4 is the magic number 4️⃣ 2020 was 4 years ago 4️⃣ 5-4 takes on FedSoc 4️⃣
🍭 👂 TRUST US! 🌈 🤸♀️
Hi hello!
What’s up with 4-part series this week? We’ve got new must-listens from 5-4 (a 4-part series on FedSoc), Patient 11 (a 4-part series on neglect in psychiatric wards), Black History, For Real (starting with a 4-part series on the women of the Black Panther Party), and In The Dark (with a new 4-part series on the runaway princesses of Dubai). As someone who loves art that ends, I’m all about it — but what a weird coincidence!
Tell me about your other favorite 4-part podcast series. Is 4 the magic number? I love a boring coincidence rabbit hole. Fuel my brain more, please.
xoxo ww
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
From Lauren!:
“Patient 11 is an intense new series about Alexis, a woman who booked herself into a mental health facility for three days and found herself trapped for three years. In four parts she tells the story about how she got there and every twist her story took that took her farther away from freedom, her family (her daughter was a baby) and her sanity. I kept on forgetting to breathe when I was listening to the rap sheet of physical and sexual abuse Alexis endured, and the hospital’s complete misunderstandings about how to care for people with neurodivergencies. (Alexis is autistic, something she hadn’t realized.) This is not an easy listen, but it’s a good one.”
Seconding across the board here. It’s a very well-told harrowing story that shouldn’t be missed.
🧚♀️recs from Lauren 🧚♀️
✨You know I love a podcast that makes me say, “I didn’t know that could be a podcast!” And I found another one, You Had to Be There, the debut podcast from Hi Barr. Every episode has a different host tasked with finding an eyewitness to a pop culture event and conducting an interview and making a piece, all in 48 hours. It’s history, it’s investigative, and it feels a little reality TV-ish, too (or are we calling it reality podcast yet?) ... you’re hearing the host figure out how the hell to find an eyewitness, every phone call they make, every hint they pick up, that gets them closer and closer to the source. The topics are a surprise to the hosts, so they not only have to find the eyewitness, they have to do the research to find clues and come up with good questions. The first two episodes were about Martin Scorsese’s concert film The Last Waltz and the night when Garth Brooks hosted Saturday Night Live and performed as Chris Gaines Listen here.
✨2020 was a wild year, so it might be easy to forget that one of the things that happened was a bunch of guys conspired to kidnap and maybe kill Michigan’s governor Gretchen Whitmer because they didn’t appreciate her takes on Covid restrictions, but it so happened. The Michigan Plot is the latest from Chameleon (I love love love,) about the kidnapping that almost happened. I would listen to a series about this, I would listen to wire recordings never before heard by the public. I would listen to FBI informants pretending to be militia members. That sounds pretty cool. But this podcast is asking a critical question: was it an almost-kidnapping? Or was the FBI wrong? And now that I think about it, it makes sense that they were wrong. I mean what do you believe…that a bunch of crazy people were attempting to kill a sitting governor and the FBI saved the day? I believe the first part of that sentence. Or that this whole thing was just an unsophisticated plan from a bunch of gun nuts and that the FBI fucked up? I believe the second part of that sentence! I’m on pins and needles. Listen here.
✨One of my biggest fears is home invasion so I was quick to press play on Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness' How Do You Survive A Home Invasion?, The guest is security expert Robert Siciliano, and I loved him for so many reasons. He calls the bad guys "the bad guys" (I thought, for some reason, he'd have a more technical name for criminals,) arms his teenage daughters with bear spray, a gun, and a baseball bat in their rooms, and "doesn't go to the mailbox without his gun," not because he's afraid of his neighborhood, but because "that's what you have to do to embody the kind of person who doesn't get fucked with." (I'm paraphrasing.) This episode was full of helpful self-defense tips. The reason I bring it up is because I was talking about it on my family call, a weekly phone call I have with my husband, parents, grandmother, aunts, and uncles. Every single woman on the call could not get enough, offering their own ideas, the things they plan to do if they are ever in danger. The men, who aren't consumed by this stuff, did not chime in at all. If this episode will get you half as excited as it did the women in my family, you'll like it. Listen here.
🔥hell yeah🔥
🎙️Historical fiction podcast Harlem Queen is doing a live show, complete with live foley artist, on February 10th at Podstream Studio Times Square. If you can go, please please please do, and send me your posts about it so I can live vicariously!
🎙️Boundless Audio has acquired Hello Podcast Media and Women of Color Podcasters, making Boundless Audio — in the words of BlkPodNews (you’re subscribed, right?) — “a leading network dedicated to amplifying the voices of women, particularly those from marginalized communities.”
🎙️The Audio Drama Gazette, a new fiction-focused newsletter edited by Tal Minear and Anne Baird, releases its first edition today! Subscribe for reviews, coverage of new releases, moves in the industry, and more.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Wondery just dropped Black History, For Real, hosted by Franchesca Ramsey and Conscious Lee, “a no-nonsense, unwhitewashed account of history’s most overlooked moments, with a mix of narrative storytelling and candid conversation.” The first episode focuses on the women of the Black Panther Party, starting with Assata Shakur, should not be missed.
🎙️5-4 is partnering with People’s Parity Project for a four-part series detailing The Federalist Society, a law school conservative “debate club” that has shaped American politics in profound ways. This series is classic, acerbic 5-4 with a new twist: it features interviews with former members of FedSoc and others, woven into the conversation. It’s a really phenomenal mix of chatcast and produced reporting piece, a structure I’d love to hear more of — and all about a fascinating, infuriating topic.
🎙️Oh No, Ross and Carrie is back at my favorite annual tradition: getting psychics to tell them what to expect this coming year. At the end of 2024, we’ll return to these predictions and see how well they went — and, as always, these psychics make some truly wild leaps. (If you want to hear how their 2023 predictions went, you can listen to that episode here.)
🎙️Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative on the Radiotopia Presents feed is making me go feral as an ex-journalist. Spending a lot of listening time really loudly yelling, “GIRL NO!” It’s a wild listen. It’s not for folks who struggle with secondhand embarrassment. It is for people who think a lot about what happens in the overlap between nonfiction and storytelling. (Hey, anyone else remember the Stanich’s best burger double milkshake duck inception?)
🎙“Not All Propaganda Is Art” on the Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything feed is the first podcast in a long while to feel like it’s running laps around me brain-wise, and it’s so refreshing. This biography of three integral figures in the overlap between propaganda and mass culture is a fascinating look into how American media got to where it is today, with a focus on the kind of political messaging the U.S. and U.K. were secretly funding in the turn of the century.
🎙️In The Dark’s new series with The New Yorker, “The Runaway Princesses,” is off to as fascinating, compelling, and expertly produced start we’ve come to expect from this amazing team. This story looks into the extremely wealthy princesses of Dubai — who have consistently tried to escape what initially looks like a glamorous life. Dive into this four-part series episode by episode on the main feed, or in full by subscribing.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
The darling new show art for Imaginary Worlds made me reminisce on how much I’ve loved this podcast for so long. This podcast is a cornerstone for thinking about fiction from deeply-considered perspectives, from Miyazaki to Disco Elysium to The Gothic™️. Imaginary Worlds is one of the first non-broadcast podcasts I remember being recommended constantly, and the quality has not dipped for even a moment. If you’re a lover of thinking about how reality shapes fiction, and how fiction shapes reality, take a dive through this podcast’s episodes and start with one focusing on subject matter that speaks to you. And look at the cute new art! I love it so much!
🎧From the Desk of Tink🎧
Today we’re talking to Michael Goodfriend, head of scripted fiction at Next Chapter Podcasts.
Describe the show in ten words or less:
The greatest love story of all time now in podcast!
Who is it for?
Anyone who wants to laugh, cry, and dance.
What’s your favorite thing about working on the Play On podcast?
I love creating multi-episode podcast series out of Shakespeare’s plays because every story he wrote is timeless, enriching, and rewarding in countless ways. You realize when you listen to these plays as podcasts that Shakespeare wrote them to be heard as much as to be seen. If I were to narrow it down, my favorite thing about the Play On Podcasts is that they make me feel like I’m hearing a brand new story even though it was originally written over four hundred years ago.
What’s your favorite Shakespeare play and why?
My favorite Shakespeare play is whatever Shakespeare play I happen to be working on when you ask the question. Right now, that’s ROMEO AND JULIET.
What do you hope listeners take away from it?
Great stories, no matter how sad or funny or whimsical, make us feel that life is worth living. If these podcasts nudge listeners towards a greater appreciation of life, they’re a success!
The new series is Romeo & Juliet. What are you most excited about with this musical retelling of this classic play?
When we first started working on this series last summer, translator Hansol Jung, director Dustin Wills and I kept trying to land on a concept for the production. It proved to be really challenging! Whenever you approach a classic story like this where the title itself is almost a cliche, you’ve got that nagging voice in your head saying “it’s been done a thousand times before” (or in this case probably a million times)-- How can we bring something new to people that won’t turn them off? We wanted to tell the story without compromising its integrity but we didn’t want it to be boring or preachy. Dustin wanted it to feel “homemade”--to “feel the foley”, as he put it. We knew we didn’t want this series to have the totally immersive audio quality that a lot of our previous series have had–not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not what Hansol and Dustin had in mind. Eventually, Hansol said, “Why don’t we just make it sound like the actors are in a sound studio?” She came up with the idea of including banter between the actors and giving listeners the feeling that they are right there with the cast as they tell the story. Dustin came up with the idea of having the actors call out their sound effects, so we hear actors saying “slam!” or “smack!” when they storm out of a room or slap someone. He also asked the ensemble to use his favorite gibberish word, “haminah” (as in, “haminah haminah haminah”), for background conversation. It’s really fun and funny and it works surprisingly well! Composer Brian Quijada came in with his brilliant music and was able to work the recordings with our musical director, Nygel Robinson, in such a way that it sounds like the actors are using the instruments in real-time, making music on the fly. Lindsay Jones worked his magic being the great sound designer that he is, often coupling the actor’s “homemade” foley with his own more realistic sound effects to kind of meld the two versions into a studio/theater hybrid. The end result is something truly one-of-a-kind and delightful to hear. I’m really proud we were able to pull it off the way we did.
Dream partnership:
The King’s Men! (The acting company that William Shakespeare wrote for and performed with)
If you could force one person in the world to listen to your show, it'd be…
My 7th-grade English teacher. I won’t name names! But wow she had a lot to learn about language, literature, human nature and the world she lived in.
What do your parents/kids/family think you do?
They all know I make podcasts, but only my wife knows how hard I work on them. My kids keep telling me I need to get famous YouTubers on my series. I mean, I wouldn’t say no to Mr. Beast playing a cameo…
Anything else you’d like to share:
One thing about this production that we don’t make a big deal about is the cast is almost all Asian. I think it’s worth mentioning because as Dorcas Leung said in her bonus interview, “representation is everything”. There may be someone of Asian origin out there thinking Shakespeare isn’t for them but if they listen to this series and find out that the characters they’re hearing are voiced by majority Asian-American artists, hopefully, they’ll feel an even greater connection to the play, and to all of Shakespeare’s work.