Triton and Usrula get married.) I hope Disney is taking notes—I would have loved to have this ending when I was a little girl. BTW Malcom appeared on one of my favorite shows, Very Amusing, to talk about the series. He doesn’t seem concerned that the Disney fans will come after him (though he is worried about getting sued by Disney, or so he says in the beginning of episode one) and I think that true Disney fans should be appreciative of the time and mental energy Malcolm has spent thinking about this problematic fave.
🎙️Humungous shout out to Ashley Lusk, who has been singing the praises of this series from Pop-Up Magazine, Pop Up Magazine Presents, which collects little snippets of personal stories from everyone from Anna Sale to 85-year old synchronized swimmer Barbar Eison White. Each episode is a little guide—to walking, to water, to trees to night sky. Some of the stories that seem plain on the surface are the most rich. (Like a journalist walking around Mexico City in the walking episode.) The sound is crystal clear and the voices feel as weathered and real as if the subjects were sitting across from me. Each one is incredibly short, leaving you wanting more, like an entire episode-more. But this is all you get. I’ll take it.
🎙️Cancel Me, Daddy is taking a look at pearl-clutching cancel culture, diving into whatever temper tantrum happens to be reaching a boiling point in internet culture that week. I can hardly believe it’s taken me so long to stumble upon a show that does this. And this one, hosted by Katelyn Burns (Vox contributor) and Oliver-Ask Kleine (Senior Producer of Translash’s The Anti-Trans Hate Machine) is both funny and intelligent. The first episode, The Zenith of Cancel Culture, is a great place to start. Katelyn and Oliver set the scene for the world of the panicking far-right. An episode with Emily VanDerWerff unpacks Emily’s piece How Twitter Can Ruin a Life, a story about a trans writer who was cancelled because the title of something she wrote invoked a lot of internet ire and led to the author killing her own trans identity.
🎙️Oh my Lord I have been thinking of this episode from Atlas Obscura nonstop since I listened. Zinara Rathnayake traveled to Kongthong, India, where mothers give their children distinctive melodies all for themselves, and sing the songs out the windows when they want to call their children home. The episode beautifully captures what it sounds like when mothers are singing into the woods, pulling them home with their voices. (All of these women had beautiful voices and I wonder if it becomes a Kongthong neighborhood joke when one of them sings off-tune.) Why this tradition has survived is so interesting, and this episode is a snapshot of a world that seems like it’s from a different time.
🎙️Chris Gethard was on Dough Boys to talk about Coca Cola Freestyle—those machines that let you disperse your own soda creations into one cup. I assumed I’d just be getting laughs with this episode, and I did, but Chris is a soda aficionado, and has takes on brands, ice/no ice, and more that are so strong and specific that it gave me a whole new appreciation for the stuff (which, since I’m from Ohio, I’ll say pop.) Until you start really digging into it, you don’t realize how much storytelling and nostalgia there is when it comes to soda. You might have mixed feelings about it. There’s an interesting story about why Chris own’t drink Dr. Pepper (the story of a lawsuit. Dr. Pepper vs. Dr. Pepper,) Mitch sneezes several times (HAHA) and we get a lot of soda philosophy and stories that paint soda as American’s real sweetheart.
🎙️Set your alarm clocks for August 3, when the final Playcation episode from The Big Ones will run. It has been so much fun to go on fake vacations with hosts Amanda and Maria, and for the series finale they will be going to Disney World, Maria as a Disney freak and Amanda as an animal lover. I literally called into the show and begged them to do this and rallied for it on Twitter, so get ready for a good time. And if you haven’t listened to back through previous episodes, do it—you’re in for a treat. Amanda and Maria are hilarious and the show is the definition of a fun escape. (Last week they went to The Galapagos Islands.)
🎙️In 2020, Laurel Morales reported for NPR and KJZZ's Fronteras Desk on the devastating impacts the pandemic had among the Navajo, where she pitched an in-depth, character-driven podcast to KJZZ and called it 2 Lives. KJZZ picked up the project for a first season, but now Laurel is doing the show on her own. Listening to it feels like you’re knocking on the doors in a neighborhood and being welcomed inside homes to hear the stories of lives that are actually two—stories of someone who has experienced something rather earth-shattering and is left to rebuild in an uplifting way. Laurel is a beautiful interviewer, sitting back quietly to let her guests shine, while carefully guiding them through their story of going from what feels like rock bottom to a surprising new place. If you’re into story driven narrative, 2 Lives is beautiful and is gentle, easy listening you’ll want to submerse yourself in.
🎙️Benjamin Walker’s Theory of Everything is so difficult to explain which is what makes it so wonderful—you never know if you are getting something trippy from Benjamin’s brain or something journalistic. More than once I have wondered what was real and what was not. The latest was an interview with Blake Scott Ball for a conversation about Charlie Brown in America that made me second-guess my tepid feelings for The Peanuts. (Don’t hate me, I was too deep into my Disney obsession and had little interest for anything else.) Blake gets into what was going on at the desk of Charles Schultz while he was churning out comic after comic, the twists and turns his characters made, and what he was saying about Peppermint Patty by clearly making her a lesbian, but never commenting on it.
🎙️This week I found myself plowing through episodes of Left-Handed Radio, it almost felt unhealthy. The episodes are short so it’s so easy to say, “just one more.” Each one is a skit that gives you entry into a unique fictional and unusual world (an apartment where a dead cat is discovered, an alternate universe with a haunted painting and a spooky, sexy song,) sprinkled with subtle ad-libbed moments that will spark joy and make you laugh out loud. (You will like it if you like The Truth.) The reason you can blow through them so comfortably is because they are all wildly different but you can tell they exist in the same universe, which I’m assuming is pretty much just the brains of Anna Rubanova and Adam Bozarth, a fun place to be. If you’ve been wanting to get into fiction, this is a great way to start. And if you need to mix up your listening, try it out. It’s unlike the other stuff in your library, I promise.
🎙️Freakonomics just launched This Won’t Hurt a Bit, a show that explores the intersection of economics and healthcare, with Harvard physician and economist Dr. Bapu Jena. It promises to answer questions like: Why do kids with summer birthdays get the flu more often? Can surviving a hurricane help you live longer? What do heart surgery and grocery-store pricing have in common? The first episode tracks deaths on the day of local running races, to find out of there is any correlation. (There is, and can you guess why?) This show gives you the tools to look under hood of medical headlines, and become a more interesting (and perhaps annoying) party guest.
🎙️The premise of The Dubious Book of Famous Deeds sounds like a fictional tale: host Paul Bates found a 132-year-old book in an alley called The Pictorial Treasury of Famous Men and Famous Deeds, full of wildly obscure and preposterously inaccurate stories about events from history you’ve probably never heard of. Each episode Paul shares a chapter with a guest and together they break down what they’ve read and talk about what it tells us about the British Empire at large. This reminds me of why I love the Bible. In college, my Biblical Studies professor used to compare reading the Bible to attending parent teacher day at his daughter’s preschool class. There was a poster on the wall with rules—don’t bite each other, don’t pee your pants (which seems like an odd rule to me.) But seeing the rules tells us a bit about this preschooler community. They were biting each other and peeing their pants. And if we read the Bible through the same lens, people back then were eating too much shellfish and fucking goats. So this is why I’m so into this podcast.
🎙️Babs Gray was on Homophilia to talk about how she started the #FreeBritney movement. I don’t want her story to get lost in the chaos—it’s incredible.
🎙️Podcast episodes don’t always go viral, but this one did. The Man Enough Podcast hosted Alok, a non-binary Brazilian musician, DJ, and record producer who wears dresses and challenges gender constructs. The hosts kind of are honest about how they stumble through the interview, and Alok doesn’t beat around the bush in correcting their thoughts. At one point one of the hosts asks, “how can I help people who don’t want to learn about the gender binary?” And Alok takes this guy to school, advising him to rephrase the question. It was cool to hear someone being honest without worrying about being polite. I started to think that non-binary people are just more evolved than people (like me) who identify as male or female. Maybe I was so fucked up by The Little Mermaid, watching Oprah, and yogurt commercials in the ‘90s that I am unable to understand what my gender is and isn’t. Anyway, if you want to hear someone fuck up and try really hard to see the other side, listen to Alok on Man Enough. It was one of the most interesting conversations on gender I’ve ever heard. (h/t Courtney Smith! Who has a murder ballads podcast!)
🎙️The Daily Show has an Ears Edition podcast that I listen to regularly (it’s really just the audio version of the television show) and each episode is so tightly packed and perfectly preformed that is often so polished it doesn’t feel like a news podcast. You can only imagine the funny things that happened behind-the-scenes to make these segments happen. On Beyond the Scenes from The Daily Show, comedian and Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. continues the conversations had on the show with his coworkers. On the second episode, Roy is joined by correspondent Desi Lydic and writer Kat Radley to talk about a piece they did about why it’s funny to see women naked in comedy roles but not men, and the double-standard women face when it comes to sexiness and pleasure on film.
🎙️When I was a kid I loved watching the original To Tell the Truth (which ran from 1969 to 1978) with my mom, a show where four celebrity panelists are presented with three contestants and must identify which is the real person whose unusual occupation or experience has been read aloud by the show's moderator. Essentially, who is lying? (Nickelodeon did its own version of this, kind of, with Figure It Out.) I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this concept originally crafted for grown-ups appealed to me as a kid, and that’s why The Big Fib is a great idea, and a show that kids can listen to with their parents. Each week kids have to figure out who’s an expert and who’s a liar in certain fields. (I listened to the underwear episode, and spoiler alert: if you are a heavy podcast listener, you will figure out who’s telling the truth right away.) I had a lot of fun listening to this and pretty much wanted to kidnap a child and force them to join me.
🎙️Observing #Girlbosses on the chopping block is something I cannot look away from, but on an episode of Public Intellectual, Jessa Crispin asks: aren’t we all #Girlbosses, really? I love Jessa because she doesn’t hold anything back and is comfortable poking holes in the things everyone seems to be going along with. She hosts an interesting discussion with Cameron Steele about what our reaction to the #Girlboss tells us about ourselves, and why we all might be guilty of participating in #Girlboss culture (unless we want to be murdered by capitalism.) Maybe it’s fun to point and laugh at toxic #Girlbosses until you am deemed one, only then will you actually be forced to use your brain to blame what’s at the root of this new, weird thing. And maybe we are wrong about what the #Girlbosses are trying to tell us.
🎙️There are so many reasons to not be on social media, but so many reasons you should be! Follow Friday helps point you toward the accounts worth following by interviewing cool people about their social following habits. I’ll say it again—Follow Friday makes my feed better and it makes me excited to wake up on Friday. Please, Eric, don’t ever go away I don’t know what I’ll do. This week’s episode was with someone I love, Liana Finck! (Full transparency, I totally pitched Liana to Eric.) Liana is an illustrated for the New Yorker and if I was on Follow Friday, I would probably recommend you follow her. She’s funny, interesting, kind, and the best kind of weird. As an artist, she often sees things in life that I do not say. So I was curious to hear about how she spends her time online.
🎙️I love you!