⭐️ 21 of the best podcasts of 2024 ⭐️

🍭 👂 Where my sphere peers at? 🌈 🤸‍♀️

Bonjour. Today is Monday, December 30, 2024. To wrap things up, I’m pulling together reviews of some my favorite shows of the year. I’m not making any big promises—some of the shows I wrote about with great episodes belong on this list, too. And I really tried to prioritize shows that made me INSANE because not enough people were talking about them. I chose 21 because that was as many as could fit. Enjoy, and here’s to a great 2025!

xoxo

lauren

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notes

✨Stop what you’re doing and open up Pocket Casts! They allowed me to curate a collection (my favorite podcasts of 2024) and you can see it in the app right now. You can also see it here.

✨Tink is hosting a TWO-DAY Podcast Marketing Radio Boot Camp at the end of January. Learn more here.

✨Philly friends! Thursday, January 16th. 6pm. Free. PLEASE join me at the Philly Podcast Mixer hosted by Rowhome Productions, co-Presented by (AIR) + City Cast Philly. I’ll be speaking in a panel discussion on The State of Philly Podcasting in 2025 with Yowei Shaw, Tom Grahsler, Lauren Passell. Get your ticket here.

✨Confirm your seat for Captivate and Adobe’s Podcast Growth Summit on Jan 7 here. I’ll be speaking with Dave Jackson, Hari Gopalakrishna, and Mark Asquith.

✨We launched a Tink-branded monthly podcast recommendation series with Castbox, starting with Audio Delicacies. Check it out!

✨Audioflux just launched their first-ever fundraiser ("fluxraiser")! If you’re moved to help out, go here.

✨The second annual Brand Podcast Summit is a free online event designed to help marketers, founders and podcasters nail their brand podcast strategy. It will be two days packed with know-how and tools to create a show audiences love, all led by industry experts. One of them is Tink’s own Shreya Sharma! Learn more here.

✨Check out the 12 Days of Podcast Marketing Tips in Podcast Marketing Magic.

✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Firewall in EarBuds.

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💎best shows of 2024💎

🎙️I didn’t know what to expect when I turned on Tiny Dinos, which is billed as “part sitcom and part talk show,” with improvisors Connor Ratliff and James III posing as scientists and best friends who revive dinosaurs, but just tiny ones. The feeling of hearing it for the first time was so magical I wish I could bottle it up. In episode one, Connor and James invite Lauren Lapkus over, since she was in a Jurassic Park movie, but they really don’t want her (or us) to know about this top secret project. They don’t want Zach Cherry, their mailman, to know either. (But Zach really wants to hang out.) This show is ridiculous and cute and weird, I think it’s a great canvas for improv stars to get really silly. It’s self-aware and meta, the chemistry between Connor and James is great. They call their listeners “sphere peers.” I really hope someone stumbles upon this show not realizing it’s improv and starts to super freak out. Maybe they’re high. Listen here.

🎙In 1998, 28-year-old Harriet Thompson was brutally murdered in her home, and thanks to a really shitty investigation, a racist jury, and an inhumane death penalty policy, Jesse Lee Johnson sat on death row for 17 years for killing her, even though he didn’t do it. Hush is Jesse’s story and it’s about the weak case the state had against him, why he never for a moment considered a plea deal, and how it felt to get out of jail when the state decided he never should have been there in the first place. Reporters Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas (of Bundyville and more) give the case justice, doing better reporting than was done the first time around. And Hush is one of the best investigative podcasts I’ve ever heard. Nothing seems rushed, every step seems covered. They get some things on tape that are truly shocking (cops being openly and defiantly racist) and track down people that are crucial to the truth of this story, people who were never tracked down before, both on the witness and the possible-murderer side, including one guy called Machine Gun Bill, who sounds like an absolute violent psychopath. Jesse sat on death row for 17 years because he is Black, Hush proves that it’s really that straight-forward. But the show is fantastic. Leah and Ryan are personable, their style isn’t stale, and the storytelling is impactful. (Like at the beginning when we learn that as a kid, Jesse risked his life to rescue a friend from being run over by a train, something that seems like an important detail and a good way to introduce Jesse to us.) This podcast is also about the racism in Oregon, which is at odds with the liberal way a place like Portland sees itself. And, in fact, Leah discovers that this case is eerily similar to the case of another Black man put on death row for something he didn’t do, except he was executed in 1945. His name was Robert E. Lee Folkes. Things have not changed in Oregon. Listen here.

🎙️With a box of his grandparents’ love letters and a trip to Italy, David Modigliani investigates his family’s past during the Holocaust for Pack One Bag, a podcast that, for its first episode, won the 2023 Jury Award for Nonfiction Audio at Tribeca. Using dramatic readings of the letters (with the help of Stanley Tucci,) physical trips to visit his Jewish Italian cousins who survived Nazi occupation of Rome, phone calls, secret Fascist spy documents, personal diaries, blocked bank accounts, and his own love story, David is able to paint a vivid picture of his relatives that decided to flee fascist Italy, and those who couldn’t. How do you walk out on your life in one day? David’s trip back to his homeland (which he says feels “both unlikely and inevitable”) invites us into a personal story but also a history lesson of a darker side of Italy. (Historians adopted a phrase Italiani brava gente, or “Italians, the good people,” to describe the belief about the non-existent participation of Fascist Italy in the Holocaust.) The idea of fleeing fascism seems even more relevant that it was when David started making this project years ago. But fleeing is part of the Jewish story, and in a moment during Passover with his relatives, David envisions a seance connecting his past and present. Pack One Bag made me laugh and cry. It’s a pop-up book of history and humanity with huge heart, colorful textures, characters to fall in love with, and a strong sense of place. I don’t know what the audio-version of “page-turner” is but this is it. Listen here.

🎙️When I saw the title of the new series from 30 for 30, Girl V Horse, I was excited because I thought it said “Horse Girls” and would be about why there is this natural connection between girls and horses, what makes a girl a horse girl, and is it sexual somehow because I think it might be? (I am not in the mood to google this.) It’s not about that. It’s about running, the sport I have dedicated a huge portion of my life to. And horses. (I spent a lot of time with them, too! I showed horses for years.) Nicole Teeny is a documentarian and a long-distance runner with epilepsy, which is very scary. After reading Born to Run she developed this new relationship with her body and a dream to outrun a horse. It’s can actually be done, it’s not just something from a freak show or a tall tale. Nicole talks to experts about how she can prepare herself. And she finds that distance running in hotter weather will give her an okay shot. (Horses tend to go fast and tire, so we can keep up with them by not giving up, must like the masked man chasing after Drew Barrymore in Scream, or…fill in the blank any horror scene in a movie. This is something, Nicole tells us, called persistence hunting.) This is a personal journey where we get to hear about Nicole and her upbringing and family, I love hearing about her sweet as fuck relationship. I bet you didn’t know you’d be getting a story about epilepsy, too. But you are! And when those seizures rumble in her body, she pictures the animal spirits inside her stampeding. At one point Nicole says, “I just want to run alone.” I feel that so hard. I haven’t been sick, but I’ve been badly injured, and I think once you’ve enjoyed the freedom of distance running, the idea that it could be taken away from you feels inhumane. I very much get how this powerful image of running next to a horse appealed to her as a goal. So then Nicole races a horse and I’ll leave it up to you to find out what happens. This entire series was an athletic event, full of so many of my favorite elements in storytelling. I almost cannot believe what Nicole was able to accomplish, how many storylines were elegantly blended together. I’m holding up a “10” sign. I still want that series on horse girls, though. (Does it exist? Let me know.) Start here.

🎙️Chess Piece opens beautifully, with investigative journalist Peniley Ramirez taking you to the deadly stretch of sea in the Atlantic Ocean between Cuba and Florida. She’s going back to a specific storm 25 years ago, when 6-year-old Elián González was found strapped to an inner tube, alone. If you remember, Elián’s mother and a few other refugees had died on that voyage to America, and Elián’s father was still in Cuba. This set off a battle of where Elián belonged, people on both sides were so invested in the fate of this little boy. Elián became a symbol of failed communism and the hope of capitalism and the American story. It became a hot topic because the system allowed for it to be a hot topic. On Chess Piece, we’re getting all of that but it’s also all framed by Peniley’s own story. When she was a little girl living in Cuba, she was separated from her own father, who went to the United States. She knows what it’s like to live in a divided family. There’s a lot going on in this podcast but Peniley sets us up so that we are reminded of the political storm and are also able to think about the human one that was also brewing. I was hesitant to press play on this one, I waited until there were three episodes out. I thought, oof. I am not sure I am ready for this one. But once I started I couldn’t stop. I think I like it for the same reason I love Bible stories. It’s a tiny beautiful moment packed with symbolism, so ripe with meaning that it goes on to become so much bigger than this angel faced boy, Elián or even Jesus. The story you find can be as simple as life and death or as complicated as immigration and politics. It’s about everything. I didn’t come to that conclusion on my own, Chess Piece got me there, and it will take you to places, too. Listen here.

🎙️Journalist/producer duo Jeanne Marie Laskas and Erin Anderson rolled up to a broken-down steel mill town called Donora, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, to better understand it and the people who live there. They ended up staying there for three years, capturing more than 850 hours of tape to make Cement City, their portrait of Donora, where there are 4,650 people, no schools, no banks, no grocery stores, no gas stations. Everything about Donora is fascinating, from where it got its name to the reason it’s called Cement City to the deadly smog it endured in 1948. Access to Donora via Jeanne and Erin is priceless. I could have plopped down on one of the Cement City porches with them to watch people come and go all day. For as excited I was to start listening to this, I was also nervous. Cement City is about what it’s like to live in a dead town. My family is from one of these small towns outside of Pittsburgh (I smiled hearing certain words pronounced just like some of my family members) and I was cringing picturing a journalist coming into The Croatian Club or The Keg with a mic, wondering aloud why these people are unable to leave. I didn’t think that would be welcome in Farrell, PA. But Jeanne is doing a good job—these people want to talk to her. She’s putting in the work to help us get to know them, being present for city council meetings, tiny parades, and quiet porch moments. (There is a portrait of one woman named MC that is so good, this woman haunts me. It’s devastating.) I did cringe, at the beginning, to hear Jeanne wonder aloud in multiple ways, “why don’t these people just leave?” It’s because that’s really hard to do. (As displayed beautifully in the podcast Pack One Bag.) The whole show is building up toward Donora’s general election and a Christmas celebration. And Jeanne comes to her own conclusion about why people won’t leave. I’m not sure it’s mine, but I’m glad we came back to that. Cement City is well done, important, and gave me so much to think about I’m not quite done yet. The fact that these people’s lives are so intertwined and they end up being recurring characters makes you feel like you’re in a multiplayer video game. With the people she is able to introduce us to by their voices alone, the writing she has done to fill in the gaps with narration and storytelling, and the tape she gets, makes this an incredible piece of reporting. Jeanne makes herself a character in the Donora story, but a perfectly unobtrusive one. She’s able to capture magic and frustration and joy and hardship in Donora, PA. Listen here.

🎙️When writing her novel The Sicilian Inheritance, which is loosely based on the murder of her Grandmother Lorenza in Sicily in 1916, Jo Piazza (Under the Influence, Wilder, Committed, She Wants More) became fixated on the real story. For her podcast (also called) The Sicilian Inheritance, she went back to the motherland with her husband and three small kids to track down why while her grandfather and other relatives were coming by one by one to America, Lorenza never made it. It’s a mystery, a travelogue, a memoir, and a call with your friend Jo, who is narrating her every move. “Italian Americans like to tell stories and they like to embellish everything,” she says. (I can appreciate this, my grandfathers came to America from Palermo and Naples at the same time Jo’s did, and I take “emotional truth” into account when I hear a lot of our family stories.) Was Lorenza murdered by the Black Hand, the Sicilian mafia? Was she a witch? Or is this a story of a family cooking up their own juicy tale for the love of drama? This show is made by Kaleidoscope, the same people who brought you Skyline Drive and Wild Chocolate. And like Wild Chocolate, there’s a food element here—The Sicilian Inheritance-inspired olive oil, direct from Sicily. Listen here.

🎙️Beyond All Repair, Amory Sivertson’s true-crime series about woman accused of murdering her mother-in-law, ended perfectly. It never missed a beat. Every episode of the series thickened the plot, made me second guess everything, and ended on a cliffhanger. Not to brag, but I know Amory and I was texting her my frustration with my questions throughout, dying to know where this all was going. I was so nervous it would end in an “I don’t know, what do you think?” It did not. Amory was going just as crazy as I was trying to figure out who was lying and what could have happened. She took us everywhere and in the end settles us into a non-toothless reflection on what she thinks has happened after chasing this story for three years. The last episode has a mic drop moment that won’t soon be forgotten. Listen here.

🎙️I was a speaker for Sounds of New York, and right before my session on marketing I got to hear Shima Oliaee and Eleanor Kagan discuss Shima’s nonfiction serialized podcast The Competition, and I was completely transfixed hearing her talk about her approach to storytelling and the project. Shima followed 50 high school seniors to Mobile, Alabama to record zillions of hours (?I think? I was transfixed, not taking notes) as they competed for the Distinguished Young Women crown. During her talk, Shima said so many wise things that would make anyone want to be an audio journalist. And it really put me in a terrible spot! To jump up there, right after her, and say “that was inspiring, now who wants to talk about marketing!?" Anyway The Competition is just dang fun to listen to but also a story about this strange period of time when girls say goodbye to their childhood and are confronted with adult things. (Something unexpected unfolds that forces the competitors to choose sides and grow up.) As an observer unfolding these individual stories, Shima, who was in this competition when she was a teen, is both protective of them but also grossed out that she has to teach them these lessons. These girls, by the way, are not the girls you envision when you think of beauty pageants. The competition is an amazing audio documentary and a story about how women, whether they go through this particular competition, have been trained to make themselves palatable to people in power. And so many other things. Listen here.

🎙️The Telepathy Tapes is one of the most mind-twisty things I’ve listened to in awhile. It felt too hot too touch, like I want to pass it along fast. Inside is a theory—that non-speakers with autism are telepathic and have otherworldly perceptions—that is both unbelievable but when you really think about it, completely plausible and if true, changes everything science has told us about not just the capabilities of neurodivergent people, but also interconnectedness, communication, and whatever god is. It starts with host Ky Dickens toting her tape recorder to homes of autistic children all across the world (accompanied by a neuroscientist) for intimate conversations with their families to hear some incredible things. Things like “my son knows what I did today even though we were apart,” and “my daughter knows all about the Harry Potter books but she’s never read them.” They say these things with such casualness because to them, it’s real and normal. But to Ky and to us, hearing for ourselves a child tell us a number between 1-1000 we are holding in our minds is truly, like, stop the presses insane. “What’s her success rate?” Ky asked a parent. “100% accuracy so far.” Ky has some compelling tape. But she’s also setting out to prove something these parents never doubted—that these silent communicators are gifted in ways we do not have words for. And if you are to believe it…(and why shouldn’t you? How arrogant to think that we have this all figured out, that the quietest ones in the room don’t have something to say)…if you are to believe it, that means you have to question everything you know about communication. And worse, that we have been misdiagnosing people with special gifts for centuries, putting them in institutions or denying them an education. There is a reason why this stuff isn’t talked about more. Science doesn’t want to talk about it because it can’t be explained and many of the families with these kids are too afraid of being censored, ridiculed, and ignored to talk about it. (But still, I’m like, why is everyone not talking about this? I could talk about this show forever, I can’t stop thinking about it.) Like I said, it starts small, in a house New Jersey to meet a boy named Akhil. As the series advances questions get bigger and bigger and you realize this series is about understanding our greater reality. Drink every time you hear someone say “I know this sounds crazy but…” (And this stuff does sound crazy. But people thought the earth was flat, too.) Maybe start with my favorite episode, “Telepathic Communication between friends and groups.” It’s about about something people with autism called “The Talk On the Hill,” a meeting of minds that happens on this airwave they are all tuned into. It’s also about energy attraction and a beautiful relationship between a mother and son. Nevermind, listen to it all. I just finished and then started again. The Telepathy Tapes is also a film, I recommend the website to dive deeper. Listen here.

🎙️Jesse Lawson and Holly Casio have a hypothesis: that Bruce Springsteen (“soul of a poet, muscles of a sailor”) deserves the queer icon stamp of approval. And to prove it, in every episode of Because the Boss Belong to Us, they are going down a list they made, asking: is Bruce camp? Does he have a narrative of struggle? Do his songs evoke feelings of deep sadness, loneliness, euphoria, or something else that queer people experience? Can you dance, cry, and fuck to Bruce? They also discuss this unspoken feeling that Bruce is giving a wink to queer folk, and if, through this series, they can find out what that feeling is. The first episode sets out the mission, the second one tackles camp. (Is Bruce camp? Absolutely. “He’s so committed to his performance that he questions if he’s ever left the performance he created, camp’s existential crisis.”) Already it’s hard not to be convinced that Bruce is giving a wink to the queer community. That album cover! This is a completely original podcast topic (but, I guess if you poll queer people you’ll find it’s not an original thought) and the sound, the sound! Listening to it I feel like I’m sitting on the floor in Holly’s room with her zines watching her and Jesse make this show by hand. (Jazmine JT Green is there too as exec producer.) I never wanted this to be over, and it was my top pick for Audio Delicacies. Listen here.

🎙️I thought I was hallucinating when I saw that Personal Best was back after five years, 120 years in podcasting. On each episode, Rob Norman and Andrew Norton help ordinary people get a little better at little things like dining alone at a fancy restaurant or shaking hands. The first episode was oddly specific but also felt relatable—a guy Wil loves a restaurant so much that he has kind of become a regular, which actually makes him too uncomfortable to go there. There is an odd pressure to please the staff. Or maybe he just can’t commit. He stops going. So Rob and Andrew embark on a series of adventures to help him. One of them includes a long-winded, adorable, absurd, Tolkienesque quest that turned Wil into a blindfolded hobbit trying to return a shawarma (the ring) to Mount Doom, all while being chased by Nazgûls. It’s all caught on tape, and imagining adults doing this all for the sake of a podcast, in the middle of the woods, made me laugh so hard I had to take a break. The second episode starred a woman who fears she isn’t mysterious enough. (Also relatable for me.) The third episode about loneliness was so insightful. (I wrote down: “the opposite of loneliness is feeling at home.”) This show has a sense of silliness, sweetness, sincerity, and fun I think is rare. I don’t know or care if this stuff is working. It’s about the journey. And our amusement, as we get to sit shot gun for the ride. But I think the most fun part is finding the creative ways the Personal Best team goes about tackling each issue. Personal Best is full of entertaining sound and multi-dimensional elements that make every episode memorable. It’s great, it’s still great. Time has passed but some things in podcasting haven’t changed. Listen here.

🎙️I subscribe to Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter and was so excited to see he has a new podcast, Panic World, which is all about trends that started in a dark the internet and somehow sprung to life in the real world. It reminds me of so many shows I love. It feels a little Search Enginey, it also reminds me of Everyone Knows That. It’s also kind of like 16th Minute of Fame but instead of telling the stories of the internet main character people, Ryan is telling the stories of the internet main character stories. Because really, the NyQuil Chicken (or Sleepytime chicken) story should have died down, but it didn’t. That’s what Ryan tackles in the first episode, which is the perfect first episode with the perfect first guest, Katie Notopoulos. They explain how the media turned this nothing joke on 4chan into an everything story that the FDA had to make statements about. (Remember that the NyQuil Chicken post encouraged people to douse chicken in NyQuil and eat it.) It’s stuff like this that gets people trying to ban TikTok. So the question lurking beneath this story is about whether or not we can stop people from thinking that obvious jokey challenges are hoaxes, or if the FDA needs to get involved every time. Also, Ryan and Katie made this NyQuil Chicken sound pretty delicious (they call it “zingy,” specifically, and go into great detail about how it might be prepared) and I’m definitely going to try it, though I haven’t eaten chicken in more than 30 years. If you try it, too, sue Ryan. Not me. Listen here.

🎙️Chenjerai Kumanyika is the host of the Empire City, a show about the NYPD’s complicated, fucked up history. I hate to sound all tag liney, but…it’s truuUUly the history the cops don’t want us to know. I knew the police force had its roots in slavery, but in episode one, Chenjerai gives the details and names I was missing. Like the story of David Ruggles, the abolitionist who gave the nickname “The Kidnapping Club” to the judges, lawyers, and police officers who sanctioned the kidnapping of free and fugitive African Americans. (I love that he gave them this completely stupid sounding nickname, like they’re The Babysitters Club or something.) Or the story of Ms. Brown, a free woman who was kidnapped by a cop from the streets and then just…disappeared. And you think the cops suck now…imagine living in a time when there were two competing police forces that hated each other. Today, a lot of us know not to call the cops when something bad happens (after living in NYC for almost 20 years I have so many fucked up stories about the NYPD!!!!) but knowing the origins of why is important. Especially when you’re trying to explain it to your daughter, like Chenjerai is. The Kidnapping Club is alive and well. Every second I’ve listened to of this show so far has been well told, unfolding like a horror novel. The beautiful music and production is cinematic, it feels alive. Everything is unflinching and urgent, each detail more surprising than the next, it’s a shocking-shit sandwich. This all sucks but the podcast is good, and here’s a sweet detail: when Chenjerai tweeted about it the day it came out, he wrote “Empire City is here. When you listen TODAY make sure you listen to ALL the credits. Like all documentary work, our podcast was a team effort. Folks sacrificed. And I want you to know who made it possible.” Listen here.

🎙️When I wrote about season three of In the Dark, I wrote about it because it was newsworthy that In the Dark was back and because I had listened to the first episode, which was good. So that review was like “In the Dark is back and the first episode was good.” At this point I have finished it and I can write about it differently, I can say that it’s one of the greatest investigative seasons of anything I’ve heard. Madeleine Baran has done the work to get thorough reporting of an incident that happened almost 20 years ago, jaw-dropping tape, and classified documents and photos released that reconstruct everything we thought we knew what happened and go against nearly everything the marines said on this day that twenty-four civilians in Haditha, Iraq were murdered in their homes. More than just explaining this terrible morning and the anguish of the family left behind and finally pinning down the people responsible for these war crimes, this season of In the Dark is letting us in on the callousness of the marines and how war made them see the people of Haditha as less than human. Listen here.

🎙️Comedian/writer/actress Akilah Hughes went back to her small hometown of Florence, Kentucky to try to get them to change the high school mascot from a confederate general to a biscuit, and she is bringing her microphone along for her new show Rebel Spirit. When I first listened to the trailer (it feels like centuries ago, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time) I realized it checked so many boxes of things I love. It’s got a real mission, it’s journalism but it’s funny but it’s making a real point. We’re living the story with Akilah, she’s using original footage. It’s ridiculous but also not. As Akilah points out, everyone loves biscuits, and they are harmless and vegetarian. They’re southern. The word “biscuit” is the same number of syllables as “rebel” so the cheerleaders don’t have to change their chants. So maybe it’s not ridiculous at all, and in this crazy world, the most sane thing I’ve heard all year. And the podcast feels like a gift I do not deserve. Listen here.

🎙️Kid Nation was a 2007 reality TV show that plopped a bunch of kids aged 8 to 15 in Bonanza City, New Mexico, to build their own society without any adult supervision. And that is the focus of Split Screen: Kid Nation. I never saw the show but have been picking up pieces from this disaster story for years but am really enjoying immersing myself in it, with all the details. (The winners of one of the challenges got to decide whether the kids would get seven more outhouses or a TV to watch whenever they wanted; another winner got to choose between a BBQ or toothbrushes…one girl came home with six cavities!) It’s a real exercise in not being judgmental hearing from the dad who saw no problem signing away his eight year old’s rights to a TV crew without any way to contact her, but isn’t that what all podcasts are? An exercise in not being judgmental? Wait until you get to the part where one of the kids accidentally drinks bleach. Almost every anecdote, every interview, of Split Spreen: Kid Nation, is pretty unbelievable. Listen here.

🎙️If you aren’t listening to Never Post, Mike Rugnetta’s stab at tackling the enormous subject of the internet, you are missing something really, really good. Episodes feel like a zine with a variety of editors and hosts who answer questions from their listeners. Hans Buetow’s ongoing attempt to find Caffeine Free Diet Dr. Pepper keeps on popping up, streamlining the whole thing. The latest episode had me jotting down tons of notes a out “critical ignoring,” something we must do if we want to maintain our sanity while living in a world that is increasingly more online. I believe it is cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky who teaches us how to “ignore interesting trivialities” and decipher between good news and bad news. There was also a fascinating conversation about how much weight different generations put toward email. (Millennials, a LOT—we grew up along side it. Gen Z, almost none and it shocked me to know that a lot of Gen Zers don’t even know their friends’ email addresses, because they don’t need to.) They also ask: if you have an important email to send on-the-go, would you write it on your phone? Or would you wait until you were back at your computer? Listen here.

🎙️I finished The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi and it was nothing at all like I expected it would be. At the beginning it introduces you to Anthony, a man from one of New York City’s crime families who claimed to have had a part in murdering the pope in 1978. He’s so chock-full of yarns, he starts to seem a little Forrest Gumpy. Like, it would be hard to believe that all of these things happened to him but also very hard to fact-check, because he seems to know weird details or be aligned in odd ways to things that are undoubtedly true. These stories are stories he’s heard, been adjacent to, or been present for. That’s the whole point of this podcast. Marc Smerling (The Jinx) is fact-checking Anthony. Which is hard because is such an unforgettable subject and fantastic storyteller, it’s hard to separate truth from fiction in the stuff he’s weaving. I joked on All of It with Alison Stewart that I didn’t care if the stories were true or false. Anthony is entertaining and the podcast is wonderfully made. Tell me a story, Anthony! But as the show evolves it gets more complex. And sad. Well first, there’s a long (a little too long?) investigation, mid way, into the relationship with the mob and Vatican City, and why the mob might have wanted the pope dead. It’s interesting but feels like a different podcast. I started to really miss Anthony. But when Anthony returns at the end of the series, we are meeting him with all of this information about what was absolutely not true, and we realize that he had a kind of sad childhood that led to a lot of shit he should have gone to therapy for, instead of building up all these fantasies to help him get by. So the question is thrown to us. What do we believe? What is he lying about and what is the source of each lie? We are the value of our stories, and as we get closer and closer to death, we want our time here to mean something. I was really excited about this podcast when I first heard it, and it wasn’t anything like what I expected. It was better. Listen here.

🎙️Do you remember being young and not quite understanding certain details in history and being amazed that your parents did? It’s obviously because they lived through it. Slow Burn does this thing that makes you feel like you lived through historical events even if you didn’t. It always does this, Christina Cauterucci’s season about the Briggs Initiative, was no exception. It set this tight scene of San Francisco in the 70s, introducing us to characters in queer history—some you know, some you don’t. It’s everything to understand the climate that allowed this to happen and all the hard work that went into stopping it, which now seems almost impossible. Or that Briggs didn’t passed based on a fluke, a technicality. A very close call. And the likelihood and real fear that it will all happen again. Every episode is a fascinating subplot that will make you feel like you were just there, in the 70s, with Harvey Milk, Richard Pryor, and Tom Ammiano, a former California legislator who later became famous for telling Arnold Schwarzenegger to “kiss my gay ass.” There is an anecdote about anti Briggs advocate David Mixner having to meet Reagan advisors in a Denny’s who showed up wearing sunglasses and raincoats that made me laugh out loud. David died last March, right after recording his interview, which we are lucky to have had him for. David lost so many of his friends to AIDS years ago. This series is precious and could not be a more important listen. Listen here.

🎙️When NPR laid off Yowei Shaw (Invisibilia,) she went to a very dark place and she talks about it on the first episode of her new show Proxy. Things didn’t end there, she worked tirelessly on a piece about rejection and getting laid off for a huge unnamed podcast that also got killed. That’s what broke her, when the darkest place got darker. That’s not what Proxy is about, really. On Proxy, Yowei connects people going through stuff with proxies—other people who have shared experience or can offer valuable advice. It’s not advice or therapy, it’s something in its own category. It’s learning how to get laid off better by talking from other people who have been there. This feels like obvious magic to me. Isn’t that what community and connection and even storytelling is for? Yowei is magical, too. She’s proven herself. And now she’s picking herself back up by turning her pain into something that’s helpful. In episodes two and three we get to hear the story that got killed and an interview with an HR person, who seems like a real human, and listening to her actually made me feel really sad for HR people. I know so many people who have been laid off lately, send this to them! It’s healing. But also beautiful for what it’s doing and for how it’s built and for what it sounds like. Podcast art by Good Tape, woo hoo! I wrote this review when Proxy was new but a lot more has been happening on that feed and there’s a ton to look forward to in 2025. Listen here.

🎙️I love you!