🐈 Cat fight ⚰️ crystal Goofys 🏰 the Ouiji board effect 🔮 heaven will be mine 🎮
🍭 👂This isn't just a friend of mine he's the love of my life 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, March 10, 2025. My next Disney Cruise is in 11 days. If you want me to send you a postcard fill out this form. If this newsletter is too long, this is exactly the kind of short documentary I’ve been craving, I felt like this was made just for me…for me only, and this ending delivered.
xoxo
lauren
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Nichole Hill
Nichole Hill is an award-winning audio showrunner, producer and creator of the independent shows Our Ancestors Were Messy, a 2024 Official Tribeca Audio Selection, and The Secret Adventures of Black People. Her other work includes showrunning for Tonya Mosley’s She Has a Name, I Am America with Tracee Ellis Ross, and Vox's Land of the Giants: Dating Games season, and The Qube and PRX's Second Sunday. She lives in LA, is from VA, and reps DC all day!
Read 5 podcast recommendations from Nichole here.
Describe Our Ancestors Were Messy in 10 words or less.
Stories about our ancestors and all their drama!
If you like ________ you will like Our Ancestors Were Messy.
Drunk History
How’d you get the idea?
I grew up loving Old Hollywood films from the 1920s-50s. On rare occasions I would see a Black person in these movies, and I always wondered what their lives were like back home in their all-Black communities. Then in 2020 I stumbled across the Library of Congress’ digital archive of tens of thousands of Black newspapers documenting day to day life in segregated Black communities.
I started reading and found the news…but with Black people in it! I found singles ads, poetry, society happenings, op eds, film reviews, short fiction, and gossip. I learned that during this period my ancestors were arguing with their formerly enslaved parents about their taste in music and fashion and careers. They were leveraging technological advancements to find love. They were crossing continents in search of opportunities to make their dreams come true. They were deploying every strategy they could think of to beat Jim Crow and all while gossiping, hooking up, hanging out, and being messy.
I got really excited about the idea of being able to highlight both sides of the ancestors and so, I made this show where I introduce a guest to the gossip, scandals, and pop culture that made headlines in historical Black newspapers across segregated communities in America.
How do you find the stories?
Once I found the papers five years ago, I started reading them for fun. There were some names and headlines that appeared a lot so I could tell they were big deals. Whenever I noticed something like that, I added them to a spreadsheet for further research.
And then what is your research process?
Eventually there were 100+ names and events on that spreadsheet, so I asked Siona Petreous to do some initial research and help me zero in on a few people and themes for the first season. Then Chioke I’Anson helped me dig into the archives in a really strategic way and find information that allowed me to paint a picture of the ancestors’ day to day lives.
I was surprised how much I learned in the first episode. Was the intent to educate people first and then you were like, “wait this is entertaining as hell” or was it the other way around?
I want everyone listening to have as much empathy for the people I cover as possible. So, I tried to find out as much as I could about the context the ancestors were living in and how that contributed to their actions. That background became the “educational asides” that happen in each episode. My hope is that by the time I tell the listener about the mess, they know enough about the ancestors’ world to be entertained but not overly judgmental.
What do we have in common with our ancestors other than messiness.
Our desire to redefine the meaning of community, identity, art, culture, and resistance. Our ancestors were successful on a scale that was unimaginable at that time, so it gives me a lot of hope for us today.
Can you tell us about your ancestors, anything you can share?
I can’t trace my ancestors too far back because no one in my family has felt up to facing the slavery parts of our history but I’ll tell you a story we all love. My Grandpa came from a family of coal miners in West Virginia, but he was determined to do something else; so in the 50s he decided to move to Auburn, Maine and work in the shoe manufacturing plants. My Nana was born in Athens, Georgia, and her mother was determined to get her out of the Deep South; so in the 50s she promised my Nana’s hand in marriage to a Bishop starting a church near Auburn, Maine. My Nana and the Bishop made the drive from Georgia to Maine, and stopped in West Virginia to pick up my Grandpa. My Nana said she saw the back of his head and knew he was the one. My Grandpa said he saw her hula hooping and that’s how he knew (lol!). They ended up married and running that church near Auburn which is where my mom grew up and where I spent most of my summers as a kid. I knew the Bishop my Nana was supposed to marry as my Uncle Bishop, whom my grandparents adored. I didn’t find out he wasn’t our blood relation until I was an adult.
Can you tell us about the sound? It is so perfect. How do you know how much to add, not too much, and how do you decide which sounds are perfect to fit in with the vibe and tone?
I worked with Jonathan Mitchell and a ton of incredible audio fiction writers on The Truth podcast and I learned to write audio screenplays with them which is how the scripts for this show are written. I wrote cues with my favorite Old Hollywood films in mind. Then I handed everything over to one of four sound designers. I wanted to work with different people because I wanted to hear how they would interpret the story. John DeLore sound designed my pilot episode and created an amazing template that everyone else adapted to fit their style. It's SO fun and I feel really lucky to get to work with these people whose work I’ve admired for so long. Episode 1 featured the brilliance and hilarity of Helena de Groot who had lots of incredible ideas about tone and had her own interpretation of the cues and how to bring different scenes to life.
How are you feeling about the podcast industry right now? I know it’s rough out there, are you still excited about stuff? And like what are you excited about?
I am excited by independents banding together to encourage one another, and collaborate, and promote each other’s work. It’s allowing for more of the unusual and the experimental in audio again, which I have missed!
Who is your favorite person in audio and why?
One of my faves is Van Newkirk II because his curiosity is so unique. I listen to Floodlines whenever I’m stuck creatively.
What’s a podcast you love that everyone already knows about?
Radiotopia Presents: Shithole Country
What’s a podcast you love that not enough people know about?
Run, Fool is appointment listening for me
What’s your favorite way to grow a podcast?
Feed drops are a love fest so I enjoy those but my all time favorite way is to create a list of orgs that I think my audience might be part of and then send a message to those orgs about my work and ask them to share. Whenever people message me and tell me they found my shows that way, I feel like a matchmaker!
Is there anything I didn’t ask you about that you wanna say?
Just that I wish there was a Letterbox’d review app for podcasts. I need a better way to track my listening and opinions, and I REALLY want to know what everyone else is listening to as well.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
On Wednesday we were gifted a tiny shrimp-smelling treat, The Final Days of Sgt. Tibbs, delivered in four short podcast episodes about Sgt. Tibbs, a geriatric cat who went missing and then died and caused a huge blow up in the Manchester, New Hampshire community he left behind. Rose, Sgt. Tibbs’ person, was devastated when Tibbs went missing, and infuriated to learn that he might not have gone missing at all. He was in the hands of Rose’s neighbor, mother/daughter duo Debbie and Sabrina, who claim to have saved Tibbs. But we all know Tibbs died. So what happened? Todd Bookman is putting a microscope to Tibbs’ last days, and what he finds is the kind of juicy story I like to read about on Reddit. Unfortunately this one has a very sad ending, but this piece was so beautifully made that it’s almost like Tibbs is getting the sendoff he deserves. The juicy part is about adults behaving badly. The war between Rose vs. Debbie and Sabrina gets nasty. There are protests, a restraining order, a cat mom who feels her baby was murdered. Then there is how race figures into all of this. Tibbs is exactly the kind of documentary I’ve been craving—something so well done when it comes to craft yet about something that might have slipped through the cracks. Todd is handling this with the delicacy and seriousness of a detective on a missing white woman case. Spoiler alert: we don’t really find out what happened to Tibbs. Maybe an old cat just died and this podcast just adds up to a record of sadness. At one point Todd wonders if there are better things he could be doing with a microphone. “But imagine something more important than something you love disappearing and dying. It seems worth every second trying to figure out what happened.” Pet lovers will get it. RIP, Tibbs.
notes
✨Thank you to Castbox for featuring Podcast the Newsletter picks in their app for Women’s History Month! Discover them in the Castbox app and let me know what you think.
✨Sign up for my March 26 Marketing 101 Radio Bootcamp here. I’m switching up the format a bit to be more individualized for all who attend!
✨I’m speaking at Podcast Movement Evolutions with Arielle Nissenblatt next month and am so excited. Come find us!
✨Arielle spotlighted Motorfest in EarBuds.
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
🎙️Sentimental Garbage is about to take a break but before that, Elizabeth gave us an episode that feels like it was made just for me, an episode with Sarah Griffin called but is actually really about the magic of Disney theme parks. The two report back from their trip to Disneyland Paris. Elizabeth admits that if she was a Sentimental Garbage listener, this might be the one she’d skip. Sarah admits she was nervous to bring Elizabeth to a place she loves! I feel that. I don’t like to bring people to my home base. It’s stressful. Sarah was five months pregnant for this trip and that is important to know because a) Elizabeth was gifted a “Thumper band,” a wristband with the Bambi bunny on it, that allowed her to skip every single line with up to three other people, even though as a pregnant women she could not go on a majority of the rides. So instead of noticing the roller coasters, Elizabeth was noticing everything else, the tiny details that make Disneyland Paris feel like a small European town. What an accidentally genius move to make someone appreciate Disneyland as an art form! Elizabeth describes this moment of touching some wallpaper in Disneyland, which we can all agree is a fake, fake place. The wallpaper was the proper, raised velvet kind, and it was more real than the kind of wallpaper most of us experience in our real lives. Looking at the detail she started to think about this trippy inversion of what’s real and what’s fake. I don’t even think she was on drugs! They also talk about what a technical feat it is to make things seem bigger than they are. I thought it was interesting they used The Pirates of the Caribbean as an example to explain this. It was when I was on that ride in 1989 that I discovered Disney magic. I said to my dad after the ride, “how did they get the ocean into that room?” Elizabeth shared a special moment of her own, having accidentally seen Space Mountain with all the lights on and realizing that you can see what this shit is made of (it’s all fake) and still enjoy it. She says something I want written on my tombstone: “I know that all of this is the great corporate fable of one American man, but let me take my hands off the bars.” Let me go fast and play. Many of these Disney experiences end up being part of my own origin story, I find so much meaning behind tiny Disney memories I’ve created with my mom and hope to create with my daughter. I wrote more notes about this episode than I have about anything, ever? What a way to go out this season, Elizabeth. BTW I am trying to get a hold of her because I cannot, I want to interview her. Let me know if anyone can help! Listen here.
How I discovered it: Longtime subscriber.
🎙️With all this talk about video podcasts, I have been thinking a lot about Radio Atlas, a podcast that is home to beautiful audio documentaries from all over the world in the languages they were intended to be heard. They’re subtitled for English listeners, so English speakers much watch it. For many it was video before video was cool. The episode Coming Out tells the story of Vitalius and Albinas, a same-sex couple in Lithuania who had to pretend they were father and son to side step laws under Soviet rule that made homosexuality illegal until 1993. (It’s legal now but not recognized.) The episode is their coming out. It won the Prix Europa European Audio Documentary prize in 2024 but more importantly it reopened a public debate on human rights. Activists organized a symbolic humanist wedding ceremony for Vitalius and Albinas, it was the first time the two held hand in public. Twenty-one thousand people signed the certificate as witnesses (you have to see this picture,) which you can now view at the national museum. This is obviously an important story, and Radio Atlas forces you to listen in a way you are not used to. My eyes were glued to my little phone screen and I was taking the story in like a Sanderson sister sucking the life force out of a child? (I think that is what I looked like and if you understand that reference god bless.) This is a very tender episode. Vitalius and Albinas explain the cosmic loneliness they felt for years before they found each other and how it is nearly impossible to get used to being together in public more than fifty years later. All for this thing Lithuania considered a disease and a crime. I’m so glad this story was captured. People younger than Vitalius and Albinas might not know their story could be possible. People older than them might not be with us anymore. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber and frequent listener but Nick Quah’s write up encouraged me to press play and not pass go.
🎙️Phonograph is one of those shows that I love so much and also, at the same time, comes out so rarely, that I end up writing about every single episode and I am aware of this. This one was special because, well not just because I got a shoutout from the guest, but because the guest was one of my favorite people in the biz Samantha Hodder, who writes one of my favorite newsletters, Bingeworthy, and the topic was one of my favorite podcasts of 2024, Cement City. (It was one of Samantha’s favorites, too. Read her excellent review here if you have not.) I work in audio but I kind of I do everything but make podcasts, so sometimes I can’t pinpoint exactly why I love something I love. And I loved Cement City. Rob and Samantha explain it, starting out in the perfect place, Cement City’s cold open, which totally and completely works for this show. (They point out why it does not work always.) They also point out tiny things down to subtle brushes of the microphone that make this piece feel up-close and homemade, why Jeanne Marie Laskas is such an unusual and excellent host. And if you’re wondering…how is it possible to send a woman to buy a house in a city and pay her to report on it from there? They get into that, too. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Originally Rob DMed me on Twitter
🎙️Hollywood Gold is the most underrated movie podcast and is one of the best movie podcasts, this is coming from a non-movie buff and someone who doesn’t really like interview shows. Daniela Taplin Lundberg (founder of Stay Gold Features, a woman-run production company) interviews people in the business but she is a great host. She deserves a best host award somewhere. For every moment of this show it’s clear Daniela’s questions are coming from a place of real interest and curiosity. She’s asking to help us understand how movies are made. That sounds so simple but it’s hard to do and not enough hosts do it. She’s asking for us, yet the interviews are so conversational it’s like we aren’t there, it’s like we are eavesdropping. These questions are not canned, I doubt they are even planned out too much. Conversations seem to have a life of their own. She interviewed producer Alex Coco of Anora, which was one of my favorite films of the year, and apparently The Academy’s. I think people were excited about this win because Anora is an independent film, made for $6 million and on location in NYC with about 40 crew members. Wicked was made for $150 million. In this conversation, we get to hear exactly what that looks like, and it’s even scrappier than I thought. Alex gets into what makes Sean Baker’s editing process so different and his oeuvre, which includes Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, and what ties these films together—they’re universal stories about unique people who have never had these stories told about them, told in a unique way. There is a lot of overlap in film and audio, I have noticed some of my favorite audio people follow Hollywood closely. If you are one of those people Hollywood Gold is the one to follow. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Via Heidi Vanderlee of Positive Jam PR
🎙️I have been on a long apology tour for my late 2024 recommendation of The Telepathy Tapes, the podcast that argued non-verbal autistic children are telepathic, an argument that I have since learned can be obviously and easily debunked. I swear to god I was just at On Air Fest and it was like I was playing Whack-a-Mole. People, smart people whom I like, would come up to me and say “have you listened?” and cover my face with my hands and wail in complete despair. I have never received so many responses from that apology newsletter I published last month. Some people said “I was shocked you recommended it in the first place!” Some people said “wow thanks for apologizing.” Some people said “I don’t care I still want to believe.” Smart people, I tell you! I haven’t really been able to explain to those ones why this is so so fucked up. So I’m grateful for the Radio Atlantic episode where Hanna Rosin interviewed Dan Engber, a senior editor on The Atlantic’s science desk, and someone who knows a lot about facilitated communication about a decade ago. Dan is able to put into easy-to-understand words how we, or at least I, fell for this. It’s basically a byproduct of the Ouiji board effect. Dan says, “If you’re facilitating me, and the messages that are coming out are actually you subconsciously writing those messages yourself, at some point, you might think, Hey. Wait a second. Dan just spelled something that was in my head, right?” Even knowing a Ouija board is a toy, it still works. The thing is, it’s not lying, it’s not manipulation from the facilitators and spellers. Ky Dickens, the host of The Telepathy Tapes, is probably not lying. What’s happening here is some form of communion, love, wish for connection, intimacy, and hope. And once you go through the portal, anything can happen. Listen here. BTW Samantha, who I talk about above, just did a VERY good deep dive into what she, and I, (and maybe you) got so wrong about The Telepathy Tapes. Read that here.
How I discovered it: Lauren Ober emailed me about it.
🎙️There was a lot of talk about how exciting and crazy Kaitlin’s Baby was, and a lot of talk about how it fell totally flat. (A lot of people, like me, thought they missed something?) Meanwhile, chugging along right beside it, was a juicy crazy story with beautiful production and so much hard, and it fucking delivered. The latest season of Nobody Should Believe Me, Andrea investigated the case of Sophie Hartman who was accused of medical child abuse in 2021. Sophie’s story is plagued with odd things, and when Andrea adds them up it pins the story of some horrifying stuff. For the last episode one of Sophie’s friends actually came forward for an interview with Andrea. It’s a woman who discovered Sophie’s series of Nobody Should Believe Me on her own and wanted to hate it, but admits that listening to it unraveled her world. Hearing her perspective of Andrea’s story was fascinating and it validates the work that Andrea and her team are doing. They’re not just doing all this fucking hard gross work to give us something entertaining to binge. Start here.
How I discovered it: I have been listening to this show since day one.
🎙️Sea of Lies started out strong and my heart really never stopped racing listening to it. Sam Mullins (Wild Boys) tells the story of one of the most wanted men in the world, Albert Walker, who gets caught for fraud when a dead body wearing a recognizable watch washes ashore. (It’s a great start to a show.) is a great host, but he didn’t report it, so the story doesn't feel as close-up as it does with Wild Boys. But it’s barely noticeable. I was trying to figure out why it’s so good, there are lots of shows about stuff like this, but aha it’s the story structure and shape. The story will keep your brain on its toes (ew?) because nothing goes as you think it will. Characters are introduced and you aren’t quite sure why they are going to be important and when you DO figure out why they’re there it’s this rewarding punch in the gut (ow?) I’m being so cryptic, there are so many things I want to say. Just listen to it here.
How I discovered it: Heard it on a promo for another CBC show.
🎙️On TransLash, Imara Jones spent some time looking into the power of trans expression and representation in video games, it’s is a conversation about how trans developers and gamers are reshaping the (very queer, welcoming, communal, joyful, fun) industry but also why it is important. For trans people gaming has always been an important part of trans identity, figuring out that trans identity, and connecting with other trans people. Journalist Willa Rowe talks about playing World of Warcraft and other multiplayer games that allow them to live as they feel they are inside and present themselves to other people in the way they want to be perceived. It allows them to have the kind of social interaction that they deserve. Imara and Willa go through the last 25 years of gaming, how things got super trans in 2020 and surged and might be ebbing with the resurgence of gamer gate culture and right wing conservatism going more mainstream. This episode made me think about video games in an entirely new way. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Long time listener.
🎙️There is something that feels really good about singing in a crowd. I associate it with church, my husband associates it with Arsenal games, you might associate it with a Taylor Swift concert, my friend Aakshi is in a choir. For Outside/In Justine Paradise did a piece on singing together that puts science and logic to a feeling that feels so magical, a feeling you could argue is in us all. But why? Tracing the evolutionary history of group singing is hard. (What came first, singing or speech?) But the episode gets a concept in sociology called an “interaction ritual,” which is like a good conversation on steroids, a deeper connection than a regular conversation. And singing does that in a way speaking does not. We might not know what came first, singing or speech, but we do know that we sing because we are social and we are social because we sing. Singing trains us to belong and is a way of participating in something that is bigger than us. Losing yourself in a sea of voices is vulnerable, it’s like putting down your sword. It makes me want to force everyone to find some way to do it. (Go to church, you guys! Just kidding!) Justine goes all the way back to our ancestors and all the way up to people singing Sweet Caroline to examine the powerful tool that is our voice. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Long time listener.
🎙️I love you!
SO much love in here Lauren ; )