🐷 “Rooty was freaking out, so I gave her a large bowl of Chardonnay.” 🍷
🍭 👂 You're in for a treat! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour!
Today is Monday, January 24. There are 134 days until I go on my next Disney cruise??? In case this email is too long, listen to an interview with the hosts of Maintenance Phase, a podcast recommended by James Cridland, and I cannot believe how much I loved this.
This week we’re getting to peek into the listening life of Mike Atkins, a producer for the Football Daily YouTube channel, creating football (soccer) content for over two million subscribers worldwide. I’m also the producer for our podcast Extra Time, which was briefly the number one football podcast in the UK upon launch in 2018, and has had both over three million downloads and three million views on YouTube.
The app I use: My go-to app is Podcast Addict - it was the first app I downloaded to listen to podcasts however many years ago and I’ve felt no need to change!
Listening time per week: On a good week I get in about 30 hours of listening - usually it’s closer to 20!
When I listen: If I’m not sat at my desk working, then usually I’m listening! In the morning before I start working, when I walk the dog, at the gym, if I’m traveling anywhere. Whenever I can find the time to!
How I discover: Most of what I listen to I’ve found through word-of-mouth. Be that friends giving me recommendations, or other podcasts mentioning what they like, if it’s a topic that interests me I’ll always give a podcast at least one listen to. Also if there’s something I’m particularly interested in, I’ll try to seek out a podcast/episode to teach me more - I always find I’m more engaged by listening to a podcast than I am by watching a video or reading something!
Anything else? In a shameless plug, I’d like to promote my twitter @MikeAtkns - I’m currently working on a couple of my own podcast projects in my spare time that I’m hoping I can bring to fruition within a couple months. We’re also launching a new podcast at Football Daily in a few weeks - if you’re into sports nostalgia it could be for you!
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Willa Paskin
Willa Paskin is the host of Decoder Ring. Follow her on Twitter here.
How do you get ideas for the stories? Are most of them yours?
We get our ideas all sorts of ways. Listeners have suggested the episodes about the mystery of the mullet, clowns and the Truly Tasteless Joke book series, among others. Colleagues have suggested our episodes about the metrosexual, Truck Nutz, and blue food. My husband suggested the episode about hydration. But I would say that the majority of our topics are self-generated.
I personally come up with episodes in one of two ways. The first is I’ll be sparked by something concrete. Like I’ll see a tweet about Lord Byron or Bart Simpson, or read about Alberta Canada’s rat war in a newsletter, or notice that Andrew Wyeth was on the cover of Time and Newsweek the same week in the 1980s and wonder: could that be something? And then I dig around and, lo and behold, there’s the story to go with it.
The other way, which is much more chaotic, is that I start with a very hazy idea and see if I can’t find my way to something specific. An example: We did an episode about the Tootsie shot, this camera shot in movies of a person—usually a woman—strutting down a packed New York City street. It’s very specific, but that came out of me doing nearly a dozen interviews noodling on the question, “Why do ‘80s movies feel so different, so much shaggier, than movies do now?” Sometimes I feel like I’m just basically ransacking my whole life, to remember every single thing I’ve ever been curious about, and then seeing if I can turn that into an episode somehow, someday.
What’s your relationship with your voice and how would you describe it?
I know how this sounds but… I love the sound of my own voice. And I think I’ve gotten much better at using it over the run of the show! My background is entirely in print journalism and it takes time to get comfortable on a mic. You not only have to learn how to use your voice to put stuff over, but then you have to get confident enough to be a little playful with it. It’s a performance and I did not think about that very much before starting the show. You know what they say about ignorance.
As for what it sounds like: a little deep, very fast, has a tendency towards vocal fry and occasional heady bursts of a New Yawk accent. If that sounds like I’m being disparaging—please see above!
What was the hardest episode to make? What was your favorite episode to make?
Pretty early on we did an episode about a conman that came closer than any we have ever done to straight-up not working . It was a great yarn and that’s why we wanted to do it, but we hadn’t thought enough about whether we, Decoder Ring, should do it and why. We thought we could just tell the story, no big, whatever, come along for the ride, but we really had to figure out why are we telling this true crime tale?
The funny thing is, as with all things that hurt a lot, you don’t really remember the pain. So I honestly don’t remember how sickeningly stressful and difficult that one was, I can just bloodlessly recall that neither Ben Frisch (Decoder Ring’s indispensable producer) or I had any clue what to even try to do with it at a certain point which, well, it’s never happened before or since, thank goodness, and there were a bunch of last minute listening sessions and a pushed airdate before, ultimately, we pulled it off. Or maybe that’s generous! I haven’t ever re-listened to that one. Maybe we just got an episode up, a low-bar kind of pulling it off.
Without that kind of concrete, defcon, emergency flare up I find it difficult to remember how hard the episodes were. I recall that the one I did about a crazy soap opera storyline contained just so much information and took so many iterations to start getting better that it really wore me down; the selling out episode was also a beast. It’s not a coincidence that those two were made in the last year. I’m sure something older was just as hard, but thankfully it’s blacked out.
Also really hard—the episode I love the most. (The episode I love the second most is about Jane Fonda and Leni Cazden, the woman who created the Jane Fonda Workout.) It’s called The Sign Painter and it’s about an artist I’ve known all my life and why her career hasn’t turned out as she hoped. I decided I wanted to do it years before I did it: when I dove in initially, it felt so fraught, that I backed away from it. But all that time I spent not working on it helped. It’s maybe the only episode we’ve ever done, maybe the only thing I’ve ever done, that turned out exactly how I saw it in my head. The thing in your head—or my head anyway!— always seems so clear but when I try to set it down it reveals itself to be foggy and nebulous and it's apparent I was skipping a hundred steps in my mind. That was true about this too, except somehow, in the end, it became what I had imagined.
Is there an episode you’ve always wanted to do but it just hasn’t come together?
I really want to do an episode about the Saved by the Bell episode “Jessie’s Song” (you know, the one about the caffeine pill addiction) but I cannot get Elizabeth Berkley’s publicist to respond to my emails!
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
I was less than pumped for the podcast Finding Fred, because, as I have explained, I thought Mr. Rogers was boring. I was a confident girl and did not need someone to tell me I was special just the way I was—I need someone to tell me that now that I have been crushed by the world. But Finding Fred was one of the best podcasts I’ve ever heard. (I cry every time I listen to Beth.) I didn’t like Raffi when I was young (I was a Sharon, Lois & Bram girl) so I am curious if the new Finding Raffi (a follow-up to Finding Fred) will be my new favorite show. The host is comedian Chris Garcia, who was the host of a beautiful, personal audio project called Scattered. I have a hunch this podcast is what we all need right now—a warm hug. And while episode one was a nice introduction, episode two gets into it—Raffi’s family background and trauma, the history of the Armenian genocide, and how that impacted Raffi. Maybe I’m a Raffi girl, after all.
⚡️News from Sounds Profitable⚡️
Sounds Profitable (check out the newsletter and podcast) launched Good Data, where Caila Litman will mine the latest audio industry studies and spotlight valuable insights on a monthly basis. This is so needed and Caila makes it totally fun. Caila spent the better half of December mining twenty-five industry podcast studies from 2021, hunting for the hottest stats worth our attention and found (among other things) that compared to other mediums, podcast listening is growing the most, more women, multicultural, and younger people are listening, and why these are important indicators of the state of the audio industry. Subscribe here.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Century Lives in her newsletter and podcast.
🎙️If you’re enjoying the whole West Elm Caleb story, listen to Do You Know Mordechai.
🎙️If you’re considering listening to The Donut Shop Murders, listen to Crime Writers On… first. Listen here.
🎙️For the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Private Parts Unknown put together an episode in honor and defense of abortion access that allows 26 actors, comedians, podcasters, and activists to voice real-life abortion stories from the court filing, which illustrates the myriad reasons people choose abortion. Includes the voices of Jamie Loftus, Anna Hossnieh, Miles Gray and others. Listen here.
🎙️On our Podcast Pitch Party last week, James Cridland recommended Death in Ice Valley, a story that starts with an unidentified woman’s body and tries to track down who she was and why she hasn’t been missed. The body belonged to a mystery woman who is believed to have either killed herself or been killed. Often audio dramas have beautiful soundscapes, but not always narrative nonfiction. This podcast, launch in 2018, has both. Audio clips of the reporters on the case can be heard in Norway and Spain—we can hear the rain on the umbrella above us, we feel like we’re on a busy beach. The climate is a character in this story. And as the mystery unravels, we are treated to a whodunnit that is a multi-layered mystery sandwich that includes confounding details that have the team globetrotting and interviewing all sorts of people who might have a piece of the puzzle. The detail we get is fantastic, and allows us to learn about what spies do and don’t do, teeth, and french handwriting. Listen here.
🎙️Torched tells the wildest stories of the Olympics, and since basketball is the best sport for podcasting (says moi) it starts out perfectly with Three Seconds on the Clock, the tale of the 1972 Olympic Men's Basketball Final, which starts with the Cold War and ends with a bitter group of American Olympians refusing to claim their Silver Medal. Listen here.
🎙️The Guilty Feminist has been recapping the Sex and the City reboot in the smartest way. Deborah Frances-White is bringing on great guests (like my former writing teacher Sara Barron) to rehash what we’ve seen, but it’s not just a recap. They’re taking a microscopic look at some of the new show’s easter eggs that call back to the original. Deborah is also laser focused on what the show might be saying about the real-life drama between Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall. Is And Just Like That an olive branch to Kim? You can watch the dumbness of And Just Like That, but then you can listen to Deborah et. al. talk about it and realize how much there is to discuss. Listen here.
🎙️What I enjoyed even more than 72-hours straight of downing shitty Hallmark (and Lifetime) Christmas movies over the holidays was this Citations Needed episode that exposes the conservative precepts and tropes that are the base of The Hallmark Cinematic Universe. This week they followed up with a look at the anti-labor business model of Hallmark films and the union-busting business of CGI by interviewing an anonymous screenwriter with experience working with Hallmark. What do you think you get when you have high churn and low budget? This is scary for laborers. (It’s kind of like what you get when you buy Shein clothes, which I do, and this was covered in an excellent episode of Vice News Reports.) Listen to the latest Citations Needed here.
🎙️One of the funniest things I have heard in awhile was listening to Aubrey and Michael of Maintenance Phase describing the cover of the book of The Karl Lagerfeld Diet. Hearing them go in depth into Lagerfeld’s fashion is not bad, either. It’s an episode about his’s “diet,” (yes, diet advice from someone in fashion is ridiculous) but more so about how and why this book really happened, and the toxicity of the legendary Karl Lagerfeld. Listen here.
🎙️On I Weigh, Jameela Jamil interviewed Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes (Maintenance Phase) about toxic diet culture and the many ways fat people are devalued in society. Jameela is transparent about how diet culture has impacted her own body and relationship with exercise, and together they discuss how the wellness industry is diet culture in sheep’s clothing. The funniest part to me is imagining sitting next to Michael Hobbes at a dinner party and admitting you’re on a juice cleanse—I’d almost like to tell him this if I ever had the opportunity to dine with him to see what he’d say. And a quote from Aubrey seems to me, an excellent campaign slogan for whoever is running against Dr. Oz: "A guy who was interrogated by Congress should not be running for Congress.” If you haven’t been downloading every single episode of Maintenance Phase, this is a great way to get to know Aubrey and Michael, and if you already know them, it’s an interesting to hear the tables turned on them. Listen here.
🎙️Jo Piazza’s Committed ended its season with a story that, if I read it in a novel, I would think, “what an imaginative writer!” Written in the Stars tells the story of a man who bicycled thousands of miles across foreign lands just to be reunited with the woman he loved in 1975. And yes, they’re still together. We get to hear them tell the story of their meeting in a way that will remind you of the opening credits of When Harry Met Sally. Listen here.
🎙️Normal Gossip takes us through small-town gossip stories that are so small we shouldn’t really care about them, but host Kelsey McKinney proves that if you pick them apart, we really do. The most recent episode has everything—annoying “organic-or-bust” fraudster, a petty knitting circle, a well-meaning protagonist who goes along for the ride, and guest Rachelle Hampton (of ICYMI) who is not afraid to get dirty in the scandal. If I haven’t convinced you to listen to this show yet, I worry that you don’t listen to me enough. Listen here.
🎙️Snap Judgment tells the heroic story of a man and Rooty, his a 300 lb pot-bellied pig trapped in a house during Hurricane Katrina. Jim stayed behind despite all warnings to flee, in order to care for Rudy, who was depressed and unresponsive as Jim held down the fort. This would have been an incredible story of survival were it not for the fact that a pig was involved. Jim is a loveable protagonist. (“Rudy was freaking out, so I gave her a large bowl of Chardonnay.”) Listen here.
🎙️If you haven’t listened to City of Ghosts, it’s an excellent time to start. The full series is here, and it’s a great show to binge. In a completely New Yorky setting, Eleanor "El" Rivkin is an information broker who makes a living collecting and selling the dirty secrets of New York’s elite. When journalist Sarah is murdered, she is tasked to investigate it, and she starts hearing the voices of the dead. The podcast is perfectly produced and pulls you deep into the spine-tingling world it’s created. The cast is full of big names—Brigette Lundy-Paine (Atypical), Erin Darke (Mrs Maisel), Moises Airas (Hannah Montanna), Rich Sommer (Mad Men) and Kevin Pollak (A Few Good Men). This team didn’t cut a single corner in creating a masterful show that will transport you to a haunted, 1990s New York City. Listen here.
🎙️Imaginary Worlds has a two-part series about politics in the funnies, which juxtaposes Walt Kelly’s Pogo and Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, two groundbreaking sensations that, in a time when the comics were generally seen as a neutral place, incorporated satire into their fantastical worlds and shaped cultures in different ways. The acknowledgment of these comic strips has dwindled (at one point they were reaching about 90M people per day—and now, hardly anyone has heard of them) we are still feeling the ripple effects of what they accomplished. Listen here and here.
🎙️Reveal is slowly unfolding the story of the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Guerrero, Mexico in a three-episode series. (In late 2014, the students were taken by armed men in the middle of the night while they were protesting on a bus.) Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Kate Doyle from the National Security Archive, along with Omar Gómez Trejo, the man the Mexican president tapped to prosecute the crime, are sharing Trejo’s audio diaries that give insight into a massive coverup by the previous Mexican administration, and updates about the current investigators who are still trying to bring justice to the people who have never been found. Listen here.
🎙️Justine had always had a difficult relationship with her mother, and on Family Secrets, she tells Dani Shapiro about how she was able to learn about her mother’s childhood that explained why, after her mom died. She discovered her mom was raised as a foundling at London’s Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children. Established in the eighteenth century to raise “bastard” children to clean chamber pots for England’s ruling class, the institution was a loveless environment for a child to grow up in, and explained why Justine’s mother had been so cold. While revisiting her own traumatic childhood, she is able to learn to love her mother, or at least the young girl who was raised without love in a harmful institution. As the secrets-whisperer, Dani gets it. She is able to pull out a heartbreaking story from a woman who has done the work to try to figure out who she is. Listen here.
🎙️A woman on Terrible, Thanks for Asking talks about going to great lengths to try to find out if her dad is still alive. Lots of great ‘90s references! Listen now.
🎙️I love you!