🤱 Mamas in brothels, honky-tonks, the lives of fish 🐠 Jessica Luther ⛹️♀️
💌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 Alexandra Cohl, the founder and editor-in-chief of POD.DRALAND, an online platform that amplifies the work of women podcasters. She hosts and produces The Pod Broads, a podcast featuring unfiltered conversations with women in the podcasting industry. And, she is a PR and social media strategist for podcasters, working with indie podcasters to larger companies like Acast.
The app I use: Apple Podcasts! I have an iPhone so it’s always just been my go-to.
Listening time per week: Anywhere between 10 to 15 hours. I have the shows that I listen to regularly like The Cut or OwnYourStories, etc. The rest of that time can go to a range of things: listening to my own episodes of The Pod Broads during the editing process, listening to a current client’s podcast like Powered by Audio or a prospective client’s podcast to see if we’d be a good fit. I try to leave time for listening to new podcasts or episodes I may want to write about or feature, but that depends on my work load for the week.
When you listen: Like many people, I used to listen most when I was commuting to work pre-pandemic, but my habits have definitely changed a bit! For pleasure, I now mostly listen when I’m taking my routine walk through and around the cemetery I live near in Queens or while I’m cooking a meal or trying (emphasis on the *try*) to get my daily stretches in. If it is more work-related listening, I may just be at my desk earlier in the day so I can take notes about the episode on my computer.
How you discover: Honestly, most of my discovery comes from social media and the connections I make namely on Instagram and Twitter. I’m really active on @pod.draland and often get podcasters who follow and interact with my posts there, which leads to me wanting to check their pod out. I don’t do much discovery in podcast apps -- it has just never really been my thing. Even when I first started listening to podcasts, I often found out about them through the active research I was doing to find more women-hosted podcasts about certain topics. I, of course, love many of the “bigger name” podcasts but it’s also really important to me to be discovering and listening to indie podcasts that are hardly getting any exposure at all. People are out here doing really important work and they just don’t always have the resources to get it out there. I’ve also definitely found new podcasts through podcast lists, attending live podcast events like Werk It, newsletters, or from ads on podcasts I already love.
Anything else you want to say…I appreciate you, Lauren, for having me here (virtually)! And, thank you, dear reader, for spending this time with me. I definitely want to encourage y’all to listen to my recently launched podcast The Pod Broads. It is fully my podcast baby and I want to share it (and the must-listen stories and expertise of these women in podcasting) with as many folks as possible. This month I released two separate episodes, where I interview co-hosts Mala Muñoz and Diosa Femme of Locatora Radio. Both episodes dive into conversations around sexual assault and survivor-centered content; as a survivor myself, I am super stoked to have these episodes come out during Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Plus, despite the partial heavy topics, these episodes are super fun and cover a lot more.
xoxo lp
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Jessica Luther
Jessica Luther is an investigative journalist, author, and co-host of Burn It All Down. Follow her on Twitter here. Follow Burn It All Down on Twitter here.
Why are you and your hosts the perfect mix? What do each of you bring to the table?
There are five of us: 3 journalists, 2 historians. While there are definitely overlaps in all of our work, I think we each have expertise in different spaces and ways that make up complementary rather than redundant. Dr. Amira Rose Davis is one of the foremost experts on Black women in sports and the intersection of race, gender, and sport. Dr. Brenda Elsey is brilliant on labor history and sport, global soccer, and specifically on race, gender, and soccer in Latin America. Shireen Ahmed is one of the best, if not the best, on Muslim women in sport, the intersection of religion, sport, and gender, and global soccer and women's sport more generally. I don't know of a more well-versed person on women's sport than our own Lindsay Gibbs. She's been reporting diligently on these topics for many years and her PowerPlays newsletter allows all of her knowledge on this to shine. And I am known best for my work on sport and gendered violence, and Title IX. But those are just our biggest umbrellas. We are all sports fans but of different sports. We root for different teams. We all have different personal stories and relationships to sport itself. We live in geographically different places. There are so many ways that we all fit together. And it helps that we are friends and have been for a long time. I think that chemistry comes through on the show.
How do you balance so many voices on one show? It must be a huge mash up of ideas and literal voices.
This has been a challenge. We are coming up on our four-year anniversary and continue to tinker with how to balance voices. We try to spread around who is on each week and have recently settled on mainly having 3 voices each time (though that's not a hard and fast rule). And we do a lot of pre-production ahead of time to give people space to think through what they want to add to the conversation and to make sure it will all flow. A long time ago, Lindsay pushed for us to have the fun opening to the show where we riff on something casual as an easy and quick way to get everyone's voice on the show immediately. So, it takes a lot of planning, I think is the shortest answer.
What has making the show taught you about the world?
That it's bigger than I can hold in my brain. I don't mean that in a glib way. I mean that working on Burn It All Down has forced me to recognize over and over again so many preconceived ideas I have about the world and sports within the world are actually US-specific. So much of what I take for granted as "normal" is only the norm here. A recent example of this was a discussion we had about sports ownership and Brenda blew my mind talking about non-profit and community-led ownership models for professional teams in other parts of the world. Or when we discussed whether drafts should be abolished and, turns out!, they are a US sports phenomenon so it's easy to see how you can do without them.
How has sports podcasting changed in the last few years?
It's ever-expanding, that's for sure. We joined an all-sports podcasting network last year, Blue Wire, which is not something I would have even thought of a couple of years ago (I know they existed but it was so off my own personal radar). And part of what Blue Wire was interested in with us is that we are 5 women co-hosts of a sports podcast (that's rare) and we talk about sports from a specific feminist lens (that's even rarer). They see that there is an interest in this specific content and I agree. We felt like there was a hole in sports podcasting 4 years ago when we started and while I think things are slowly getting better and more people are recognizing that sports podcasting doesn't have to sound the same all of time, I still think there's plenty of space for more work like ours.
What is the topic that sets you on FIRE? Like what is your favorite thing to talk about on the show?
LOL. My co-hosts would say "doping." I wrote a chapter on it for my latest book (Loving Sports When They Don't Love You Back, which I co-authored with Kavitha Davidson) and have been obsessed with it ever since. When you drill down on doping, you really see how arbitrary so many of these rules are within sport and who gets punished for violating them. It's such a useful frame to think about fairness. But I also love a good takedown of major institutions like the NCAA, FIFA, the IOC, etc. Sign me up for those discussions any day.
Why do you think women love true-crime? Have you ever considered mixing some true-crime basketball in there? What is true-crime basketball?
II'm not sure why women love true crime so much. I know there's been a fair amount of writing on this. I'm sure it stems, in part, from the fact that our society is set up to infantilize women, to remind them constantly that they are not safe in this hetero-white-supremacist-patriarchy, and to diminish all reports of gender-based violence that they experience. It's a society-wide gaslight on a constant basis. So, it makes sense to me that there's a fascination for women who are constantly negotiating this untenable (purposefully untenable, I think) position of being told they are not safe and then disregarding any actual experiences that they have being harmed.
I think for media (documentaries, TV shows like 20/20, podcasts), true crime is so great because it's a mystery often (who did it) with often high stakes (especially if the crime is that someone has been killed). But it doesn't even have to be high stakes to be enthralling as a story -- the unraveling of the mystery and the putting together of the puzzle pieces is often a compelling narrative in whatever form it comes.
I have such a sad encyclopedia in my brain that when I read "true-crime basketball," I immediately thought of the horrific tragedy with Baylor men's basketball in 2003 where one player murdered another and then the coach had his players and staff lie about it in order to cover up the coach's NCAA infractions. There was a great documentary about it a few years back (I wrote a review of it.) But that's to say, I'm sure there's plenty of it if you look.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
I have been bingeing Katherine Goldstein's The Double Shift, a narrative and journalistic show that paints portraits of motherhood framed around the lives of moms as women, not only people tethered to their kids. This shouldn’t be revolutionary, but it is. Katherine is one of the only people offering us this kind of narrative. The show brings us the complex stories of moms, and proves that the way we often look at their stories is missing a big piece of the puzzle. My favorite piece is Mamas of the Brothels, which is about sex workers at Sagebrush Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who are also moms. Katherine digs into the ways moms are supported at Sagebrush Ranch, and the pros and cons of doing legal sex work when you have children. Hear my favorite moment here.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Don’t you love listening to people talk about things…anythings…that they are utterly passionate about? Nocturne has an interview with Bill Evans, who talks about the wonderful world of bird migration that happens each time we put our heads down to go to sleep. There is an entire universe up there—they’re communicating and navigating and deftly surviving—and Bill understands birds in a way I cannot dream of. At one point he talks about the sadness he felt when he realized he will never see the world the way it was seen 500 years ago, and that stopped me. This feeling has driven all of his work. His belief in reincarnation drives him to map out bird migration in the night (and day) so that when he comes back (“I know I’m coming back,”) someone (he) will have moved data along and can pick up where he left off. This piece is beautifully produced, I felt like I could hear the birds are flying overhead. And I will never listen to them in the same way, again.
🎙️What Evan Stern is doing with Vanishing Postcards is unbelievable. He’s produced these snapshots of hidden places in Texas with the highest quality of storytelling, yet it also somehow feels incredibly homemade. You feel invited by Evan into these spaces with an intimacy that makes you feel like you have stumbled upon something with him and are tiptoeing inside to see what you discover. On the new episode you discover a honky tonk in Bandara, Texas called Arkey Blue's Silver Dollar. Pull up a barstool and hear from the regulars and owners about why this places has such meaning for the people of Bandara, and why it must have been so devastating for the people who lost it when it shut down (for the first time) in Covid. What will the futures of honky tonks be post-pandemic? Can we get a bonus episode, Evan?
🎙️I am so excited about Roaring Earth, stories that explore the extraordinary lives of animals. These stories are intense—the first one is a true-crime story about murderous killer whales and the second episode celebrates the goofy-looking Sloth Bear. But yikes. There is a heart-breaking story about the way Sloth Bears are abused so that they can “dance” for tourists in India. I’m not someone who gets bothered by this kind of stuff often, but it was hard to listen to. Still, this show is fast-paced, produced with energy and excitement, and taught me so many new things. When the Sloth Bear expert compared the bears to graceful pole dancers, I loled. The way he spoke about them made me smile. (And don’t worry too much—the bear-dancing thing is now illegal, so Pole Dancing Bears dance no more.)
🎙️Sarah Hurwitz, senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, was a 24/7 workaholic (taking her phone into the shower) but as she started to explore the teaching of Judaism, decided to begin partaking in Shabbat, the day of rest. Traditionally, Jews who strictly adhere to Shabbat refrain from doing any work for this 24-hour period of time, sometimes resist ordering taking the elevator or ordering food (because it would cause work for someone else.) I was familiar with Shabbat, but the way Sarah talks about her transformation when she started resting for one day on The Happiness Lab completely warped my mind. I had never considered how being unpluggged would literally change your existence. How your conversations would change if you were completely focused, and engaging with others that were practicing Shabbat, too. It doesn’t just give you a break, it changes who you are. What would you do with a day of no work? A day with no email? Take a nap, read a book, pet your cat, hug a tree, observe something new, go on a walk? (Not a walk where you are making work calls or listening to podcasts.) Your time with your family would be completely different. Nobody would be bracing themselves for a text or that sound…you know that sound…of a Slack message. (I run social media for one of my jobs, so I always assume the message is going to say, “Lauren you tweeted your butt on our account!”) Shabbat isn’t all or nothing, and you don’t have to be Jewish. We could all take our own edited version. Listen to my favorite moment here.
🎙️One of my favorite episodes of The Adventures of Pete and Pete is “Hard Day’s Pete”—Pete hears a band playing a song in their garage and for the entire episode is fighting to never forget how it sounds. I love this idea, and Kerning Cultures offers two similar quests for music. The first one sounds almost mythical—a record producer serendipitously unearths a Moroccan album in the back of a dusty electronics shop in Casablanca, which launches his mission to find the artist and re-release the song. And then, how a song that was meant for a few friends became an internet sensation.
🎙️West Cork was previously an Audible exclusive but is now fully available, and I blew right through the entire thing. It tells the unsolved story of the murder of French film producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier in 1996, in West Cork. It begins with “The Blow-Ins,” which refers to the tourists who blow in and out of the town, which ends up being a big reason why nobody can track the killer. The slow pace and almost novelistic feeling of West Cork is flawless, and the fact that they do not even name a suspect until a few episodes in, is perfect, too. (It’s actually necessary.) Do not Google anything—you have to trusts Jennifer Forde and Sam Bungey. You are in good hands! With each episode, the story evolves into something else, unlocking more complications and dead ends.
🎙️Deborah Frances-White invited Alison Bechdel and Maria Bamford to The Guilty Feminist to answer the phrase, “I’m a feminist, but…” And Alison Bechdel, creator of The Bechdel Test, admits that she is a feminist but her favorite movie is Groundhog Day, which does not pass The Bechdel Test. (Hear a clip here.) They all have an interesting conversation about the value of women telling their own stories, and Deborah comes up with a new test for Alison—one that asks: does the woman in this piece of art further the story? Or is the story and action driven by the man? (We don’t have a name for this test yet.) It was wonderful to hear from Alison and Maria Bamford is so loveable and funny. This episode brightened by hectic Monday morning and set me off for a good rest-of-the-week.
🎙️I was lured into listening to a bit of Wondery’s new In God We Lust by seeing the flashy cover art, but didn’t stop listening. It begins with focus on a luxury hotel pool attendant in Miami who is confronted by a married couple for sex—the husband wanted to watch. You know where this is going—the couple was Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife, Becki. It’s outrageous to hear the whole debacle in great detail, and the podcast is really juicing the story for its most dramatic moments with good-natured flair. The only thing I wrote in my notes for this episode was “romantic getaway with the falwells? ew.” If you feel like a fun, extended gossip piece on this scandal, Love at First Sight is your girl.
🎙️The Sporkful interviewed Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner, who recently published Crying In H Mart, a memoir about growing up Korean American and losing her mother to cancer. She reads from the book, which makes you want to buy it, and tells a story of trying to care for her mother at the end of her mom’s life by feeding her. I am always moved by stories of children having to care for their parents, and also of anyone being unable to nourish someone else because of sickness. This story strikes all of my emotional hot spots. (Hear a clip of her telling one of my favorite stories here.)
🎙️Slow Burn has done something pretty incredible—it has created a show with an overarching theme that zooms in on specific historical events, and each season has ben top notch. Slow Burn has not suffered a slump or weak season since it began, and all of the seasons completely hold up. I can’t think of other shows that have been able to remain so consistently good. The new season just launched—Noreen Malone will be reporting on the years leading up to the Iraq War and how it was so supported so gung-ho, despite the fact that it’s now widely considered an enormous disaster. Episode one kicks things off by telling the story of Ahmad Chalabi, who helped propel the United States to war in Iraq. Slow Burn it makes these stories feel like the greatest dramas of our times. The timing seems good, too. We are far enough away from the Iraq War to be able to begin to unpack it, yet close enough that we have memories of what we were doing while it was unfolding.
🎙️Billy Gohl, who died in 1927, is looking down on Phoebe Judge and saying “thank you! Redemption, at last!” (Kind of.) Our history books tell us that Billy Gohl was a murderer, the reason so many dead bodies were surfacing in Gray’s Harbor in the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century. But Phoebe reveals deeper look at the story which suggests that the murders were pinned on Billy, a powerful union official, unfairly. (They did stop when he was put into jail.) There were real reasons people wanted him out of the picture. This isn’t just a true-crime story, it’s about the terrible working conditions of sailors and lumber workers, and brings to life the clashes between pro and anti-union forces at the time. Somebody please update Billy’s Wikipedia page. There needs to be an asterisk in the first line where it says “German-American serial killer.”
🎙️As you know, I clip great podcast moments to publish on Hark, and my process for this is taking screenshots of my podcast player every time I hear something that makes me go “wow.” I must have taken 18 screenshots from this episode of Smarty Pants, which talks about the internet and its impact on the future of language. (“How language is humanity’s most spectacular open-source project.”) Linguist Gretchen McCulloch (of this podcast) talks about how Twitter and cellphones have changed not only the way we directly communicate with one another, but our entire lives, completely. There were many surprising things in here, like the fact that language changes more slowly over the internet because of spell check, and the way voicemail has transformed our every day.
🎙️I have heard countless times that fish do not feel pain, something that has never made sense to me. Species Unite has a valuable episode that celebrates fish—their emotions and relationships and fears. (And yes, they do feel pain.) Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe, author of What a Fish Knows, completely changed the way I feel about fish. Much like the Nocturne episode above, it is delightful to hear someone who just knows their shit and is passionate about it. But this episode is a push for animal empathy. I think fish would make better dinner guests than dinner. (Full disclosure: I haven’t eaten fish since 1992.)
🎙️BBC Documentary’s two-part series Dance Divas is a must-listen. Hosted by “The Queen of Clubland” Martha Walsh, the piece introduces us to the women DJs, producers, vocalists, and remixers who were pioneers in the underground dance scene from disco onwards. Unsurprisingly, their work has largely gone uncredited, but this series takes you through year by year, giving people like Yvonne Turner, Carol Cooper, Gail Sky King, and DJ Sharon White the credit they deserve. We hear about how the AIDS crisis hit these women professionally and personally, and what sampling did to their careers. I would recommend listening to this for the music alone—the episodes are incredibly musical and made me so much of this songs and the women behind them.
🎙️I was interested to see VICE’s Strongman, a show that highlights people dominated by threats, force, and violence, popped up. The beauty of this show is the scope of guests—all sorts of people have their own version of oppression. I started with Obedience, which interviews author Reema Zaman about her marriage to a man who slowly started to control her every move. Reema is a beautiful writer and speaker and her story is both hard to listen to and hard to stop listening to. (It’s specifically interesting to hear about her background and how she thinks her upbringing led to her being someone susceptible to this kind of abuse.) When she published her book a few years ago, I realized that this was the Reema who was my first friend in New York City—we were attached at the hip. I lost touch with her and this must be why. I have happy memories of skipping arm and arm with her through Lincoln Center, getting bad sandwiches at delis on the Upper West Side, and rolling our eyes at gross guys at terrible clubs on the weekend. I can’t believe that this is the same woman and I’m blown over with how proud of her I am.
🎙️I don’t remember how I found Seen and Not Heard, probably from The Bello Collective. It’s a fiction show created by independent podcaster Caroline Mincks that is based on her experience as someone who starts going deaf, and the ways that complicated her relationship with her family. The storytelling and acting are perfect, I was immediately drawn into the world that Caroline has created. The main character, Bet, is grappling with her own identity as a newly deaf person, someone who can’t listen to music, engage with others, or even work as she did before. Her family is aggressively down-playing Bet’s ability to hear. (I wonder how much of this is an accurate portrayal of Caroline’s experiences, and how much is reflection of how she felt.) Seen and Not Heard is funny and honest, you get to take a walk in Caroline’s shoes. This was an obvious example of the power of storytelling—after listening I immediately started to view things through the eyes of a deaf person. There are also some great interviews that popped up around the thread of the story—like this one with Cassie Josephs, creator of Mina’s Story, co-founder of Starlight Audio, and someone working at Max Fun to unite podcasting and accessibility. Or this one, with Eleanor Grey of The Way We Haunt Now, which I also started listening to.
🎙️On Good One, Jesse David Fox invited James Acaster on to talk about James’ lengthy, hilarious joke of his about losing it on the set of The Great British Bakeoff, and how the joke, which dealt with mental health, impacted his fans. He is extremely thoughtful about it. It’s worth listening to the episode just to hear him go on, and to hear the joke itself. But Jesse digs into the conversation to learn about James’ intent when it comes to comedy, and how that impacts James’ material. He talks about a moment when he made a fan cry made him realize the kind of comedian he wanted to be (and not to be.)
🎙️My eyes widened when I saw that Frerdrick Brennan was on Duncan Trussell Family Hour—I recently finished Q: Into the Storm and I think you leave that documentary wanting to hear more from Fredrick. I was hoping they would get into more spiritual, mindful things, like Duncan often does. But it was a fascinating conversation about the monster that Fredrick helped to create by starting 8chan, trying to put the genie back into the bottle (you can’t,) and how we can put laws into place that can keep up with the fast-moving internet space.
🎙️I love you!