📖 back for days 👥 sisterless boys 👁️ surveillance capitalism👙 the alamo?🦝
🍭 👂Let's let a bunch of depressed podcasters laze down the river 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday September 1, 2025. Today kicks off International Podcast Month and is appropriately Arielle Nissenblatt’s birthday…HAPPY BIRTHDAY ARIELLE!
In case this newsletter is too long…this was the best book club conversation OF ALL TIME and it’s actually better if you didn’t read the book, hilarious “rustic” audio here, the best love story I’ve ever heard??????
xoxo
lauren
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Finding Lucinda follows singer songwriter ISMAY while they trace the roots of their musical hero Lucinda Williams. With poetic narration and an almost meditative tone, ISMAY tracks their road trip through Texas, Louisiana and Tennessee to meet Lu’s early collaborators, dig through family archives, and visit the places where Lucinda got her start. Hear from Charlie Sexton, Buddy Miller, and Mary Gauthier. Finding Lucinda is available on The Bluegrass Situation or wherever you listen. Look out for the Finding Lucinda film coming Fall 2025.
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🚨the one thing🚨
I listen to Straightiolab every week without fail, at 1x speed pumped throughout my house so I can listen with my husband. (And I wait until the weekend to do it, that’s true love.) I seriously almost skipped the last one because it was the very first episode in Straightiolab’s Book Club, which was covering Jo Firestone’s Murder On Sex Island (Jo’s on the episode,) which I actually listened to as a podcast and liked, but Justin did not and I didn’t think he’d enjoy. I wasn’t that interested anyway, sometimes book club conversations on podcasts make me feel either excluded or can be just too predictable. But Justin turned it on, anyway, and boy am I glad. You do not need to have listened to or read Jo Firestone’s Murder On Sex Island, in fact you might be frustrated if you did. Occasionally George will try to pull things back to the book but it’s like trying to feed a fussy toddler peas. The only time they mention Jo’s creative process is to make fun of the fact that they are not talking about it at all. Sam and Jo are close, they worked together when Jo was lead writer on After Midnight, which means they have the closeness that happens when friends are coworkers, and they tease each other the whole time. George as there as kind of a serious moderator, trying to make sense of the wild thing coming out of Sam and Jo’s mouths. This was a non-preformative conversation that made me laugh so hard (Jo is effortlessly her own kind of unique hilarious) and made Sam and George laugh, too. It was one of those episodes that felt like it was for their entertainment as much as ours. It’s almost two hours of jokes and stories of Jo’s beautiful weirdness.
notes
✨Yesterday, Arielle featured 5 podcasts to feed your nostalgia (curated by Paul and Erika of That Aged Well!) in EarBuds.
✨Sign up here for my next Podcast Marketing 101 Radio Boot Camp. I’m going to be sharing everything I know.
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
👂I wish you could have seen me at Podcast Movement when Lindy West And Meagan Hatcher-Mays came up to me after one of my sessions to say hi. I’m behind on episodes of Text Me Back so didn’t know they were there. I screamed and jumped around in a clockwise circle away from them for a few round, waving my hands, before giving them a hug. This was a celebrity moment for me. Text Me Back is one of the most underrated podcasts running right now. It’s funnier than every single show that is topping the comedy charts. Meagan and Lindy are documenting their lives and best friendships and their back-and-forths couldn’t be better if they were written in a writer’s room. If you were at Podcast Movement or if you’ve ever been to a Podcast Movement or really just any conference that makes people wear badges, or a Gaylord hotel or if you know literally anything about podcasting or if you’re looking to hear something funny and unconventional, you cannot miss their Podcast Movement Dallas Diary. (Titled: “Lindy and Meagan Start an Insurrection at the Gaylord Texan.”) They used the mini influencer mics that they got in a swag bag at On Air Fest to make us feel like we’re there with them (“rustic audio,) from the moment they landed in Dallas (Lindy found a raccoon tail on the ground in the parking lot that she went on to “imbue with life personality feelings and hot flashes,” Meagan, devastated by the closure of the lazy river, ate too-spicy chiliquilies next to a fountain that you can hear, both changed the entire industry at their own Podcast Movement session. Of the Gaylord Lindy said, “we are living inside a fake Alamo in the middle of a human zoo that is also Disneyland with a fake town and shopping and 100 restaurants and it’s Texas themed. (I love it for those reasons, too Lindy.) She did not mention the Build-a-Bear workshop, nightly light show at the top of the atrium, or the covered wagon in the lobby. There is a section at the end about them eating Combos that had me laughing out loud. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Loyal listener
👂I love Podcast Reddit because you could be like “Looking for a specific podcast ep, a story about a woman with a terminal illness, told by her husband” and within minutes someone will know what you’re talking about and tell you. This literally happened last week. The Redditor knew that it was a May 2019 episode of Phoebe Judge’s Criminal called “Philip and Becky,” which tells the story of Philip Benight, who helped assist in the suicide of his partner Becky Golden when she got a terminal illness and wanted to die. (For the episode, Phoebe is in conversation with Ann Neumann, who wrote about it for Harper’s.) Philip was arrested and charged with a crime that carries a sentence of up to ten years in prison and a $25,000 fine, which makes this a story perfect for Criminal. But the episodes of Criminal and/or Phoebe’s other show This is Love that I end up writing about are always the ones that I can never remember lived on which feed. And there could not be a better example of a story that belongs on both than “Philip and Becky,” one of the greatest love stories I’ve ever heard. This is a story about what it feels like to want to be together and the pain of not, what it truly means to love someone. To quote the Ann’s Harper’s article I read after I listened, “One day, Philip was inspecting a birdhouse in their yard when he was startled to discover that a snake had eaten the inhabitants and taken up residence. As punishment for scaring Philip, Becky burned the birdhouse down, snake and all.” I love that story because it gives you a sense of what they were like when Becky was well, what they were like together, why they were united in the first place. But this is also a story about what life even is really (is this hell?,) why we are alive, and why we drag people’s old bodies around in all their suffering and pain even when they want to die. At one point Phoebe says, “we don’t listen to anyone in a nursing home.” I know editing could have been involved but I was shocked by Ann’s quick response: “We don’t listen to anyone over 65.” Listen here.
How I discovered it: Reddit
👂Trolleyology is a thing, and Alie Ward is all over it. On Ologies she talked to Harvard Psychology professor / neuroscientist Dr. Joshua Greene about the gruesome philosophical humdinger-y of the trolley problem, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. But maybe you haven’t heard of the footbridge scenario, which posits that you must decide whether to push someone off a bridge to stop the runaway trolley and save five others. There is a lot of interesting stuff happening in the fold between these two truly horrifying dilemmas, and Joshua has studied the psychology and neuroscience behind it. What is it about the foot bridge scenario that changes our entire reaction to this moral question? Does it have to do with what is intentional vs what is a side effect of our actions? (This had a huge impact on the way The Vatican thought about abortion.) This whole trolley / footbridge thing makes the trolley problem seem quaint and rather boring, and this episode will complicate the feelings of anyone who thinks they’ve figured it all out. As always, because Alie Ward has grown such a strong community of rabid listeners, the show is full of smart questions from them, which leads Alie and and Joshua into additional related issues surrounding religion, Peter Singer, polarization, neurodivergency, and other moral buttons. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Occasional listener
👂For Snap Studios, Shaina Shealy has made A Tiny Plot, a story about a small group of unhoused people in Oakland who make a plan for cogovernance, which means they turned their encampment into a real place to live, making decisions together in accordance with the city. Shaina has really embedded herself into the story, we’re there with her and she spends a significant amount of time getting to know Mama D and Pappa Eddie, tracing the community as they test this model that, if successful, could help other homeless people across the state. She eventually gets kicked out of the encampment by authorities. Things seem sunny at first—they help each other, they’re self-regulating, things are relatively peaceful and they create spaces they are proud of. The fact that the government’s actions fuck this up might not surprise you but that doesn’t mean this story won’t hit hard because of the people you get to meet. I think of them now! Mama D are you out there? Pappa Eddie are you OK? This is frustrating and sad, and paints a picture of how hard it is to get housing for the unhoused and also the fucked up ways cities work. Start here.
How I discovered it: Saw it in the Snap Judgment feed
👂On Corporate Gossip, siblings Becca and Adam Platsky tell business stories in a dishy way. If you don’t think you like business podcasts, you’ll be surprised they can be this much fun while you're actually learning about things like venture grooming, privatization, and private equity. Episodes are broken down by pieces of gossip (there is an entire episode outlining the shittiest things McKinsey has gotten in trouble for) but for now I point you to a series on Sam Altman that exposes the origins of OpenAI and what has been going on behind the scenes over there, the messy stuff that hasn’t been publicized. The amount of research and dot-connecting Becca does is impressive; her energetic storytelling held my attention. She calls what’s happening with AI “this century’s Dust Bowl,” and makes a good argument that bad farming practices + bad science + unbound regulation + greedy entrepreneurs who felt it was their right to do whatever they wanted to make themselves money = both. (Another similarity: experts came to the Great Plains and tried to sell solutions to a desperate population—somebody hired a rainmaker to fire off dynamite into the sky to shake up clouds, someone else suggested putting waterproof paper on plains, paving the plains, or sending cars to the plains to hold down the ground, ridiculous tactics that give real Musk vibes.) This series gets dark but if you use AI ever it is your duty to listen so you know exactly all the suffering and damage that goes into your Chat GPT quandery about a self-guided Aperol Spritz tour in Venice. And just when you think it can’t get worse they get into surveillance capitalism and how terrorism benefits the tech industry. I had an out-of-body experience hearing Becca talk about Sam Altman, momentarily forgetting that he isn’t a dumb cartoon character in a dystopian comic, but a real man with a lot of power (who is very very good at getting more power.) He got scurvy while building Chat GPT because he was glued behind his computer for weeks eating only Ramen—what a flex. Start the series here.
How I discovered it: I kept seeing the show and wasn’t that interested until I heard Becca on Glamorous Trash
👂The Hunter tells the story of Lydia Lerma, a mom who gathered a police detective, a professional hunter, a district attorney, a Navajo handtrembler, an anonymous tipster and an Apache medicine man to hunt the man who sexually abused her son when the law wasn’t working fast enough for her. Read that sentence again, it’s nuts. It’s insane. Who would do that? (Not me—can you imagine me hunting someone down? Can you imagine me holding a gun?! Do I need to join the NRA now that I’m a mother??!?!?!?!?) Once I started listening to Lydia’s story, her growing frustration with the police’s lack of…doing anything, the steps she took every time someone told her no, I couldn't stop. The podcast is brought to you by a mother’s rage This is a wild story peppered with moments of a kind of psychotic determination, a fucked-up the justice system, love stronger than I think a lot of people have, and a connection with nature and identity that drives the whole thing. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Press release
👂What’s Our Podcast is new from Headgum, hosted by Beck Bennett and Kyle Mooney of SNL (they’re also former roommates,) and kind of in the vein of Next We Have, the premise is that there is no premise. Beck and Kyle will have guests on who are there to help them think what the show should be. (First guests are Marc Maron and Fran Gillespie.) These end up being loose, fun conversations about many funny things, with meta podcast conversations sprinkled throughout.I am sure they are not reading this but my advice would be to lean so much harder into this meta-ness idea, it’s such a good one. Actually make a mini episode within with different jingles, maybe even a fake sponsor. Maybe the guest goes away after giving the idea. Maybe they aren’t even there and just leave a voice note, kind of like what they do on Handsome. (That’s a really good model.) But right now I’m just bummed to hear that Marc Maron has never ever listened to a podcast. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Apple Podcasts feature
👂TV, I Say with Ashley Ray is a show that my husband I listened to religiously, every weekend together. For me, it fits into the category of utility more than art or entertainment. A necessary object. When it went away a little more than a year ago, Justin and I grieved. Ashley knows so much about the television industry, watches more TV than I listen to podcasts, is the opposite of snobby about what she enjoys but yet I find her taste either so aligned with mine or far off enough to make me really invested in why. I don't mean to make this show sound dry, Ashley is really funny and listening to this show is the equivalent of smoking weed on your couch with a TV genius friend. But of all things this show is useful. After going away it’s back (under the same umbrella as two other amazing shows Panic World and How Is This Better, COURIER.) This is in the “podcasts I texted to my friends” section, but my friends also texted it to me—the people are excited. Episode one kicks off with comedian and TV writer, Niles Abston to fill us in on what they’ve both been watching the past year. I was listening alone in Dallas texting my husband links to Common Side Effects and Dave and he responded, “are you listening to TV I Say without me?” Niles also said something I thought was funny criticizing comedian podcasters who have politicians on and shy away from obvious jokes. (“If you are a comedian interviewing JD Vance and you don’t ask him about fucking a couch, are you really a comedian?”) Listen here.
How I discovered it: Press release BOX originally (it had a bunch of cool stuff in it) then I saw it back in my feed
👂Great Days Out on the Bus from Buxton is a British travel guide that encourages visitors to explore Buxton’s, towns, villages, attractions, beauty, history and heritage all via bus. It’s also a podcast from Maria Passingham (of Equal Parts,) who decided to really dig into the guide when she moved there, bringing along her microphone. I didn’t realize, until I started listening, how hungry I was for this kind of immersive audio—ambient noises, captured and stripped down sound, real conversations with real people. It’s a lot like Strangers on a Bench but feels even more homemade. (If you’ve been following along, it could also be compared to “Lindy and Meagan Start an Insurrection at the Gaylord Texan.”) Podcasts like this are great for people who want to break their brain from the usual stuff they hear (my brain felt nourished,) for people who just love sound, real sound, the kind of sound that is often completely avoided or scrubbed away, or for people who are just nosy. Where are all these people going??? Listen here.
How I discovered it: Arielle Nissenblatt’s Podcast Plunge
👂I love you!
Lauren, you are the best. Thank you for the birthday wishes!