🤳 10 podcasts I texted my friends (Coca-Cola, cowabunga, your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper)

🍭 👂 Sweet motherly ghosts! 🌈 🤸‍♀️

Bonjour. Today is Monday, March 30, 2026. Below, something I binged, something I nearly missed, something I only listened to because I was trapped wifi-less on a cruise ship but really ended up liking.

xoxo lauren

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🚨the one thing🚨

M Gessen is a journalist well-known for writing analytically but also with so much humanity, also for writing mostly about authoritarianism and power and identity. (They were born in Russia and grew up in the Soviet Union, returned to Russia and wrote a lot about being out and gay in Russia.) But for Serial Productions, they have made a series, The Idiot, on something that at first seems much lower stakes, their least favorite cousin, Allen. M Gessen reports on terrorism! M Gessen reports on the erosion of human rights! But yet…that goddam cousin Allen is what really gets their goat. I mean, Allen is terrible. M Gessen never liked him, but when he tries to hire someone to murder his wife Victoria, it’s just too much. The Idiot is an attempt to really try to understand not just whether or not Allen really did this murder-for-hire, but how he got to that point, what or who was influencing him, and how the entire Gessen family could let it get this far, how the Gessen family will move on. Is Allen just an idiot or something much more complicated than that? M Gessen reports with a calm rage that we all can empathize with (annoying family members, am I right?) and writing precision and next-level thoughtfulness and honesty. You will like Allen, despise Allen, pity Allen, but mostly despise him, and also despise his mother, you’ll worry for his kids, and you’ll fear for Victoria’s life when Allen gets out of jail, because by the way he’s in jail and currently suing The New York Times for the podcast. M Gessen talks to Allen in jail and tracks his life from Russia to Zimbabwe to the Gessen family home in Cape Cod, where the family will be left to figure out how to put together all these pieces. The reporting here is measured, somehow clinical and warm at the same time. It’s like M Gessen is an engaging doctor performing surgery on this murder-for-hire plot. It works. I was glad it dropped one day and I could listen to it all at once.

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notes

✨Great Pods has relaunched with a major expansion of user-facing features designed to change how podcasts are discovered, evaluated, and shared. There are 6,300+ expert critic reviews from 132 active critics in there including The New York Times, Vulture, The Observer, and The Times, and ME and you can actually follow all of my reviews here. Obviously I love this and want to support it. Sign up, check it out, tell a friend!

✨RESONATE announced Levels Up: Sound, Score and Story, a two-week residential intensive focusing on sound design for narrative podcasts, June 8 to 18 at Virginia Commonwealth University. Hosted by the VPM+ICA Community Media Center, the program is supported by Apple Podcasts. Levels Up: Sound, Score and Story is open to anyone 18+ with some experience in music or audio production. Those who are interested, are encouraged to apply at this link. Applications are due by April 24, and notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of the month.

WANTED: These 6 Amazing Podcasts to Come Back

✨Yesterday, Arielle featured 5 Podcasts on UNESCO World Heritage Sites in EarBuds.

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💎podcasts i texted to friends💎

👂City of Lights starts with some old tape from 2002 of Al and Mary Ann Signorelli, whose 21 year old son Jeff was murdered in Aurora, Illinois, talking to host Willy Nast, our host. Willy recorded this years ago when he had hoped to turn the story into a book, not a podcast. That DELIGHTS ME because what we get is really interesting tape, not tape he was assuming would ever be shared. City of Lights is what happened after this murder to this town and everyone in it. Including, kind of, Willy, who grew up in Aurora. I have been using the word “polished” in my mind to describe shows that are shiny, their personality gone. “Rough” is when the personality is there. Personality is here, in City of Lights. It feels like the story is part of Willy’s blood and guts. It’s here particularly at the beginning scene I mentioned earlier, when we hear Willy as a young awkward wannabe author. What comes next zooms so far away from the murder (to city council, local political drama) that you kind of forget where you are but then you realize you are deep inside a community and you deeply, deeply care. Because inside the folds of this community is where you find all the interesting stuff, the rough edges. This is an investigation unlike anything I’ve heard in awhile. It’s meaningful to Willy and he will convince you why you should care, too. Because it’s a good story. But even if you don’t think so, I think you will be entranced by the work he spent smoothing out the story of a town that had been previously crumpled into a big messy ball. Listen to City of Lights here.

How I discovered it: It was featured in Apple Podcasts, I queued it up, then realized that Willy Nast had been emailing me the nicest notes about it since late last year and they were all going to spam.

👂“Your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper” MF Doom, aka Danielle Dumile, is one of the most enigmatic people of modern time. He wore a mask on his face at all times and created alter egos (that actually made diss tracks about each other) and based so much of his art on comics and storytelling that you got the sense he didn’t want us to be able to hold him in our hands. The day he died in 2020, my husband was really rattled, and I didn’t yet know who he was. As I have gotten to know his music, he’s seemed almost Jesus-like to me, a myth in my mind who I cannot believe walked this earth. But he did, and he walked his last days on the particular areas of the earth called Yorkshire, England, away from his family, banned from the US, and quite mysteriously. (Technically he had a rare reaction to prescription medication, but maybe it had more to do with the fact that he was a Black man hospitalized in a British hospital.) MF DOOM: Long Island to Leeds is trying to explain the most tangible mystery about him: how was it that one of the rap world’s most idiosyncratic figures, raised in Long Island alongside the birth of hip hop in NYC mind you, died young in Yorkshire? This 5-part series hosted by AFRODEUTSCHE and Adam Batty (guest appearances by Romesh Ranganathan and MC Paul Barman) exposes the way that MF DOOM came to be, made his own rules and broke his own rules, made entire worlds, and made music that sounded stopped the world, music that sounded unlike anything anyone had ever heard, made music that made people say, “what is he doing???” (It also features a specially composed soundtrack by Matt Helders of Arctic Monkeys.) As I said, he seemed like Paul Bunyon to me, and he was intentionally mysterious, so I wonder what he would think of this series. There is a sound byte that starts each episode of someone saying, “the unorthodoxy of his beats are craved by the human ear.” But MF DOOM: Long Island to Leeds is an incredibly orthodox piece. It is a radio program. (It is part of the BBC’s Audio Labs initiative.) If you’re looking for something that MF Doom probably would have loved, look at the independently made “Searching for DOOM” one of my favorite pieces of last year. But there is utility in Long Island to Leeds, just know that once you know the true story the mystery will be gone forever. Listen to MF DOOM: Long Island to Leeds here.

How I discovered it: Roundup from The Guardian

👂To mark the country’s 250th birthday, This Day has a series, “50 Weeks That Shaped America,” that dives deep into the stories of our past. April 25 marks the day of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 that killed almost 150 people, mostly poor women who worked in the factory. It’s a day I never let slip by because Bertha Kula, a 19-year-old who was killed in it, lived in my building when I lived on East 4th Street, and every year on March 25 someone would always write a memorial for her on the sidewalk with chalk. I’m sad I can’t see it there today. I was always moved by it because I thought about these young women who died who were just like me, working gals in the big apple trying to make it big in book publishing? I mean I’m kidding, but kind of. It’s strange to walk around a city with layers of ghosts like that and harder not to think about the ghosts. You know the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, but do you really know it? Jody, Niki and Kellie zoom in to give us the devastating facts we already know (146 people died, the largest workplace death toll until 9/11) but they also zoom out to tell us the context for it, what the city was like, what the fashion was like, what working conditions were like. They help us put us in the mindset of the people who died in the fire or were just alive at the time. (To quote Niki, “they knew you either burn or you jump” to your death and the ones who had survived Russian pogroms or tenement building fires knew which one was worse.) Jody, Niki and Kellie outline how what happened that day in 1911 went on to shape workplace safety reforms. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a breaking point for people. There was a great moment during this episode where the trio were discussing why it often takes tragedy to galvanize people to make political reforms, why violence is the catalyst of change. Niki talks about how often and in this case, things had been brewing for a long time but she also wonders what the missing ingredient is. Kelli cuts in. “It’s whiteness.” It’s massive white solidarity, and usually that means white people have to die for that to happen. Start with “The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Shocks America [Part 1]” here and subscribe to This Day’s newsletter here.

How I discovered it: Subscriber

👂From Reply All/Hyperfixed‘s Alex Goldman and former VICE culture writer Caroline Thompson comes Amityvilleville, where the two are watching the nearly 100 films in the Amityville Horror franchise one week at a time. There are so many because some people figured out that you couldn’t trademark “Amity” in a film title because it’s a town, which opened the floodgates for movies like Amityville Vibrator, Witches of Amityville Academy, Amityville Cop, etc. I like a podcast with a mission. For episode 0, which I think all podcasts should have, Caroline walks us through the real-life events that inspired the movie. The first real episode, “The Amityville Murder,” is about the original movie starring. I thought I didn’t understand this movie because I was bored by it and stopped paying attention, but based on Alex and Caroline’s review, the movie literally does not make sense and is also boring. But they punch it up! And they explain what this movie is really about, economic anxiety and home ownership, living above your means. (Also, “marrying a shitty hot guy” —Caroline.) So I now better understand why this idea for a podcast is the one they went with. There’s something for everyone in Amityville—haunting, devil worship, an Indian burial ground, murder / family annihilation, it’s all the hits. And when you mix it all together you get “batshit insane in the most boring way.” Boring, Amityvilleville is not. And with 100 things to watch in the franchise, we’ve got to learn something, right? I really love how they’re open to changing the name of the podcast if someone comes up with something better. That is indeed a marketing idea so terrible it could be great. Listen to “Episode 0 - The History of the Amityville Murders” here.

How I discovered it: Promo I heard on Never Post

👂I am really loving the weekly “The Iconograph” series on The Daily Zeitgeist, where they talk about people who exist in our zeitgeist but we may not know why. Like, they aren’t in headlines but everyone knows them and like 5 key random things about them that are probably untrue. Jack’s metric for this is whether or not people would know who you are if you dressed as them for Halloween, and a recurring question he wants to ask about them is “if this person existed in our reality today, how likely would they be in the Epstein logs?” They’ve explored Dolly Parton, Santa Claus, Albert Einstein, and way more. These are all really good episodes that are both research HEAVY and hilarious with fun chatty vibes. And we finally got an icon who was on Epstein’s plane, sort of—Bart Simpson. (Matt Groenig was. Virginia Giuffre had to give him a foot massage?) There’s a lot of history about The Simpsons, plus a look back at the bootleg Bart merch that defined 1990s Bartmania and the war George Bush waged with the entire family, which I remember so well because Bart t-shirts were banned at my school. Kind of like the dads who will stop at every weird side attraction on a long family road trip, Jack and Miles take us down every rabbit hole they come across, which means we get to learn about Nancy Cartwright’s scientology, pivotal moments in the show, and even yellow kid papers/journalism. This isn’t three Simpsons fans gathering to be like, “remember that one episode where there’s a monorail? That was cool.” This is a lecture that will enrich what you already know. Listen to “Icon #15 - Bart Simpson: The Yellow King” here.

How I discovered it: Subscriber

👂ICYMI I was on a Disney Cruise last week and forgot to download anything on my phone before I got onto the ship and I was like, fuck. What have I already downloaded? And there wasn’t much there, but what was there was a four hour episode of Acquired about the history of Coca-Cola that I downloaded last year at the London Podcast festival when someone told me about it. (Oddly, the same day my dad texted me wondering if I’d ever heard of it.) Pressing play I was like, “four hours about Coca-Cola? Who are these guys and why am I listening to them? Lucky for these guys I’m on a cruise ship wifi-less, trapped with only this to listen to.” What ended up happening, you ask? I listened and became the most annoying person on the cruise ship, spouting off stories about Coke’s origin as Civil War vet John Stith Pemberton’s “nerve tonic” called “Pemberton’s French Wine Coca” (a cocaine-and-alcohol concoction) to how Fanta was created by nazi German Coca-Cola bottling entrepreneurs who lost access to real Coca-Cola during WW2. The storytelling was so great. Hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal tell each other the story of a business, but it’s not the Michael Hobbes style where one host knows everything and one host knows nothing. They both have separate pieces to tell but are still teaching each other. It sounds hard to do, I’d love to hear their production process. The result: a back and forth that was fun, never tiring to hear. They also did a great job driving people to their newsletter, which as a marketer, I respect. This story is heavy with imagery you really have to see (the original bottles and very strange ads) and they kept reminding us that to see it we’d have to be newsletter subscribers. Cannot believe how much I loved this episode, maybe I will listen to another one before I find myself stranded on a cruise ship with nothing else to listen to. Oh and to answer your next question, YES I was craving Coca-Cola the entire cruise and YES how funny that I and how odd that I found myself on a cruise ship with unlimited Coca-Cola stations every 25 yards or so. (I drank so much I was nearly shaking.) Listen to “Coca-Cola” here.

How I discovered it: Two guys told me to listen to it

👂The Walkers: The Real Salt Path is about a literary scandal surrounding Raynor Winn’s memoir/bestseller / literary phenomenon The Salt Path, which is Raynor’s account of her and her partner Moth, who had a terminal illness, losing everything and walking England’s South West Coast Path to heal Moth and find a new sense of purpose. People started noticing huge discrepancies between fact and fiction when it came to the logistics of the trip, Moth’s medical condition, and details about the Winn’s financial situation. I started this show because I love book publishing drama, and I did get that here. But it really is a story in what humans really want to believe. Truly host Chloe Hadjimatheou does a great boots-on-the-ground work, dragging her microphone all over the place to try to find out where the holes in the story are. There are so many that it’s like where are they not? And that is an interesting exercise, to just be sitting there with your jaw on the floor thinking, “the audacity of these people!” I mean you kind of have to give it to them. Isn’t it more interesting to sit back and say, of course this story is not real but good job creating it. Clearly everyone wanted it. Raynor, you are good at something!!! Couldn’t you have just stuck to fiction? I have to admit it took me a second to get into this podcast, I restarted it a few times. (Why did I not give up? I don’t know.) I was just getting tired of hearing the litany of crimes both small and enormous Raynor and Moth committed —from literally stealing money from a small family-owned business to just making people who cannot cure their own illnesses with hiking feel like shitty failures of human beings. But you do have to hear it all so that it will sink in JUST how brazen and shitty these people are, how they are masters in manipulation. The number one reason I liked this podcast is that Chloe really brings us along with her. This podcast is about what it’s like to report for this podcast, to tell a story that is so fresh it hasn’t scarred over yet. Start The Walkers: The real Salt Path here. (It’s on the Sweet Bobby feed. Also, why is the “r” in “real” not capitalized. There’s no way to know!)

How I discovered it: Have subscribed to this channel since Sweet Bobby.

👂From the Financial Times and on the Untold feed comes Opus Dei, a kind of exposé into this weird little group within the Catholic Church, Opus Dei, that was founded in Spain in 1928. It makes even like super conservative, pro-life Catholicism seem chill and normal and not scary at all. I’m on pins and needles with this series because it’s just something wild happening all around us that I didn’t know much about. We also get to hear from real human beings who were in Opus Dei, even though it still just seems too crazy to be real, or too ancient to be still going. (There’s some real medieval shit going on, they self flagellate and wear penitential chains called cilices.) But for the series reporter Antonia Cundy is explaining how its presence, both cultural and political, is growing, and what is going on behind closed doors from insiders who describe how it promises members closeness with God but ends up being a harmful, exploitative, invasive cult. How do they slip into it? How do they get out? Can they? Start Untold: Opus Dei here.

How I discovered it: Pitch letter

👂Roseanne wasn’t popular with my friends in school but I watched it religiously with my mom. She just quoted the show the other day! (“It’s a long story and I don’t end up looking very good in it.”) I think about that episode where Darlene got her period every time I get my period. Aunt Jackie is my style icon! That show ending…what was that??? LAWRENCE OF ARABIA??? Does anyone know what I’m talking about??? So I am very interested in the podcast We Blame Roseanne, though it’s not a Roseanne rewatch podcast. In fact, if you don’t know the show well, much of it won’t make sense. Hosts Diana and JR make deep cut references or will refer to certain episodes pretty vaguely, and they also talk about The Conners a lot, the 2018ish show I’ve never seen. But that’s where it gets interesting. In lieu of looking at the show through the episodes, Diana and JR are going through subject by subject. For episode one, they look at how the show made parentification a punch line and how that impacted the show’s characters later in life. They pull in stuff like the latchkey generation, narcissism, how parentification was handled on 90s sitcoms in general, and even Roseanne’s personal life, her post-Roseanne days, her unpredictable trajectory toward right-wing insanity, and her comedy. Episode two is a conversation about Roseanne’s performative, non-intersectional feminism. All this swirls around the core of this show, which is just how much impact Roseanne has had on culture and our lives, whether we’ve noticed or not. This show has potential but it’s far from perfect. I lost track of how many times the host says, “we’ll discuss that later,” which I always see as a cue that we’re in the hands of a weak storyteller. The sound isn’t great. I go back and forth fighting with myself, trying to figure out if they are being too hard on a TV show that was made in the 90s. (A lot of the stuff happening in the Conner’s living room seemed revolutionary at the time.) And there isn’t enough of an episode outline explaining who these people are, why they are here, and setting up where they are dropping us in the Roseanne timeline. But this is interesting stuff and I want this show to be good. Maybe it will help me figure out what on earth happened to Roseanne, and what has happened to me. Listen to We Blame Roseanne here.

How I discovered it: Recommended to me on Pocket Casts

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