👩❤️👨 The best podcasts to make whoopie to 👌 The Bechdel Cast's Jamie Loftus 🏂
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
There aren’t any, ya weirdos! Now please scroll down and read an interview with my hero Jamie Loftus. It’s really good.
xoxo lp
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The Bechdel Cast’s Jamie Loftus
Jamie Loftus is a writer and the co-host of The Bechdel Cast. She created Santa University, Boss Whom Is Girl, My Year in Mensa, and a bunch of other stuff. Follow her on Twitter here. Follow The Bechdel Cast on Twitter here. Follow Jamie on Instagram here.
You could tell stories through so many different ways, books, songs, journalism...why is podcasting such a good format for you?
Podcasting is the best because you can make a solid product with very low overhead, and the way you connect with listeners is more intimate and direct than a lot of other work I’ve done (there’s also drawbacks to the whole parasocial life but that’s for another day, haha). There’s a lot of projects I’ve wanted to do that I either don’t have the means to create and promote -- the Mensa show I worked on is a good example of that. I would have loved to make a documentary of that, but when you’re pitching people a left-field idea like that that there isn’t a ton to compare it against, you’ll almost always get shown the door. I’ve found that podcasting is a great way to avoid that discussion altogether, not feel beholden to have to convince someone that the story is worth it. If you feel like it is and have a way to record it, then you can just tell it the way you think it should be told.
You're a great writer. Which writers do you admire?
Thank you, that’s so kind!! The first person who comes to mind as a great writer who was really influential on me when I was starting my writing career is Rembert Browne -- he wrote for Grantland and had such an incredible writing voice that he could get me passionate about literally anything. His piece about Nicki Minaj at the bar mitzvah? SEMINAL. I’ve also been revisiting Elif Batumann recently, and Diablo Cody was my writing hero when I was a teenager.
Did you receive any backlash from the Mensa community after you released My Year in Mensa?
Not as much as I was expecting -- although, since I formally left the secret group that was the nucleus of the problem, I can’t speak to anything going on there, though I hear it’s pretty bad, haha. There have been a number of people who have reached out to share their perspectives on the group, some telling me to fuck off and die, and others defending the group. A healthy unhealthy mix of feedback that hurts my head to think about!
You've been a guest on a zillion shows. Which was the first?
I was on a Boston comedy podcast called “Improv Saved My Life” I think about five years ago, and I was so terrified and also improv did not ever save my life. The host was so sweet and it’s a great show! [ED NOTE: I FOUND IT.]
You are a feminist who I think appeals to a lot of bro-ey guys. Lots of dudes listen to The Daily Zeitgeist. What has your interaction been like engaging with so many dudes? Do you think you are changing the way they look at the world?
I hope so! It’s always nice to hear from a male-identifying listener that The Bechdel Cast or TDZ changed their perspective on something, and that very much goes both ways for us, as well. We’re very much in our LA bubble and hearing back from listeners who live all across the country and world is truly invaluable, it’s symbiotic. The men listening to our show seem willing to listen, and we want to do the same. And we love hearing from people who all genders who get the men in their life to listen!
Women podcasters are always being criticized for their voices. What's your relationship to yours? How would you describe your voice?
I’ve been adjusting my voice since I was a little kid to make myself sound more ‘appealing’ to people, and I wish I hadn’t. I like my voice, but one of my earliest memories is watching how people reacted to my mom’s voice and accent and promising myself to never sound that way, and once I started podcasting, removing any trace of ~vocal fry~ or other things that I would get people flooding my mentions about. It sucks. I majored in radio production and the way women are trained to have their voices sound over broadcast is, um, different. So I like my voice, but also recognize how many times I’ve forced myself to change it for others.
I bet you have a lot of ideas that you don't end up pursuing because time. How do you decide which projects to move forward with?
Maybe this is overly optimistic, but I think every idea has its day. There’s ideas I’ve been sitting on for years that I haven’t found the time or right medium or angle or funding to make happen yet, but if I’m excited enough about them I try to make sure I revisit and update stuff every once in a while. The pod I’m working on right now has been in the back of my mind for three years, and I’m only now getting my shit together on it! Then there’s other projects that feel more urgent or timely and get to the front of the line. I love all my children!
💎BTW💎
🎙️Shuffle Collective’s Weekend of Words was last weekend, and I was invited to moderate a panel about Creating Literary Podcasts. The panel was made up of Jordan Kisner, Tommy Pico, Jennifer Baker, Kendra Winchester, and Valerie Khoo. The conversation was so much fun (Tommy is a riot) and there were lots of great takeaways for people interested in starting a podcast. You can watch the panel here!
🎙️Through the Weekend of Words panel I learned of Thresholds, conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. There are lots of podcasts that interview writers, but asking them about these pivotal moments feels super deep and special. The rich conversations I listened to felt unlike anything else I’ve heard. (And I listen to a lot of authors on podcasts.) As guests, the authors aren’t in-your-face promoting their books, but their stories are even more effective in making me want to read their works. Jordan Kisner hosts with an honesty and openness that makes you feel invited inside—she often lets you see behind the curtain, what went on before and after the interviews, and how each episode touched her. Podcasters take note! Jordan is doing a great job! (Start with the Tara Westover episode. We have probably all read Educated and heard Tara speak, but this was a new, even more vulnerable side of her.)
🎙️I love The Boring Talks, which uses storytelling to prove that potentially boring things are actually beautiful and exciting. (One of my favorite episodes is about pencils.) A new episode is about breakfast cereals is hilarious and poetic. It’s a personal story about a narrator and the way breakfast cereals allowed them to explore their identity. Sounds lofty, I know, but trust me. It works.
🎙️Childish is a scripted comedy musical, starring Dante, a college student in NYC who becomes an RA in order to follow in the footsteps of his hero, Childish Gambino. The RAs he has to work with are awful and cringe-worthy—their interactions with Dante make the show sharp and hilarious. The music is really fun, I only wish the series was LONGER. Listen if you want to explore a fiction show, but are maybe worried about committed to starting something that will take you forever to finish. You will fly through this one. (There’s still one episode to be released.)
🎙️Endless Thread tells stories born from Reddit threads, and sometimes Reddit isn’t taken very seriously, but the stories are beautiful and fascinating and the production of the show is top-notch. It’s truly a look at the importance and strangeness of the wild wild internet and how it’s shaping our culture. There’s a five part series running now, called Madness: The Secret Mission for Mind Control and the People Who Paid the Price, that unravels the shocking history of CIA-funded mind-control experiments. It starts out telling the story of an evil doctor who abused his patients at a psychiatric hospital in Montreal. It starts out…just devastatingly sad, but as the plot thickens, we find that the abused patients were only the tip of the fucking iceberg. The series begins exploring MIND CONTROL and MK-ULTRA. There are three episodes out now and I’m on PINS AND NEEDLES to hear the end of the story.
🎙️In my interview with Jamie, she mentioned Reply Guys, a feminist political comedy podcast brought to you by two “nice ladies doing socialism,” Julia Claire and Kate Willett, and I’m addicted to it. The guests are a mix of journalists, comedians, leftist candidates for office, and activists, and together with Julia and Kate, they ridicule corporate greed, spineless politicians, and online misogynists. IT’S FUN! They’re funny (and truly nice) and convincing enough that I think they could turn us all into socialists.
🎙️Natal is a podcast docuseries about having a baby while Black in the United States that allows Black parents, birthworkers, medical professionals, researchers, and advocates to tell the stories of Black pregnancies, births, and postpartum care, in their own words. We all hear the stats that black women are more likely to die in pregnancy, that their symptoms are never believed. But I’m excited for this podcast to put those numbers to real people. I want this show to soar, I want everyone to listen to it and recommend it to a friend. The optimist in me thinks that if this show blows up we can actually change how Black women are treated in delivery rooms and beyond.
🎙️Nadia Bolz-Weber (former stand-up comic/recovering alcoholic/Lutheran Pastor/founder of House for All Sinners and Saints) has launched The Confessional, where she asks guests to share stories about times they were at their worst, what led to that moment, what they learned from it, and how they changed as a result. The first episode was with Megan Phelps-Roper, a FORMER member and FORMER official spokesperson of the Westboro Baptist Church, a group widely noted for the extreme nature of the homophobia and antisemitism propounded in its doctrines and campaigns. What a way to start this show. Megan has gone through such a drastic swing, and talking to Nadia seems to be a step in her search for redemption. This episode, and the show in general, stresses that we CAN change our minds, we can apologize and redeem ourselves, even when it feels impossible. And that is an extremely liberating thought. Love that this show is a reminder of that.
🎙️I know sports fans are so bummed right now to live in a world without sports, but filling the void with non-sports talk is my favorite way to talk about sports. For someone like me, who gets bogged down by scoring point numbers and trade updates (I don’t even know enough about sports to use the correct language, and I’m not going to google it, just to show you how ignorant I am.) I am much more interested in human stories, how athletes are training in quarantine, what fans are doing in lieu of cheering on their favorite teams. How the pandemic is rocking the sports world. So I love The No-Sports Report, where Jensen Karp interviews athletes, coaches, commentators, and legends from the sports world about their sportsless lives. The sports talk isn’t super high-level, and Jensen is funny and sweet. I’m also accidentally learning about sports. Is this sports cancellation turning me into a humongous sports fan??? I started with this interview with Derrick Walton Jr. because Carl Tart is on it. They discuss talking about sports when you can’t really, and what the future of sports looks like. This episode hooked me enough to begin bingeing the whole show. Today’s episode featured an interview with Sugar Ray Leonard!
🎙️In The Dark continues to shine a spotlight of the pandemic in rural areas for their series, Coronavirus In The Delta. Episode two paints a terrifying portrait of inmates at Mississippi's infamous Parchman prison, who are watching the news and hearing advice to self-isolate, but logistically cannot. Many of them share a single room with 107 men. You guys, my brain is screaming again.
🎙️I have always loved Manoush Zomorodi and Jen Poyant. Manoush’s book Bored and Brilliant is…brilliant and I loved Note To Self. Manoush and Jen came together to form Stable Genius Productions, which produced a great podcast, Zig Zag. The last episode was raw and sad. Manoush and Jen announce the end of Stable Genius (but not their friendship) and the financial and parenting pressures COVID introduced to their work and the business they had once dreamed of. It is such an open, raw conversation between two partners who are almost thinking aloud about what happened and their struggles. It’s valuable to hear if you love them or even if you’re a business owner. Manoush and Jen lay it all out for us to hear, which is a huge gift to us. This piece is a very real story of a bright, promising business that crumbled under the weight of a pandemic.
🎙️How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] about Anything is beautiful storytelling about how adult children of immigrants cope with talking to their parents about taboo subjects, but it doesn’t stop there. I had high expectations (host/executive producer Juleyka Lantigua-Williams is founder of Lantigua Williams & Co) but I wasn’t disappointed. After talking to guests, Juleyka brings on an expert to a therapy session, diving into WHY these subjects are taboo, what’s actually going on in these moments of miscommunication. The first episode, about Sandra and her mother, who “surprised” Sandra by driving up to New York City during the pandemic (something that complicated things for Sandra) invites family therapist Evelyn Hernandez Brown to talk about how arguing with loved ones often allows us to repair our relationships with them. It reminds me of conversations I have with my (gym bro) husband about how weightlifters break down muscle to become stronger. Listen to this if you like Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin?, which is GREAT but HTTTMAPAA is more interesting if you are tired of hearing white people complain about their problems.
🎙️Snap Judgment played a Mother’s Day special about two badass moms, which just left me thinking that moms need to be in charge of everything and running the entire universe. The first snippet tells the story of a mother who finds a missing child, and the second is about a mom who risks her life to care for her sun suffering from Ebola. I’m not a mom so I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I will say I AM HUMBLED BY THE POWER OF MOTHERS. I think something must happen to their brains. They become the strongest humans on the planet. These stories prove it, and this episode is wonderful.
🎙️On The Comedian’s Comedian, Stuart Goldsmith interviews the funniest people in the world, and explains on the latest episode that his guest, Helen Zaltzman, isn’t technically a comedian, but I have always thought of her as one? She is host of The Allusionist, Answer Me This!, and Veronica Mars Investigations, and while I suppose none of these are straight-up comedy shows, I have always found her very funny. I love the conversation she has with Stuart. She is a real podcaster OG, maybe the queen of podcasting, and she comes off both mind-blowingly smart and completely warm, relatable, and humble about her accomplishments. I was listening, thinking, I can’t believe this podcast LEGEND took the time to interview for Podcast The Newsletter. Surely her time would be better spent creating more audio for us to listen to. I am grateful for the work she does (I found her Queer and Namaste episodes of The Allusionist particularly valuable), especially the Tranquillusionist episodes she’s been dropping during the pandemic, where she simply reads beautiful words in her soothing voice.
🎙️I loved hearing Jameela Jamil and Roxane Gay talk on I Weigh, Jameela’s show that challenges society’s definition of worth through weight. Roxane talks a lot about how being raped was the root of her obesity, concern trolling, and her weight-loss surgery—all things Roxane writes about in Hunger. Jameela talks about being put on a pedestal as a “good feminist” only so that society can look up to them and purposely tear them down, something that Roxane wrote an entire book about. It’s not a tin foil hat theory, Roxane says, that when we tear women down, we’re signaling to other women what happens when they rise too high, too fast. Jameela admits at the top of the episode that she was nervous to interview Roxane—I would also be nervous to interview The Clapback Queen. But Jameela does a great job. She admits to making big mistakes in her life, and Roxane does, too. Hearing strong women admit they’ve made mistakes is so valuable for me—am I allowed to admit that I fuck up all the time, now, too?
🎙️You KNOW I love Julia Bainbridge and her show The Lonely Hour (👈please click there, it’s a beautiful website,) and that I also love Rachael O’Brien and her show Be Here For Awhile, so when Julia appeared on BHFA my heart exploded, I loved hearing these two women talking about loneliness and Julia’s COVID boyfriend. Rachael is so goddam funny and loveable and a great interviewer, and Julia has such sharp insight about loneliness (she doesn’t like to call herself a loneliness expert, but I think she could be a therapist.) Full disclosure, I made this conversation happen—Julia is a Tink client and I booked this interview, so THANK YOU TO ME.
🎙️Julia was also featured on Neon Hum’s Telescope, talking about her COVID boyfriend. This story is funny, sweet, honest, and incredibly thoughtful.
🎙️Another Tink client, Ashley Lecker, was on True Crimecast to talk about the last meals of serial killers. (She’s the author of The Serial-Killer Cookbook.) It’s a fascinating topic even for people who don’t love true crime, and Ashley tries to stump True Crimecast’s John and Jamie with a Serial Killer Last Meals Quiz. If you think you know your true crime stuff, listen and take the quiz yourself and let me know how you do.
🎙️I didn’t think I could listen to three grown men talk about Dinosaur, Disney’s Animal Kingdom ride, for two hours, but boy, could I! On Podcast The Ride, hosts Mike Carlson, Jason Sheridan and Scott Gairdner are my favorite type of hilarious nerds obsessed with something I love, Walt Disney World. The Dinosaur episode was sweet and fact-filled, and it allowed me to take a 2-hour Animal Kingdom nostalgia bath. Despite the fact I was in Disney World two months ago, my mom and I were among the last people in the park before it closed, I miss Disney World so much, and worry about when it will reopen. I was supposed to be on a Disney Cruise right now! So in lieu of the real thing, Podcast The Ride makes me happy. I’m not recommending this show to everyone, but if you think this show might be for you…you know who you are…you’re probably right and you will LOVE this show.
🎙️If you’ve been having WILD quarantine dreams and are wondering why, Today, Explained has a great episode explaining why.
🎙️Web Crawlers had a really interesting, funny episode about fast food rumors. Morgan Freed, a former food scientists, talks McDonald’s nuggets goo, never-rotting burgers, and severed fingers found in chili.
🎙️If you’re reading this newsletter you clearly love podcasts, and you should listen to Do You Even Podcast? My voice was featured on the latest episode, I talk about one way my listening habits have changed during the pandemic.
🎙️Michael Lewis’s Against The Rules has a new season which focuses on the rise of coaching in American life, the impact of coaches on our world, how they make the world less fair. We used to only have sports coaches, but now we have relationship coaches, death coaches…bidet coaches! (I made that last one up, I think.) Over on Public Intellectual, Jessa Crispin interviewed Maxine Eichner, author of The Free Market Family, about how America prioritizes the market over the family. Eichner talks about helicopter parenting, which supports Lewis’s argument about our obsession with coaching and trying to give ourselves and our kids extraordinary advantage. In America, whether or not your child will succeed is very make-or-break, it has a huge economical impact on their lives. The pressure for kids to beat out other kids is strong, and their ability to stand out from the crowd determines whether they will sink or swim. Enter, coaches!
🎙️The Heart is already known for making people feel uncomfortable, both with subject matter and sound. Their 4-part series that launched last week, Race Traitor, is truly pushing The Heart further into the space of discomfort, but in an important, beautiful way. Host Phoebe is opening up herself (“an angry Jewish dyke”) to explore her own active participation in white supremacy culture. It truly feels like storytelling that white women (like me) need to listen to more than anything. And true to all Mermaid Palace projects, the sound and storytelling quality is basically incomparable to anything else out there.
🎙️For The Happiness Lab, Laurie Santos coaches Reply All’s PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman on healthy griping and channeling their gratitude for each other to become happier people. Alex and PJ write gratitude letters for each other, which is precious, and I actually think the whole “gratitude letter” exercise is a good idea.
🎙️I start each morning focusing on gratitude over anxiety, I even text those words to my husband sometimes. When I think about gratitude, I feel less anxious. Am I a fool? The latest Citations Needed makes an argument that I am, and pokes a lot of holes in gratitude thinking. The episode about self-help culture chronicles the development of self-help culture and the problem with our happiness obsession. I never would have thought that focusing on gratitude prioritizes solipsism over solidarity, but I heard it on a podcast so it must be true! Still: should grateful people be more active in fighting against the inequities they might not be experiencing? BTW Citations Needed, I’m not stopping my morning gratitude ritual. I think it helps me so it does.
🎙️An episode of Code Switch talks about “hood feminism” and how while COVID impacts women more than men, it’s truly the worst for women of color. Guest Mikki Kendall digs into black feminism to explain why it’s so different than white woman feminism—the stakes and the impact of white feminism are much smaller.
🎙️I love you!