🤳 10 podcasts I texted my friends (the best show of all time, feminine survival, horrifying rom coms)
🍭 👂 "They can’t hear me they’re in the past" 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday October 6, 2025. Listen to a trailer that I am working on and very excited about here. An artwork tease:
xoxo
lauren
~sponsored~
Immigrantly is an award-winning podcast that challenges the rulebook on immigrant stories. Hosted by Saadia Khan, a rights activist, social entrepreneur, and unapologetic truth-seeker, this show unpacks the complexities of identity, race, and belonging through unfiltered conversations with artists, academics, culture shifters, and everyday disruptors. Whether unpacking generational trauma, challenging labels, or exploring cultural mashups, Immigrantly invites you to rethink what it means to belong in today’s world. ❤️I loved th interview with Tiff Soga, Managing Editor at Who What Wear, about the politics, power dynamics, and cultural narratives woven into our clothing.❤️
⭐️Reply to this email for classified ads and sponsorship opportunities. ⭐️
🚨the one thing🚨
Blair Braverman is building a mini-survival podcast on the You’re Wrong About feed log by log, much like the cozy cabin she would surely build you were the two of you to be stranded in the middle of the woods. (If you have not already, search “Blair Braverman” in the You’re Wrong About feed and listen to all of it.) This time she’s here to talk about…you know what? I’m not going to tell you, exactly. Because Blair did not prepare Sarah and the show notes did not prepare me, and not knowing was a really fun experience. Blair pulling you through the story, much like the sled docs who she would have you pull through the snow were you racing with her in the Iditarod, is part of the fun of this story. I will tell you this because you already know: this is a story about survival. More specifically, about how survival is not masculine. How toughness and femininity are not contradictions, even though it behooves society for us to think it does. I’ll say a little, very little. Spoiler alert: A woman in this story is in trouble and while her husband is planning their joint their suicides, she plans for the future that she knows they will make it to. She plans dinner parties and designs brown and pink paisley outfits, she doodles cats. She (I’m quoting Sarah here, this is advice for us all) “wakes up every morning believing in the future and creating a better quality of life with the person she is trying to survive with, and doing what she can to share that hope with them.”) What buoyed this person was stuff that is usually dismissed as silly non-survial skills. We are all surviving something, and if you’re doing it with someone you have to ask yourself “do I wanna be in a lifeboat with this person?” and the answer needs to be yes. (I think many of us and to figure out during COVID, I know I did. Being stranded in a tiny apartment with Justin is what made me realize I wanted a baby.) I left some of the best details out of this write-up on purpose.
notes
✨Thank you to Cohost for including me in this list of 75 Top Thought Leaders in Podcasting. (I can’t believe I get to be in the same article as these people.)
✨As they gear up for a new season, Face-Off is re-releasing The Great Wager, a look at how Richard Nixon made friends with China. You can follow the DRAMAHHH over the next five weeks there, including a never-before-reported visit by a Chinese leader to the CIA. Then Face-Off returns. Start here.
✨Yesterday, Arielle featured 5 podcasts about therapy (curated by Kristie Plantinga and Felicia Keller Boyle of What Your Therapist Thinks) in EarBuds.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Maggie Freleng
Maggie Freleng is a Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast producer and one of the foremost journalists in criminal legal reform today. She is the host of Graves County (found on the Bone Valley feed) and one of the hosts of Wrongful Conviction. Read my review of Graves County here, this interview will make more sense.
How is Graves County similar to Bone Valley and how is it different?
Both stories examine how a case can be built on sand—rumors, pressure, and shifting witness accounts—while the system keeps moving as if the foundation were solid. You hear the same players show up again and again: incentivized witnesses, media narratives, and institutions reluctant to admit error.
Graves County follows a case propelled by a citizen sleuth, a group of teenagers, and a prosecution that leaned on changing stories over forensics. The social dynamics of a small Western Kentucky town—friend groups, gossip, fear—are the engine. Think Salem, MA and The Crucible. In Bone Valley, there were at least testable physical threads, though ignored by the authorities; here, the absence is the point.
How did this case get into your radar, and why did it stick with you?
Right from the start, everything about this story stood out; the case came through a man known as “Sherlock Homeboy” in prison. He told Jason Flom about it, who gave it to me. Then I read transcripts where the “facts” morph with every telling. When you see a conviction held together by rumor and momentum, you feel a responsibility to slow it down—put everything on the tape, side-by-side, and ask: does this still stand?
Susan Galbreath, a citizen sleuth, plays a major role. What about her involvement surprised you? How did her version of events shape the official narrative?
Susan Galbreath, a homemaker (often called a citizen sleuth) was surprising in many ways. I was struck by her persistence, her willingness to dig into things that authorities either dismissed or never investigated fully. She pursued interviews, collected her own documents, and explored angles other people ignored.
But ultimately, what surprised me was the shamelessness she had in making false allegations and ruining people’s lives. She was proud of it. And I say that because we know for a fact that she said Quincy Cross stalked her, something Tom reported, but later found out it was her own husband. She never made an effort to correct the record and used it to steer the narrative that Quincy Cross was a monster.
What was the most surprising thing about this story, after everything you learned?
How quickly a theory can become an institutional memory. Once a narrative calcifies, every new detail gets bent to fit it. Watching that happen in real time—across years and people—was the single most sobering thing.
Do you consider this true crime or investigative journalism and is there a difference?
I’m an investigative journalist who uses the tools of narrative audio. “True crime” can be a genre label; investigative reporting is a method: documents, timelines, sourcing, accountability, and being willing to publish the truth even if it’s not what we ourselves want to hear.
I was shocked to learn that the National Innocence Project is a nonprofit but that some states, including Kentucky, have innocence-type units inside the public defender system. How does that change cases like this one?
That can mean better access to state resources and clients—but also heavy caseloads and government constraints. Separately, some counties have Conviction Integrity Units in prosecutors’ offices. Structure matters: independence, resources, and incentives shape outcomes.
I loved to hear you describe audio in your conversation with Gilbert. How does audio play into this story in particular?
Audio provides a story and character without visual distractions, much like a book allows you to immerse yourself. It captures breath, hesitation, overlap and feels less contrived than video, which, in my opinion, helps the authenticity and intimacy of audio reporting. Field tape—parking-lot air, paper rustle, a door buzz at the jail—they place you inside the system, not just reading about it.
What is your favorite sound?
The silence after a good question…hearing the silence of grappling.
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
👂I was walking down 42nd Street the other day, which usually isn’t a flex at all but there was a van driving down the road with a dog painted on it, I think, and a dog was hanging out the window wearing sunglasses like someone straight up chillin, and the van was blasting Vanessa Carlton’s ‘1,000 miles,’ which I keep getting confused with ‘Everywhere to Me,’ and might do again during this write-up. It reminded me of the “Sean Pick” in Sean Malin’s book The Podcast Pantheon, which included Punch of the Jam, which I think might be my favorite show of all time during the Demi/Miel era. Every episode is extraordinary, there isn’t one I’d cut. (From the Demi / Miel era…if you’re new to this show start at the beginning when they are the hosts.) That’s another reason I wanted to write about this show. I forget that not everyone has been listening as long as I have, so they might not know that Punch Up the Jam is maybe the best show of all time, that it seemed impossible what they were able to do for each episode (comedically break down a song moment by moment with research, then create a parody of the song they just broke down) and impossible how talented and entertaining Demi and Miel were together. Or that it was still pretty good when Demi left. And then Miel left and it was taken over by the guys who turned Kimberly “ain’t nobody got time for that” Wilkins into an internet joke. Anyway, I was like, I have to know why Sean picked the Vanessa Carlton 1,000 track with guest Jon Cozart. What a hard task. (I think I’d pick the Amy Miller episode with ‘Love Shack.’) It is packed with so many off the cuff jokes, so much delight. Per usual, they give the song’s back story, point out some things that you would not notice if you didn’t know a lot about music, and punch up the song with a hilarious rewrite. Does this song make sense? Is it good? How on earth could you make this song soooooo funny? Demi, Miel, and Jon did. Listen to ‘A Thousand Miles’ by Vanessa Carlton (w/ Jon Cozart) here.
How I discovered it: I listen to everything Headgum makes
👂Oh man, Chelsey Weber-Smith’s American Hysteria episode on Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (with Liz Gotauco) was the perfect thing to get me in the mood for Halloween. These books are a huge influence for Chelsey and the show, and so this is not just a 101 on them, it’s a real love letter to them. Chelsey kicks things off reading “The Haunted House” just to remind us why these stories are so good. Maybe you haven’t heard one in a long time. Maybe you forgot how stripped down and adult they are. How they are almost written journalistically, only the facts. They are told, as Chelsey points out, in the way kids often tell stories. In these stories, the lack of detail makes things even scarier. Chelsey and Liz walk us through Alvin Schwartz’s life, why the books blew up, and talk so much about the value of folklore and horror. And in a time when our libraries are getting stripped of books just like these, it’s good to remember how good horror in general is for kids. They boost their confidence, they build community, they give them ownership. Reading these books is a ritual, a rite of passage, as Chelsey says, “a mystical text to pass on” as kids cross into the threshold of adulthood. But I sit in here in adulthood and I still want to close my laptop and pull out my weathered copy now. This is more than a book. Listen to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark with Liz “Cosbrarian” Gotauco here.
How I discovered it: Heard Chelsey on Back Story years ago and have been listening to AH ever since
👂I don’t know what is going on over at The Carlsberg Foundation but they (along with Orkan Media) hired Iggy Pop to voice Mother Nature in a podcast, Sweet Little Human, which is “a tragic story about humans where Mother Nature decides it’s time to make a change” and…I’m grateful. We are taken to Mother Nature’s office (she’s drinking whisky and her assistant Mr. B is there, too) where we learn about her new mission: getting humans to care about “our messed up environment” without boring them to death. (To give you a sense of the vibe, he calls Greta Thunberg a “narcissistic little punk.”) This show is strikingly beautiful and smooth, Iggy Pop’s voice is beautiful and gravel-y. He is a great voice actor—his enunciation is both dragging and bouncy and adorable as he goes through all the emotions. Angry, excited, patient. In one episode we learn about fire and our relationship with it and why wild fires are burning longer and hotter than ever before. The second episode, my favorite so far, tells the sad story of the Great Auk’s extinction. The writing is visual. Iggy Pop is the kind of storyteller who makes you feel like a kid being read to at the library. But it’s all very funny and meta, about how to make content about the climate crisis. (“Who is the target audience of this podcast?” Mother Nature asks. “Penguins? Fuck this, go fuck yourself!”) And what happens when this beast we’ve spent centuries taming, climate, gets loose, and about the whole new epoch to come. Listen to Sweet Little Human here.
How I discovered it: I think I read about it in Podnews
👂Ashley Hame Pritchard made the last season of Taboo Science about the science of kink as a fun topic for people to learn about but ended up hearing from people about how it made them more empathetic toward people in these communities. So she steered the show to focus on people for whom empathy is critical, people in the trans community. This new season is for “people who know just enough to be dangerous,” people are like “I feel like I know enough, I’m an ally, I’m good.” Those are people with dangerous misconceptions. If you’re thinking you might not need this new season you might be so, so wrong. If not for you, but so that you can be armed for any uncomfortable conversations you know you’re going to have to have with Aunt Cindy’s new husband at Thanksgiving. The first episode is designed to be a standalone episode on trans basics but upcoming episodes are deep dives into medical transition, trans youth, family dynamics, dating, sports, allyship, and more. There will also be a standalone episode on nonbinary identities, because if there’s any community that people misunderstand more than binary trans people, it’s nonbinary people (who also count as trans people, fun fact!).Every episode features at least one trans person talking about their life, but like 90% of the expert guests are also trans. The brilliant Newton Schottelkotte is this season’s sensitivity reader and they’ll also be featured in the nonbinary episode. I’m excited for this and almost jealous that Ashley got to immerse herself in this. I’m grateful she is sharing what she’s learned. Listen to Trans 101: Everything You Think You Know (But Probably Don’t) here.
How I discovered it: Ashley told me about it (Arielle Nissenblatt introduced me to her)
👂Nymphet Alumni interviewed the “Freud of Fashion.” If you’ve been listening to Fashion Neurosis, you might think I’m talking about Bella Freud, a fashion designer who is literally the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and has a podcast where she interviews celebrities on her couch about what they’re wearing. But I’m talking about Valerie Steele, fashion historian, curator, and scholar, who serves as the Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She’s there to talk about how we interpret clothing and the Museum at FIT’s latest exhibition, Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis. After listening to this episode I feel like I went through the exhibition with her but I also want to go see it with my own two eyes. I will probably feel like a fucking GENIUS and start giving strangers impromptu tours. Alexi, Sam, and Biz know their shit and pepper Valerie with good questions, the interview quickly skips around to all sorts of fascinating neighborhoods. Valerie starts talking about Freud’s interest with clothing (which you wouldn’t know if you read his writing—it was in his personal journals that he obsessed about it and expressed shopping anxiety) to explain how fashion may be external, psycho analysis internal. But fashion is a symbol of what’s beneath the surface. And fashion isn’t just clothes, it’s bodies and tattoos and skin and even cell phones. Valerie goes through the how evolutionary theory can be a useful lens to understand fashion, the transformative properties of fashion and identity and performance, erotic concealment, the different way men and women wear clothes, why gay men are so good at designing stuff for women, and whether or not we wear makeup to fan our peacock feather or for our own delight, which is something I think about oh, once a day. Have you ever been excited to listen to someone talk about an interesting topic and think, “how were they able to make this interesting topic uninteresting?” This conversation was the total opposite, it will change the way you look at not just clothing but bodies, why people do things, technology, evolution, sexuality. (She makes an argument that we are all trans and it is tied to fashion.) If I have any complaint about this episode, it’s that the conversation was a little too packed. I kept thinking, “whoa Valerie WHAT? Slow down!” I guess she should have her own podcast. Valerie could have her guests lie on a couch and tell them about what they’re wearing and why. Listen to Ep. 134: Fashion and Psychoanalysis w/ Dr. Valerie Steele here.
How I discovered it: Originally read an interview with a guy who said he listened to it, cannot remember who it was
👂I was IG tagged in a photo at a party with someone I didn’t know, Sequoia Simone (Cadence Dubus of Busy Body took the pic,) whom I stalked and discovered had a podcast called But Make It Scary, a dark comedy podcast that twists hit romantic films into the horror movies, so I started listening to it. And they say there is no podcast discovery problem! (lol jk who says that? Nobody says that.) This show is glorious, it’s like if funny people wrote fanfic for your least/favorite rom coms but included murder and demons. For each episode Sequoia writes one version and the guests write their own, and it’s double the fun to see how two creative minds run with the assignment. I listened to “When Harry Met Sally (w/Elliot Davis)” first because I was like, “Lauren please stop being a trop of yourself, you cannot listen to the Dirty Dancing episode first.” (I listened to that one second. I have self-control!) Elliot renames the movie “When Harry and Sally Met John Doe,” and it involves a Harry and Sally meet-cute/murder and Harry and Sally brought together by their hauntings of the people they’ve killed. I have to include this detail…the couple montages sprinkled throughout are of people who were killed. The hauntings escalate. I would literally watch this. Sequoia’s story is demon-y and a hilarious call to Rosemary’s Baby. I would literally watch that one, too. Listen to When Harry Met Sally (w/Elliot Davis) here.
How I discovered it: I was IG tagged in a photo at a party with someone I didn’t know whom I stalked and discovered had a podcast
👂Bloomberg’s IVF Disrupted, which showed up in the Levittown feed, is technically about Kindbody, a fertility company that thought it was going to “disrupt” egg freezing by pretty much moving fast and breaking things. From the sound of it they were tapping into millennial vibes, smart. They were speaking to women who wanted to have kids when they were ready to have them. From the sound of it the waiting rooms looked like The Wing, and if you know what that is, I am sorry. While they prioritized sleekness, they did not prioritize efficiency, and were screwing up all the time, conducting unnecessary procedures, unfreezing eggs when they shouldn’t and mixing eggs up. All the while burning through money. The most alarming things about this series (and thre is a lot of alarming shit) is how common mix-ups are. They often do not go public, and when we do find out about them it’s because the baby comes out a different race or something too obvious to ignore. Wait, no the most alarming thing is learning about how unregulated and secretive this shit is. So whole The Retrievals was about a horror fuck story that made us squirm, it might be even scarier to know that if you go to a bad clinic (and this one raised millions, opened dozens of clinics, and became a billion-dollar unicorn!) you could get a mix up and never know it. Or something else. IVF Disrupted is about a lot more than that, though. It’s about everything. It’s about Silicon Valley going nutso on something they really shouldn’t, women’s bodies. Which makes you start wondering what they really should go nutso about. I don’t trust Silicon Valley with anything. (In the early days the founder promised that “we will all make so much money we will all have jets” and compared Kindbody to a rocket ship headed toward the moon. Doesn’t that just give nightmare vibes? And all this shit was bad before a private equity firm bought it. That put all of the mistakes on hyperdrive. Just when your jaw is like “I am already on the floor, it doesn’t go lower than this,” you learn about how a Kindbody employee discovered the company was helping an imprisoned billionaire father multiple children through surrogates and egg donors against their will. Then the series becomes about something else all together—rich guys wanting to fulfill their reproductive ambitions. I cannot believe how underreported this is but am grateful to Jackie Davalos for her wonderful reporting. I blew through this series. Start IVF Disrupted: The Kindbody Story here.
How I discovered it: Ilana Susnow sent it to me to set up a promo swap
👂I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about this season of The Girlfriends, which follows Kelly Harnett, a survivor of domestic abuse who was convicted for murder someone with her abusive boyfriend. (And untimately how a woman once a victim became a villain in the eyes of the law.) In a world where so many podcasts, especially true crime ones, sound the same, The Girlfriends stands out like a glittery gem in a slab of concrete. As much as a story about a murder can. Kelly is smart, tough, bubbly, silly, loving, passionate, honest, and fiery. She loves her stuffed animal collection and dancing and her brother. She is a character and the second you hear her voice you want to hear her start talking more. She is never who she seems. Throughout the show, she continues to surprise. Once in prison she becomes a jailhouse lawyer, helping people on the inside. She befriends the lawyer who formerly prosecuted her case to work on getting a retrial. She brings joy and support and friendship into the prison. Anna Sinfield, the host, brings us through the story with real transparency—it’s a lot to do because I feel like juggling Kelly as a subject in your reporting can be a bit like juggling wigging hamsters. Challenging but maybe more fun. When I finally finished the season I started to miss them both. Listen to The Girlfriends: Jailhouse Lawyer here.
How I discovered it: I dunno, everyone was listening to the first season but not enough people are talking about this one, it’s better
👂Jack Coyne gained notoriety for his really popular TikTok gameshow where he would give random people on the street five bucks if they could name the artist of a song he’d play. He started a podcast called The Track Star Show and before you start groaning about another influencer with a podcast, wait. It’s not just the TikTok series, and it’s really thoughtful and good. There is still a bit of a gameshow element (he gives the guests money for things they answer correctly) but so far episodes have been sweeping explorations of music genres using storytelling, interviews with huge names, and field recording. There is a video element, too, but this still feels audio-first. First of all, there’s a new assignment for the one he’s done so far. He’s choosing 10 songs that define a music genre, using them as pillars to tell the genre’s history. For the ”Hip-Hop’s Origin Story in 10 songs” episode, he along with hip hop historian Deborah Harris, goes to 1520 Cedric Avenue where hip hop was born, specifically the rec room where the very first hip hop party happened. Where the physical inventors dropped beats and made loops—it wasn’t that long ago that everything had to be physically made. You can watch the video and see them in the space but it felt special listening to them talk about it. This huge genre started in this one room, like the Big Bang. Deborah shows how back hip hop goes back much farther than you think if you look into the parties, not the studios, it was being played. There are great interviews with Fat Joe and De La Soul—this is a New York piece and maybe it’s because I love New York, but I loved hearing the city noise in the background. (Same goes for the “History of Punk Rock in 10 Songs” episode. He’s on the streets where all of this was happening, explaining how different and destructive early pre-punk was. I wanted to write about this because I liked what I heard and want to highlight how some people are creatively going from video to audio in an exciting way. Listen to Hip-Hop’s Origin Story in 10 songs here.
How I discovered it: In the “New Trailers” section of Apple Podcasts
I love you!