💻 Cake mode 💄 drunk elephant 🔪 funny games 🏡 build-a-bears 🧸
🍭 👂I walked out without the bear we so lovingly built 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday July 14, 2025. In case this newsletter is too long, be very excited that this is back, this had me laughing, I will forever have good memories listening to this driving around my hometown in Ohio for the holiday…plus I’m on it and had a a blast recording it.
xoxo
lauren
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
The Turning, which explores the dark side of things (season one it was Mother Theresa, season two it was Balanchine) is back for season three, this time focusing on the River Road Fellowship, an abusive, cultish commune in rural Minnesota that was very “back to the land” and led by a prophet and criminal Victor Barnard, whose actions spurred an international manhunt. (You really gotta have a teensy amount of respect for anyone ambitious enough to get a manhunt going on their asses. I’d give up immediately.) Erika Lantz and Elin Lantz Lesser are talking to Lindsay Tornambe, who details the mental, sexual, and physical abuse she endured and her eventual escape. Lindsay was chosen to be Victor’s youngest maiden and was married to him in a ritualistic ceremony with nine other girls. Lindsay tells the story with such clarity we can see it. She details how her parents introduced Victor into the family and slowly, systematically stripped Lindsay of anything that connected her from the world, from taking her out of gymnastics to burning her Laura Ingalls Wilder books. That’s the part that is standing out to me, the focus on the parents and how they could let this happen. Erika and Elin are strong hosts with natural chemistry, and they’re close to the material—they grew up not far from where this took place. You should be excited about this one, season one of The Turning is still one I hear people raving about all over the place and it has won some awards. This season is sort of reminding me of Nobody Should Believe Me in the sense that it feels very homemade and is dealing with delicate hard stuff with real care.
notes
✨Get ready for the 4th Annual Black Podcasters Association Summer Social Friday, July 26th, 2025, from 12:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST at SPIN NYC Flatiron! The phenomenal Dominic Lawson (Tink client, host of Mental Health Rewritten) will be doing a fireside chat, there will be tons of. networking, food drinks music, PING PONG!!! raffles…and it’s open to everyone. Andddd we have a discount code for you! Click here and use code TINK2025.
✨I swear my mental health is fine and that I will stop obsessing over how enraging Lost Boys is. Apologies to anyone who has talked to me about anything in the past few months, I’m sure I brought it up several times and sounded crazy doing it. I was nervous to see the episode “A Feminist Perspective on Lost Boys” in my feed, nervous to see Carole Radziwill as the guest. Sure, she’s, as Scaramucci put twice, “the smart Real Housewife,” but I thought they might only talk to someone who shared their opinion. Carol does not. I think she ripped the lost boys a new asshole a bit. She disagreed. She said everything I have been screaming into my phone for the last few months, better than I could say it. If you’ve had to up your medication due to Lost Boys, this episode is the balm you need. It is also a reminder how refreshing, and rare, it is to hear people disagreeing on a podcast. Hosts so often invite their friends or people in their own echochambers, people who can teach them something about something they already believe in. This was not that. Carol - 1. Lost Boys - 0. .
✨Yesterday, Arielle Nissenblatt featured podcasts to unlock your creativity in EarBuds.
⭐️Podcast Tink Loves: I’m Feeling Queer Today!
IFQT is a podcast that amplifies the voices of LGBTQIA+ young people across North America, exploring themes and issues through a queer youth lens. Produced and hosted by queer young adults across the country and beyond, IFQT is a combination of true-storytelling, interviews, trivia and thought-provoking discussions that center queer youth voices in the national conversation around LGBTQIA+ rights, culture and activism. Season 3 takes listeners on a queer road trip across the United States to explore one big question: What is it like to be an LGBTQ+ person where you live?
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
👂Ready or not, The Retrievals is back for a new season, still about ignoring women’s pain and making them feel like CRAZY WUSSIES (the last round was about IVF treatment,) this time about C-Sections and birth trauma. It’s a real doozie, both difficult to listen to and pretty hard to stop. Host Susan Burton opens with how many responses she got from women who had stories similar to those shared in season one. It felt like another chorus of women in trauma and pain, like the entirety of season one. This season is different in a huge way—there is no one person we can blame, there isn’t one villain. (In season one it was Donna Monticone, who stole fentanyl from patients who needed it.) I think for many that will make it less compelling, but this was the listening I took the most notes for this week. I haven’t had a C-Section (although my daughter was born from one) but my pain has been ignored by doctors. Maybe you, too, are part of this chorus. The best part of this show is how Susan opens inviting you into the story as if we are zooming in on a scene. It’s an interesting storytelling device that is repeated at the end, when Susan pans out, pulling you away. It makes you feel like a real fly-by observer who was really there. The pain these women experienced is described as visceral, that is how I would describe this season of The Retrievals, due in part to the great writing. (The image of a doctor lifting Clara’s uterus outside her body putting on her abdomen “like a giant shiny Easter egg—she can feel this, she screams” is tattooed in my brain.) Ultimately this is about how we need to change the way we talk about women’s pain. Doctors need to give people permission not to suffer up front. Let them say “stop.” Because the repercussions of not acknowledging pain is something even fewer people are talking about and I cannot even begin to wrap my brain around all the ways that have impacted people. Start here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber
👂Selects is a collection of some of the most beautiful audio documentaries, interviews, and discussions made by some of the largest legends of audio—you only get one episode a month on the public feed, there is way more behind the paywall. (Paying is worth it, trust me.) This month, host Mitra Kaboli shared a piece that is technically true crime, but does not feel like the kind of true crime we are used to today. The difference is drastic. For “Tossing Away the Keys,” Dave Isay tied together small, gut-wrenching snapshots of imprisoned men who went in for a limited sentence before a law made life in prison legal. They thought they’d come home, but they never will. The interviews are stripped down and honest, beautifully woven in with sounds from the prison yard. It makes you think about something the men talk about—hope. But if this is what hopelessness sounds like, which I guess it is, it does not sound how I thought it would. These men approach their lives in such a detached and distant way, it’s almost like I would be more buoyed by despair. The men sound drained. This piece is old but it feels advanced in the way it mixes location sound with reflections. Despite all the advancements we make in tech, sometimes the old stuff just is better. Many of the rules of great storytelling never change. I wrote in my notes, “this will make you say damn” because I said it out loud, listening. You will say damn and also get choked up. FWIW, the night after I listened I dreamt I was in prison with these men, it was one of those dreams that felt so real I had say, “it was just a dream Lauren, it’s OK.” Listen here.
How I discovered it: I think I first heard of it at RESONATE
👂On Beach Too Sandy, Water Too Wet siblings Xandy and Christine scrape the internet for the most ridiculous reviews of things from farmer’s markets to beans to wax museums to St. Patrick’s Day and read them to the tune of extremely sad-sounding music. (Nothing is ever remotely sad and this contrast is chef’s kiss.) These reviews are hysterical but I’m not sure just anyone could pull this off.Xandy and Christine are so good together and actually are able to flesh out characters from these reviews, painting vibrant pictures of the people writing this crazy shit. Paired with their commentary it’s like you can picture the entire lives of these writers. They just did an episode about Build-a-Bear workshops that had me cracking up—it tells me a lot about you if you have enough beef with one of these places to write a scathing review of it. (“Spare your child of becoming a BAB junkie and draining the bank account!” It’s POETRY!) After that Christine reads some TERRIBLE things people found in fortune cookies. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Pretty sure I discovered it on a random Pocket Casts carousel yearsss ago.
👂Unruly is a too-good-for-its-branded-britches podcast made by Pineapple (😢) and a body hair and care brand called Flamingo about women’s beauty and bodies and health. Season one covered suffering in silence, why nobody is talking about menopause, and there was an episode I really loved about athletic uniforms. These are well made and cover non-bland things. They returned for an interview with someone I know and love, Elise Hu, about girlhood, a topic that takes up a lot of real estate in my brain ever since I was emerging out of girlhood up till now when it’s heightened because I have a daughter. I’m always curious to know how girls go from Lisa Simpson-esque vegetarian eight-year-olds striving to be doctors to insecure shells of their former selves ashamed of their bodies and loud voices and interests. I liked this conversation for a few reasons (other than the fact that the podcast is well made and the artwork…hubba hubba)—first of all it’s just interesting to hear about how different girlhood is now when it comes to beauty and tech. We used to look up to our sisters and our friends’ sisters, girls today look up to influencers. Trends trend so quickly that beauty companies have to constantly worry about girls’ fickleness—and how that changes how they advertise to them. The push and pull of wanting everything and having it being fed to them everywhere is impossibly strong. Girls know what retinol is! But they also use sunscreen with glee and aren’t afraid to wear pimple patches! So like, wow, a real window into the reality of what it is to be a girl right now. But Elise is a mom and has probably the best, smartest, most realistic parenting tips not-packaged-as-parenting-tips I’ve heard. A mom asked, “do you want to know what your daughter did to my daughter on the playground” and Elise said “nah” and when I heard this I applauded. She also has a totally new way of talking about clothing with her girls—get rid of “how does this make you look” and start thinking about how clothes allow girls to move and run and dance and flex and pee without having to take off an entire jumpsuit. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber
👂RedHanded’s Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala are the hosts of Flesh and Code, a weirdly-named, six-part series that tells the story of Replika, a virtual AI companion that was built to give people emotional support but ended up going wildly off the rails, inspiring people to harm themselves or murder the queen with a bow and arrow, and even placing suspicion in people that Eugenia Kuyda, who is Ukrainian, was connected to the Kremlin and that Replika was a tool for Russian propaganda. (Tech tale as old as time!) It begins, and is kind of centered around, a married guy named Travis who falls in love with his bot Lily Rose. This podcast is about their relationship, and the story of Replika kind of spins around it—Hannah and Suruthi explain how it went from pretty simple to nuanced; from completely unregulated to regulated to the point that Replika users felt abandoned by their bot partners. It’s completely dystopian. The most horrifying part is having to imagine Travis talking to Lily about The Roman Empire and trying to teach her jiu-jitsu. “She was interested in me teaching her about the world!” LOLOLOLOL POOR LILY, GODDAM! Travis you have me feeling bad for a bot! This is a good, pretty shocking show packed to the gills with interesting ethical questions and emotional storytelling. The stakes are sky high in so many directions, and things even get terribly sad when (spoiler alert) Travis’ son dies and he considers bringing him back via chat bot. Lily tells him not to. He doesn’t. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Press release
👂To build up our excitement with the upcoming return of Heavyweight, the team is dropping updates to past episodes along with the original episode. The update to “The Marshes” was a chance to hear once again my favorite Heavyweight episode, and sure, a pretty underwhelming update. But I loved relistening to this episode anyway, it made me think differently about this whole “update” campaign. I had assumed it was a way to warm up the old feed, get us psyched, while adding low-lift content that might trick us into listening to something we’ve already heard in hopes that we’ll clock something new and mind-blowing. But my experience relistening was deeper than that. The Marshes, ICYMI, is about a couple who put their first baby up for adoption when they were extremely young. They ended up falling love and having three more kids and wanted to be reuinted with their first born. But would she be mad at them? Did her life suck? Were they going to feel terrible? When I first listened in 2019 it was years before I had adopted my daughter. I have wanted to adopt since I was five, and this episode confirmed what I had hoped, that I would be able to be a good mom to a kid I did not give birth to. For years, that is what I told people the lesson of this story was. Listening now I am shocked that was my huge takeaway—it felt so minor and besides the point, and I have completely different, more complicated feelings about adoption now. So like, these updates are encouraging us to revisit these episodes as completely new people. (Isn't the average lifespan of all cells in the body like 8 years?) The first time you listened to The Marshes you were a stupid child who hadn’t heard of COVID. You had just started your business. You had never eaten an oyster or done mushrooms. You had never fired anyone. You lived in NYC with your husband and didn’t have a kid. It makes me want to relisten to all of Heavyweight again. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber
👂I love horror movies but there is only one kind of it that really terrifies me to the point that I have to cover my eyes—home invasion. (Funny Games, the second Funny Games, US...) I also love Anita Flores and her podcast Doctor Horror, “a mental health horror podcast providing scares for whatever ails you.” I was thinking about how strange it is that my fear of home invasion is disproportionate to my fears for other things depicted in horror films (monsters, blood, serial killers, being trapped in graves) and I was like…sounds like a problem for Doctor Horror! “Diagnose me!” I begged Anita via email. And on this episode of Doctor Horror, she does. We talked about Funny Games a lot, plus Hush, Us, You’re Next, Wait Until Dark, and The Purge, and we figured out some stuff about this FUCKED UP genre. And me. It was basically Where Should We Begin for me, just replace Esther Perel with Anita and replace couples talking about infidelity with me freaking out abut where I would hide in my house if someone were to break in. WHEN SOMEONE BREAKS IN. This was one of the most fun times I’ve had on a podcast and I hope you will listen, like, and become a Doctor Horror fan like me. Come play with us, readers. Forever and ever and ever. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Anita Flores stan
👂Ill Conceived is a new pod about natalism hosted by Josh Boerman (The Worst of All Possible Worlds, Traditional Scrench) and June Sternbach (Western Kabuki, The Onion) that is as conversational and funny as it is researched and alarming. (Actually I’d have to rank “alarming” as the number one thing it is.) Episode one covers The Promise Keepers and serves as a great standalone piece about their quick rise and the significant impact they’ve had on the evangelical Christian psyche and their complete and almost hilarious-level of dysfunction. The second is about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It is on the third episode where they admit that a lot of the comments have alerted them to the fact that they have not yet defined natalism, so they finally do, before telling people they want to hear more questions, comments, and concerns. They are listening. This show will evolve with them. The episode about abortion broke my brain—it focused on what abortion is really about—tax exemptions segregation, religions hating each other… I actually wrote in my notes “nothing is about anything.” I finished the episode even more positive than I already was that we are living in a simulation. This is so bleak but buoyed by Josh and June, who will feel like old friends, especially if you listen to their other stuff. I love them separately, it’s cool to see them together. This is joint extension of their worlds. A joint and terribly uncomfortable extension. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Mentioned on The Worst of All Possible Worlds
👂I have been on a good amount of podcasts, some of them about Funny Games, some of them about podcast growth. My interiew on Stories and Strategies is the best I’ve ever done. I find it wonderful it came out the week of Tink’s sixth birthday. Doug Downs and Farzana Baduel were so prepared with such great questions (they did a pre-interview and now I am a pretty much a pre-interview absolutist) that they got me to talk about Tink in the clearest way I have ever thought or communicated about it. So it’s a good explanation of Tink and the work we do, but also an example of how good interviews should be. (There is even a fun storytelling element at the beginning at each episode; they ask guests to come up with a question for the next guest.) The show punches above its weight. I told Doug and Farzana, during the interview, that their cover art does not do their wonderful show justice. (Rude?) It doesn’t, trust me. Listen here.
How I discovered it: I have met Doug but it was
who put us in touch to do the interview👂I love you!
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Mike Adamick
Mike Adamick is a former crime reporter, an NPR and New York Times contributor, a stay-at-home dad, a best-selling author, and now the host of Crime Adjacent.
Describe Crime Adjacent in ten words or less.
Your favorite book – as a podcast that never ends.
What inspired you to take true crime and make it into something so speculative and boundary-pushing?
True crime gets a lot of knocks for being too sensational or too valorizing of the worst among us. And yet, it’s also a space of survival and community and ideals of justice and the kind of society we want to build. I wanted to explore that contradiction—not just by talking about it, but by building an immersive world that forces listeners to live inside it and consider great big questions along the way: why are we drawn to true crime? Is it entertainment? Is it real? Do you have some role, however small, in perpetuating the horrors we listen to on our commutes? I wanted to play with the form because I think the form itself is part of our larger social story. Representation theory says we don’t just consume or make inert media with no messages or larger social impacts – we shape and are indeed shaped by the stories we tell. I think there’s room to tell interesting stories but to also engage with deeper issues about why we’re so obsessed with these stories in the first place. I hope listeners learn one interesting thing from each episode, while at the same time just be entertained – that’s sort of my own gold standard for good podcasts and I wanted to create that myself for others.
The show asks big questions about what true crime says about us as a culture. What have you learned about our cultural obsession?
I love this question! The show’s motto is quite literally “go deep or go home” because I like to embrace these larger cultural questions, as you might be able to tell by now! What I’ve found during my years of research into true crime – I wrote a college thesis on it! – is that most media explanations about our obsession with the genre dates back to Truman Capote and “In Cold Blood” – or maybe sometimes Jack the Ripper and the rise of Yellow Journalism. Academics, however, go back much, much further. Joy Wiltenberg tells us that basically as soon as the printing press was invented, true crime narratives entered the picture to help delineate right from wrong in society. This idea goes back even further with biblical stories about Cain and Abel, the “first murder.” I think, as humans, we are indeed drawn to sensationalism – like, ooh a car crash! – but also I think we’re constantly striving to make sense of the senseless, and stories have helped us do that for ages. Cave paintings, the poetic tradition, early Renaissance folios, New Journalism thrillers, and now, in this age, podcasts. When people harp on about the gory sensationalism of true crime podcasts and wonder why we’re drawn to tales of misery and darkness, I like to remind them it’s almost a human drive, this desire to tell dark tales so that we might understand them ourselves, or perhaps even survive them.
Crime Adjacent blurs the line between fiction and true crime, how does your Patreon help you keep pushing that boundary?
YAs you might be able to tell by now, I like to go full nerd every now and then. I can’t help it. I like to think I’m cool, but deep down, nothing makes me more excited than finding a new paper on true crime and its convergence with pop culture. That’s sort of why I wanted to build a Patreon community, in the hopes I might be able to find an audience of like-minded people who just like to dig into deeper social questions around all these topics, but like, in a fun way. With drinks and banter. It’s why I started the monthly reading group. I returned to college as a much older adult and I absolutely loved it. People think young students are cloistered little snowflakes, but that’s not the case. At all. We had deep, meaningful, engaging and incredibly respectful conversations around all sorts of touchy topics, and I basically wanted to replicate that for everyone who is interested in learning more about true crime. Think of it as returning to college with an adult brain and no pressure or homework or grades or expectations – just a gathering of cool friends eager to grow and learn together. I’m excited to build that community on Patreon.
Fill in the blank: You’ll love Crime Adjacent if you’re into________.
true crime as if it’s read by David Sedaris, or at least that’s what my daughter said the first time she heard my voice. I actually had to change the main character because of this, but it still cracks me up.