🤠 Texas dance halls, DMX, prairie dogs, queer food 🌯 Samyuktha Varma 💃🏽
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
🎉Podcast the Newsletter was nominated for a Podcast Fest Award! (Thank you to whoever threw my name in, and thank you to Jenna Spinelle who pointed this out to me.) This means so much to me. If you have been enjoying Podcast the Newsletter, or if you have ever added a show to your library because of one of my recommendations, I would appreciate your vote! I’m in the niche category.
This week we’re getting to peek into the podcast app and listening life of Jenna Spinelle, the host and producer of the Democracy Works podcast and founder of The Democracy Group podcast network. She also writes about podcasts for the Bello Collective, Current, Timber, and other outlets.
App I Use: I use Apple podcasts for shows I subscribe to and Overcast to keep up with running lists curated through Listen Notes. I’ve thought about switching apps a few times but just … haven’t.
Listening time per week: 10 hours, sometimes a little more if I’m preparing for an interview or have a Podcast Brunch Club meeting coming up.
When I listen: These days, I mostly listen while cooking dinner, taking walks, and running errands. I work for a university and used to get a lot of listening in walking to and from meetings around campus. Over the past year, my listening time and my step count have gone way down and I’m always looking for ways to build both back up!
How I discover: I’m one of the leaders of the Podcast Brunch Club’s virtual chapter and find new shows based on the monthly playlist and recommendations that people share at the end of every meeting. I also get a lot of recommendations from newsletters, including this one! Sometimes if there’s an actor, author, or musician that I’m into, I’ll search for them and use podcasts as a way to learn more about their backstory.
Anything else? I’m that person who buys every book I hear about on a podcast! On a more serious note, the podcasting community has helped me so much personally and professionally over the past few years. I’m so glad to have found my tribe and feel honored to contribute in a small way.
xoxo lp
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Samyuktha Varma
Samyuktha Varma is one of the hosts and creators of City of Women and In the Field. She is also the co-founder of Vaaka Media, a small podcast production company based in Bangalore, India. Samyuktha is pictured left, with co-founder of Vaaka Media, Radhika Viswanathan, right.
How did you get introduced to the audio space? Have you always loved it, before podcasting?
I got into audio mostly because Radhika Viswanathan, my co-founder, asked me if I would be interested in making a podcast. At the time I was consulting for non-profit organizations, doing a mixture of research and communications work, and had dabbled with publishing. I was very interested in finding a way to talk about NGOs and development work in India more broadly because it was/is such an inspiring, dynamic world with incredible personalities that people outside rarely get a real glimpse into. We kind of reverse-engineered our first show, In the Field, which is an essay-style show about development and progress in India. We had no experience working in audio. We did, however, have years of experience writing, researching, publishing academically… and we both loved podcasts. So that’s how it all began.
I don't know many podcasts from India. What is the podcast space like for Indian hosts and producers?
Podcasting in India is rapidly growing. And this might be the year when it really takes off because we’ve been primed for it for a while - we have a hugely developed film and television industry, people consume a lot of digital media, and data is extremely cheap. Right now, there are a fair number of chat shows, news shows, and interview shows, mostly dominated by hobbyists, and independent producers, and not very many production studios like ours focusing only on podcasts. But at the rate that things change in India, this information could be irrelevant by the time this is published! There is huge potential for interesting narrative shows that tell stories about India’s vast cultural diversity. As a listener, that’s what I’m waiting for.
Can you describe your fans? Are most of them women?
Yes, they are mostly women, but we have fans who are not. A lovely man called Justin recently called City of Women “gleeful” and “complex” and we were thrilled by that description. We think of our fans as people who love books by women writers, tell hilarious stories about themselves, and are slightly angry at the world (in a good way!). I think the show appeals to not just women because the scenarios we talk about are so familiar, so normalized, only really talked about in small private settings, if ever, but presented in a way that’s joyful even when the subject matter is hard.
The stories on City of Women are so different but they all hit me in the same way. They seem to illustrate unique feelings that I think are universal to women. What do all the episodes have in common?
Most women have experienced years of conditioning about how to conduct themselves in public life. And yet there’s so little we’re in control of when we do go out in public especially in big crazy Indian cities. These learned and received ideas frequently collide with our reactions in the moment, especially when we are strategizing for survival or pleasure. That’s where we believe the story is. And we bank on the idea that everyone is either eager to learn what someone else’s strategy for breaking the rules looks like, or to have their strategies be seen.
Are there too many podcasts?
Nope, no way!
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Texas native Evan Stern has set out on an adventurous road trip exploring the dives, traditions and colorful characters that can be found hidden away from the interstate in his podcast Vanishing Postcards. The first two episodes are here. Episode one takes you to the iconic Tom Sefcik Dance Hall in the teensy town of Seaton (it won’t show up on your GPS,) a place that has been shaping Texas culture for generations. Evan invites you inside to hear from the family running it and a few of the regulars. It’s an immersive, funny, lyrical piece that feels alive. It comes at a strange time. I haven’t been in a bar in 2,000 years and it was magical to hear the clicks and clangs of glasses and the bustle of people in the background. And Evan has trapped this moment, that feels from another era, right before the pandemic, which has devastated dance halls. This might be the last snapshot we have of a place like the Tom Sefcik Dance Hall. (Evan points you toward the Dance Hall Preservation, which has raised $260K in relief funs to 32 historical dance halls.) By speaking to the people behind the bar, we learn what this place means to the community. The Alamo symbolizes the history of Texas land. The dance halls symbolize the history of its people. And this dance hall is a labor of love for them. Just as Vanishing Postcards is a labor of love for Evan. Vanishing Postcards lets you in to secret places that feel almost forgotten, definitely overlooked, but enormously important. The experience you get listening is unlike anything I’ve heard. I wish I could force it into your earbuds.
💎BTW💎
🎙️I have to tell you about something amazing we are doing at Hark. We have been building clips and lists for awhile, you know that. But now we are working with podcasters so that they can create their own lists, and they are voicing them, too. Two great examples: Chelsey Weber-Smith of American Hysteria and Bill Nye of Science Rules! You get to hear the best of the show, and why the clip means so much to the podcaster. There’s also this phenomenal list, Women Leading the Fight Against Climate Change, which is wonderfully produced and hosted by Maeve Higgins and Thimali Kodikara of Mothers of Invention. This is a great example of the amazing things Hark can do! You can download the app now. Let me know if you’d like to make a list for your show.
🎙️I was vaccinated on Friday and I bawled when I felt the push of the shot. I was feeling emotional because I couldn’t believe it was happening, but I had also just heard of the death of DMX. (Listen to my favorite DMX song here.) Cory sent me this interview he did not too long ago on People’s Party with Talib Kweli. DMX tells one of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve ever heard on a podcast, about a man whom he trusted that tricked him into taking crack when he was 14. We can see how this shaped DMX’s music and life, how it taught him to look at the world. And we get to hear how he tried so hard to overcome his pain in the rough and tough hip hop industry. Sad, sad, sad. Cry along with DMX and me. (This man sure can cry.) Hear the big moment here.
🎙️On Family Ghosts, Mary Terrier tells the story of losing two mothers. First she loses her mother to cancer, and then she loses a woman her father had brought into her life. The second woman, “Santa Anna,” is so perfectly depicted, with such detail and heart from Mary, I wonder what part of Santa Anna is real, and what part of her, if any, has been crafted from Mary’s memory. There is love and a beautiful pain expressed in the way Mary talks about her. Santa Anna is a ghost that visits her just when she needs her, and then fades away. This is the story of Mary’s double loss, her triple loss, really, because she loses her innocence. And the story of her becoming a woman. And the women that guided her along the way.
🎙️The Big Short, Vice, and Anchorman’s Adam McKay has launched Death at the Wing, which connects tragic deaths of many basketball stars in the 1980s with the Reagan Administration. While the NBA was having its moment, many (mostly young, Black) players were losing their lives due to tragic, avoidable situations. Death at the Wing is a sports show wrapped up like my favorite kind of burrito…stuffed with human stories and historical insight. Episode one covers the merging of the ABA and NBA (something I knew nothing about) which sets up the series nicely for episode two, which goes into how Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign inspired players to do more drugs, and how that led to the death of Michigan State legend’s Terry Furlow. Hear a moment here.
🎙️Anna Pheland of TED recommended I listen to Sentimental Garbage’s lengthy series on Sex and the City. (I always take your recommendations!) I think she must know me very well because it is hitting me hard. I’m not sure what it’d be like to listen to this show if you didn’t have strong feelings about Carrie Bradshaw in the heyday of SATC (I binged the entire series living alone in Italy, right before I moved to New York City, and it is one of the reasons I wanted to move here.) But unpacking what the show got right about women, what it got wrong, what’s changed in the sexual landscape, and what the show neglected to touch upon, is forcing me to reevaluate my original relationship to the show. The stories of Sex and the City are so deeply embedded in my psyche, it’s almost biblical. Listening, it feels like you’re sitting in an academic classroom taking SATC classes. Caroline O’Donoghue and Dolly Alderton examine the tiny moments of the show that are actually thoughtful, huge, and capable of shaping a generation of women who loved and loathed the characters because they saw them in themselves. We tease women for identifying as “a Carrie” or “a Samantha,” but identifying with these women is real. I felt even closer to Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte, rethinking their personalities. (Why didn’t Carrie enjoy having men as friends? Was Charlotte a mirage?) Each episode covers on season of Sex and the City, so you really get to dive in. But it’s not so all-encompassing that I have to listen to 70+ hours. Going episode per episode would be a little much. This is the perfect amount.
🎙️Speaking of Sex and the City. When I was in college I was a loser with no friends and I used to eat lunch alone in the cafeteria every day. I would strategically sit near the same group of four girls. They probably though I was stalking them, and I was. I was hungry for the conversations they were having about their hook-ups and school and families, and their friendship. I pictured Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda huddling around a diner booth in Sex and the City. I wanted in but just observed from afar. I was thinking of this listening to this episode of Web Crawlers. I love how the show digs into strange stories, but I stay tuned every week for the host banter. These women have a relationship I want to be in. I feel like I am stalking them from afar. It reminds me how much fun it is to hear women talking to one another. About The Cecil hotel or The Brave Little Toaster or Pizza Bites, or the tiny moments you get to witness that bubble up around these things.
🎙️Rebel Eaters Club promoted an episode of Proof—The Search for the Queerest Food, and it was such a fun, layered conversation about food and queerness. Chad Chenail asks queer people which food they think defines queer food, and based on their answers, he narrows down his metric for what queer food is. The first person says iced coffee (which is interesting, I had no idea that iced coffee was a signal object in the queer community.) But that’t not a food. Someone said pasta, which didn’t seem queer enough to Chad. Pasta is pretty straight-forward to prepare and doesn’t stand as a symbol of the complex and nuanced queer experience. People say sandwiches and exotic fruit…all things that don’t feel completely perfect to Chad, but help him hone in on what he thinks feels right. In the end, Chad (spoiler alert) decides there is no one queer food, that it is something unique to everyone. Chad’s dad kind of solves the mystery for Chad by suggesting a Crunch Wrap Supreme. I thought it was so sweet that he had this thoughtful answer for his son—Crunch Wrap Surpremes live in the grey area between foods. And they’re a happy, customizable food that is full of delicious, varied surprises. This episode is an exploration of food, queerness, where the two intersect, it’s an impossible journey that speaks to how indefinable the queer experience is.
🎙️I was just reading about Burn It All Down’s Jessica Luther (I am interviewing her for the newsletter) and I stumbled upon her book Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back, and it struck me as something so interesting, something I think more women and minorities may struggle with. What do fans do when their heroes let them down off the field? Then I listened to the first episode of Crushed, which is about just that. Sportswriter Joan Niesen opens by talking about her childhood, growing up in St. Louis in the summer of 1998, when she idolized Mark McGwire. But it soon came out that McGwire and other players had been taking steroids for years. Joan is taking us back to this era when baseball was in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, to see what impact a scandal can have on a sport team’s adoring fans.
🎙️Femlore’s first flip episode was so much fun to listen to, and kind of a mind fuck. Mindy and Rachael retold the story of Beauty and the Beast, swapping the genders of Belle and The Beast. It’s an interesting exercise because you discover that when you hear the story this way, you experience this cognitive dissonance that you can then examine and kind of unpack the beliefs that are burned into your brain. This treatment teaches you something about yourself you didn’t know you needed to know,
🎙️Hidden Mickeys, “a podcast about the fringe, obscure, and underground sides of Disney,” is back after more than 28 months, and I’m excited! Together Natalie Palamides and Carrie Poppy go over a very weird video about a Pinocchio propaganda conspiracy theory they found online, share fun and non-boring park news, and I’m not much of a “shoot the shit” podcast fan, but they shoot the shit about Disney in a way that I like. I hope this show is back for good. Natalie and Carrie are hilarious and most importantly, intelligent Disney fans. They are balancing their fandom with their critiques. Listening made me want to jump through my headphones into the conversation. Natalie and Carrie if you are reading this, please tell me you are back for good.
🎙️This episode of Getting Curious was a delight, like any episode of Getting Curious when Jonathan gets to talk about animals. He is joined by Eva Meijer, who talks about the language of animals, how they communicate with each other and us. More that once Jonathan shrieks with delight, it’s impossible not to smile hearing his reaction to these mind-blowing animal facts. Because everything Eva says will change how you think about your own humanity and your relationship with animals. There is a part about prairie dogs that Jonathan gets so obsessed with it almost derailed the entire episode, but it was a fun little straying from the path.
🎙️Mission: Interplanetary is a new podcast from Slate starring astronaut Cady Coleman and scientist/author Andrew Maynard about the future of humans in space. On A Space of One’s Own, they talk about the way space travel was built for men’s bodies, and how it needs to change to reflect the needs of people who aren’t men, by comparing it to The Muppets. (Trust me, it works!) They ask a question that may seem crazy to some but shouldn’t: The first mission to the moon was made up of men. Should the first human mission to Mars have an all-women crew?
🎙️American Shadows had a dark, kind of whacky story about that time when St. Louis mayor David Francis tried to steal the Olympics from Chicago by hosting the Louisiana Purchase Exposition the same week in 1904. You could listen to this twice, once focusing on the shady, complicated, kind of genius tactics Francis used to steal the limelight that summer, but you could also listen to it as a comedic saga where one vengeful man goes to extreme lengths to fuck over an entire city at all costs. There is brief mention of the expo’s marathon, which may be one of my favorite stories of all time. And if you like it, too, you must must must listen to The Constant’s episode about it. This story is already a piece of comedic art, and the way Mark Crisler delivers the punches is heroic.
🎙️On Fairwork, Robbie Warin is telling the story of the gig economy in the UK and how it is changing the world through both personal and political lenses. Each episode profiles a gig worker to find out what their job is really like, logistically and on a human level. What does it do to your soul to be managed by an algorithm, rated on every and monitored every step of the way? Episode five talks about how for many gig workers, minimum wage is only a fantasy. Ethan Bradley, a Deliveroo courier, talks about the juxtaposition of gig work’s promise of freedom and the feeling of being a prisoner on the clock for Delivroo. Hearing him talk about his day reminded me of the working conditions at Amazon. His basic humanities have been stripped away. This podcast drives home the fact that exploiting employees is what makes these companies work. So giving them back their humanity doesn’t seem possible in the existing model.
🎙️Step into Chelsey Weber-Smith’s own haunted house, American Hysteria, with a beautiful conversation with author Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties, In the Dream House, The Low Low Woods.) It’s a conversation about what makes things haunted, the tropes we find in haunted stories, and why it is homes that are so often haunted. This episode will change the way you think about hauntings—I left it thinking of them as an entire philosophy and state of mind, a realm that exists around us, and one that we enter to discover dark and beautiful things about ourselves.
🎙️We keep hearing about people with Covid who are losing their sense of smell, and an episode of Every Little Thing talks with someone who is enduring a mystery much stranger. Her sense of smell isn’t gone, it has been totally rewired. So that gummy bears smell like burnt hair and condoms. What is going on with her nose? A rhinologist pops in to try to unravel what’s going on, and his explanation explains why Covid is throwing people’s senses of smell out of whack, why this case is so unusual, and what people can do about it.
🎙️We are often so driven to do things that make us money or improve us in some tangible way, so Sydnee Washington’s new podcast is a breath of fresh air. In Hobby Hunter, she asks people what they do for pure personal enjoyment. It’s not only inspiring but a cool way to get to know people whom we only know for their work, like Las Culturistas/SNL’s Bowen Yang, who is on to talk about video games. And because he’s talking about something he does for himself, his enthusiasm is contagious. He tries to convince Sydnee of the power of gaming and talks about how he has used video games to escape, connect, and explore his identity. Sydnee says it’s hard to have a hobby when you love your job. She loves stand-up comedy. I love podcasts, but they completely take over my life. I have zero boundaries. Sometimes I don’t know if I’m listening for fun or if I’m listening for a specific reason. Anyway. This is also just a funny conversation. Sydnee is hilarious and so are all of her guests. I can’t wait to listen to more.
🎙️The Daily had a great episode that examines the Myanmar military so we can try to understand how it became an organization that murders its own people. Reporter Hannah Beech joins on to explain how five years of Democratic reform have been replaced by a military regime, how the military culture is unlike anywhere else in the world. This episode brings us close to the violence consuming the country—kids are being shot in their own homes, by the military. One little girl was sitting in her father’s lap when she was killed. Some soldiers just can’t take it anymore, and Hannah focuses on one of these soldiers who has decided to desert, which paints a stark picture of the people and their clash with the military.
🎙️Vice News Reports gets into the recent uptick in alien and UFO sightings, and what scientists think about them. You hear the story of the Tic Tac UFO video, taken aboard a Navy fighter jet from the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, and there’s a great conversation about why with all these stories coming out, we still can’t prove that aliens actually exist. When we do find them, will we be able to remember that we are visitors to the space, and not colonizers? Not colonizing things we plant our flag on isn’t something we’ve been historically been great at.
🎙️Manoush Zomorodi is bringing ZigZag back for season six, this time with The ZigZag Project, a series that offers advice and exercises in how we can all align our ambitions with our life work. Manoush has profiled six people who are reinventing their business and lives, and by hearing their stories we can reflect on how we want to shape our own. Manoush also offers really constructive homework assignments for each episode. Episode two asks us to go deep inside ourselves and imagine our futures to discover what it is we actually care about.
🎙️There has been a hole in my heart where Bad People used to be, but it’s back. One of my favorite true-crime shows mixes psychology and humor to figure out what real crimes tell us about us, and why we do them. The first episode of the season tells the story of a German popstar who knowingly transmitting HIV and wonders whether spreading an infectious disease should be a crime, and what that means for people like this asshole in in Disney World.
🎙️“A beach is always changing.” Outside/In takes you to Rockaway Beach, asking you to look at it in a new way, seeing it as a moving changing thing, a miraculous force of nature that heals itself and as it changes, impacts everything from the surfers who ride the ocean’s waves to the entire ecosystem surrounding it. You’ll never step in sand the same way again. When we sit on beaches, we probably aren’t thinking about what’s going on around us and underneath us. This episode is a life-altering way of exploring nature and will give you a proper appreciation for the wonder that is the beach.
🎙️Jay Caspian Kang had a really interesting op ed in the Times about why when the democratic party speaks of “people of color,” they are not speaking to 99% of the people who they think identify as people of color. I recommend you read it and then listen to the crossover episode he did with The Dig and his own podcast Time to Say Goodbye. It’s a lengthy conversation that gets really in the weeds about the promise of the third world liberation front, how the idea of the model minority has shifted and will continue to shift, and why we may need to do away with “Asian-American” and “Latino” categories all together and replace them with the word “immigrant.”
🎙️In my write-up last week about Uncuffed, I referred to incarcerated people as inmates, something I have since learned not to do, and I apologize. As always, please let me know when you see a problem with the way I am speaking about something. I always want to do better.
🎙️I love you!