👏 clap clap 🏙️ cities of sin 🚪 door banger 👰 George Banks says no 🌭
🍭 👂Come to bed with Sheryl 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, March 31, 2025. In case this newsletter is too long, I couldn’t decide which show to put in my “If u only have time for 1 thing” section—this, or this—the first one made me feel the most fear I’ve felt listening to a podcast and the second is one of the most entertaining climate stories I’ve heard. I was anxious listening to this.
xoxo
lauren
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
James Kim’s fiction anthology show You Feeling This tackled love in the first season (it was so good) and is tackling horror now. The first story, “Retreat,” written by Andrew Ahn, is about two friends at their church youth group who stumble upon a cave with someone, or something, inside. They tell the thing to clap once for “yes” and twice for “no” and ask it a series of questions, and much of the story is them learning about the thing this way. The claps carry you through the story. I was so on the edge of my seat, I almost fell off. I felt the same way I do when I’m reading a great book that I never want to end—I could have followed the claps forever. Except for the large portion of terrible iHeart ads, this was 22 minutes of terror, the most scared I can remember being listening to a podcast in a very long time. But there’s more to it. These boys are figuring out something about themselves, it’s summer before college. And while they do wander in the cave for some time, something happens to one of the boys that I won’t spoil. The team has even found a way to dip into video.
notes
✨Good news for all, Pens.com fucked up my last pen order but I found the old ones so now we have two terrible designs to pass out at Podcast Movement in Chicago. If you’re going to be there find me and ask for one!
✨I’m following up with a Podcast PR 101 class, sign up here! It’s the first time I’m doing it, I have so much stuff I want to share.
✨Arielle spotlighted What’s Your Map? in EarBuds.
~sponsored~
From pit to peak, Mile 40 Podcast explores navigation techniques to overcome any obstacle: personal, professional, or on the playing field. Mile 40 is a forum to learn about how athletes, professionals, and leaders of all backgrounds stare down moments in life where the only option is to rise up. The show strives to remind listeners that the comeback is always greater than the setback!
P.S - If you’d like to see an ad for your podcast here or in Podcast Marketing Magic, fill out this form.
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
👂It’s such a shame that most climate stories are often predictable and non engaging. Why can’t climate storytelling be good? Maybe they can be. I got inspired listening to Alessandra Ram and Samantha Oltman talking about this on the first episode of their new show Sabotage. What if we could tell thrilling stories that reflect the real urgency of climate change, where climate is a character instead of an issue? This is what they’re trying to do, and I loved the first two episodes, which started appropriately with idea of climate storytelling via sabotage—getting attention—how artists will disrupt things to get media attention by throwing, say, soup on a Picasso. Because that’s what you have to do to get people to care. So what’s it really like to do this? How do you choose the painting you are going to fuck up? (This part sounds fun.) Do you practice fucking it up beforehand? (Yes!) Will you get arrested? (Probably, many times!) Why does it piss people off? (It’s so complicated!) Anyway that’s just how it starts. It quickly slips into the story of the Getty family, who made their money from oil and then built museums with that money to kind of make up for it, or to distract people from thinking too much about what they did. Alessandra and Samantha are specifically talking about J Paul Getty’s granddaughter Eileen who saw ties between her struggles with addiction and the evils of her family’s wealth. She ended up using her fortune to fund Just Stop Oil, an environmental activist group primarily focused on the issue of human-caused climate change. She’s supporting anti-oil protest that targets art in a museum with her family's name all over it. Sabotage is great storytelling beautifully made, it really sweeps you up. Listen here.
How I discovered it: I had a conversation with Alessandra and Samantha about it awhile ago and Alessandra reached out to tell me it was here.
👂A new four-episode mini-series of Landslide, “Engines of Outrage,” explores our current information divide, arguing that it’s fueling our political one. Season one was so great, in my absence Wil wrote about it as their “If u only have time for 1 thing.” It starts with a look at what media used to be like. Then it talks about what really started this information bubble (hint: it’s the internet.) Then it moves onto how to break the bubble. Finally, it considers how we can look outside the bubble, because getting back to traditional news doesn’t seem to be an option at this point. (There is also a cartoonishly evil anecdote about Facebook doing this experiment in 2020 that included a “good for the world algorithm” and a “bad for the world algorithm” and you can guess which one they chose.) So in four tiny episodes, we grow a bubble, break it, and look around and try to put together the pieces. In four tiny episodes, Ben Bradford sums up what is everywhere and everything right now, what is behind so many of my worries about the future. For example, after I finished the series I was reading about how Sesame Street is in trouble, probably because it’s competing with fucking Cocomelon. Sesame Street is educational, Cocomelon is entertaining for babies. (Mind numbing for me, I won’t let my daughter watch it for my sake or for hers, I think it brainwashes us to be less intelligent.) The Sesame Street problem is also the “we have too many options” problem that came up again and again when Ben talked about news. When we have too many options, we go with the fun one. The Cocomelon or the Joe Rogan or whatever. Truly, ever since I listened to this miniseries, the information divide seemed to be under every rock I turned over, it gave me a lot to think about. Start here.
How I discovered it: Lovely email from Ben Bradford that did not feel like a pitch letter.
👂On Glamorous Trash, the podcast about celebrity memoirs and other things, Chelsea did an episode about Lean In that I thought was really helpful, with Corporate Gossip’s Becca Platsky. Lean In has become a joke at this point but if you’re my age you can remember when we were told to read it and underline it and take it very seriously (things I didn’t do) and that if you didn’t do all that you were missing something or the wrong kind of woman. This episode is about Sheryl Sandberg but also the toxic environment of the 2010s, nailing why what Sheryl was doing was not just misinformed but evil. I want Gen Z to, if not read Lean In, listen to this episode to understand why I’m kind of fucked up (this is the advice we were getting you guys!) In a strange twist of fate, Chelsea recorded this episode at the same moment Sarah Wynn William’s Facebook whistleblower book Careless People was published (the book that absolutely nobody knew was coming.) So the following episode was like part 2 of the Lean In convo, with Becca and Traci Thomas of The Stacks. Last night my husband was like, are you going to read Careless People? And I was like no way. I don’t want to and now I don’t have to. It is a wild book but I don’t need that much of a deep dive (it’s 400 pages) and I wouldn’t want to read it alone. Sarah seems like a really unreliable narrator and I appreciated some funny commentary. The episode isn’t only mind-blowing facts from the book, it is a fascinating conversation. Chelsea, Becca, and Traci don’t agree about everything. It was cool to hear smart women sanely disagreeing about things. Things like…how much is Facebook to blame for Donald Trump? Does Zuckerberg have a soul? Is Sheryl Sandberg a lesbian who semi-sexually harasses other women at the org because she doesn’t know how to have women friends but knows she (Sheryl “Lean In” Sandberg) should and wants to lure them into her cult? Listen to those episodes here and here to find out.
How I discovered it: Longtime subscriber
👂Saved by the City is a podcast hosted by two friends, Roxy and Katelyn, who grew up in the white evangelical American heartland but ended up moving to New York City, a place bursting with sin! Their podcast is about how to maintain a sense of faith while living in a place that’s pretty secular. What they find living there is that city life strengthens their faith, and their conversations are fascinating, not at all what you might think? Or what I might have assumed, that it would be about two women trying to go to church while their friends are hungover at brunch. That would be interesting, too. But Saved by the City about how to find community in cities, what cities bring us, and what we lose and gain by living in them. The episode A New City Won't Save You offers a conversation about what happens when we become transient. On another episode, Roxy and Katelyn talk about what it would take to read the Bible with fresh eyes. I listen to a lot of Christian content from a historical standpoint, but these are the most relatable conversations I’ve heard about what it’s like to live by the book. (Not that I do—I was the hungover girl in New York, not the one in church.) For me, these conversations were nourishing. Non-insane religious conversations, wowee! Listen here.
How I discovered it: Shreya and Devin had a Podcast Therapy session with Roxy and Katelyn and told me about it because they knew I’d love it.
👂I have noted that since Ronald Young Jr. took over Pop Culture Debate Club it’s felt much more debate-like and less conversational. This struck me especially hard after listening to the last episode about Father of the Bride vs The Wedding Planner—I actually got anxious listening because I was so invested. Do I want to live in a world where Father of the Bride loses to The Wedding Planner in a debate??? For this episode Selena Coppock is repping Father of the Bride and Chelsea White is repping The Wedding Planner, and this could just be about two women remembering their favorite parts of the film (SNL’s Chris Farley Show-esque) but Ronald is business-like in outlining what he’s looking for in a winner. What would Gen Z say about this movie? How does each play into the wedding industrial complex? And when I really started thinking about those tests I started to worry about whether or not Father of the Bride should win, and what does winning really mean anyway? This is a good debate that made me, someone who has seen Father of the Bride more times than is necessary, think about it in new ways. (Like: for once we get a Dad bridezilla! And what…it’s not even a rom com at all?) I’m not spoiling who wins, I want you to feel just as anxious as I did. Oddly, I picked two episodes from the PCDC archive, this one and one on texting vs calling that ended up being a fight to the death between the same two women, so I can only conclude they are my soulmates. That was a tense one as well. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber
👂Rich-looking, traditionally beautifully white women start cults all the time on social media, so I somehow missed the story of Kat Torres, who became famous for luring people into promises of beauty, power, witchcraft and “alien baths,” which actually sound pretty creative. Things get dark here, fast. Kat ended up kidnapping a bunch of grown women and human trafficking them. Don’t Cross Kat, which I binged in a morning, tells the story, and there are a few things I like about it. First of all, the host is Brazilian journalist Choco Felitti, who first broke the story in Brazil. He does a really good job connecting the dots and making sense of the timeline. I also like that we get to hear from the woman whose friend went missing into Kat’s cult. This woman put her life on the line to find her friend! In the end, à la The Girlfriends, it was many women who came together as armchair detectives to find their missing friends. When I heard what happened to Kat, and spoiler alert, she gets caught bad, I felt physical relief. The podcast is fast and scary and strange, all building up to the moment in the end and you can calm down a little bit knowing she’s not getting away with this anymore, for now. That her victims are, maybe not OK, but free. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Advance listening via Wondery
👂Big Time is a new show about fringe characters who commit crimes, supposedly hosted by Steve Buscemi. There are only a few episodes out but from what I can tell Steve Busemi really only introduces each story, kicking it off to a reporter. For episode one, “The Homecoming Queen’s Gambit,” I cannot figure out who the reporter is. I can’t find anything online and I did not receive a press release and I gave up looking. Anyway, I liked it. True crime podcasting is America’s oldest profession and scam podcasts seem to be particularly huge right now, but a lot of the ones coming out now are about truly heavy shit. I think I just listened to three brand new ones about human trafficking. I could really use a break from those and Steve Buscemi’s scam podcast is, so far, offering that break, with well-made, fun-to-hear episodes. Episode one is about a high school scandal. On its surface it’s flashy—a mother and daughter cheated to make the daughter the homecoming queen. But deep down, and why these two got into so much trouble, is because it becomes a story about privacy. This story is fun and relatively harmless and, spoiler alert, these two do get in a ton of trouble for doing something so stupid and shitty that this really was a fun listen. It occurred to me I would listen to an entire podcast about homecoming scams or even high school scams. Episode two is about cheating competitive fishermen in Ohio, another scam story less bad than human trafficking. Listen here.
How I discovered it: I saw it on Apple Podcasts.
👂I was working in book publishing when I started listening to podcasts and when I discovered Reading Glasses, the podcast for book nerds hosted by Brea Grant and Mallory O’Meara. It was love at first sound. Now they’ve launched a new spinoff show called Reading Smut, dedicated to all books romantic, erotic, spicy. When I start thinking too much about why these books, or most books written by women, get way less than the respect that they deserve, I start to get angry. Intelligent people read these things and they should! Yes it would be easy to make fun of horny fairies. But Brea and Mallory are taking them seriously. If it’s any indication what a fun, snappy show this is the first guests were Chelsea Devantez and Jordan Morris, who talk about Unhinged by Vera Valentine and Priest by Sierra Simone respectively. When the episode with Jordan ended another show started playing in my queue and I literally, physically frowned because I missed the fun vibes. And after the Chelsea episode I thought, “why aren’t there like multiple podcasts talking about fucking doors? I have things to say, we all need to discuss!” Listen here.
How I discovered it: MaxFun press release.
👂The Dream went from a structured narrative show to an always-on show about things that suck? (I think that’s the throughline, there were incredible episodes about Anti-Abortion Uprising and private equity.) Jane Marie recently spoke to Terra Newell, whose family was the inspiration behind Dirty John, the hit documentary and podcast. It is an eye-opening conversation about how Dirty John was made, how Terra, who please remember…murdered her mom’s abuser to save her own life, was completely taken out of the story and stripped of all agency to get this JUICY piece of content to our eyes and ears. This isn’t a story about a scam artist and a murder, this is a media horror story. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Longtime listener.
👂I love you!
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Erica Rosenfeld Halverson
Erica Rosenfeld Halverson is an author, actor, the Mayor of Whoopensocker, and the host of Arts Educators Save the World. Follow the show on Instagram here.
Tell us about Arts Educators Save the World in 10 words or less.
Conversations with successful artists and their mentors about arts education.
Why did you title it, “Arts Educators Save the World”?
It’s a play on my book, How the Arts Can Save Education where I describe how arts practices should transform what good teaching and learning look like across all aspects of education.
It also reminds us that arts educators are superheroes, it is because of them that some of our most successful artists - composer and musician Lin-Manuel Miranda, actor Bradley Whitford, ceramicist Sharif Bey, comedian Cecily Strong - are who they are. We hear time and again on the show that it is the educators who made these artists’ lives possible.
Why did you make it? Why did you make it now?
I have spent the past 20 years as a professor and I have found that my research about the profound impact arts education has on peoples’ lives was not making its way into the public discourse. And a huge problem with that is that the arts continue to be underfunded and forgotten in education, because no one is advocating loudly enough for the transformative benefits of arts for everyone.
I have been lucky enough in my life as an artist and an educator to interact with hundreds of artists from across all art forms who recognize the huge role their mentors have played in their success. And so I thought I could bring my expertise in talking about the power of arts education to conversations with these artists in a way that could excite and activate our communities.
What is the most rewarding aspect of creating this show?
So many things! Two best parts: First, getting to hear from artists who do work that is unfamiliar to me - glass blowing, culinary arts, choreography - and hearing about how they learned to do their work and which aspects of their art form are most inspiring to them.
Second, I LOVE being the person who reconnects an artist with their mentor. For so many, this is the first time these pairs have talked in many years and seeing their pride in one another is magical! We’ve had quite a few off-air tears as people like Jonathan Groff and Cody Renard Richards were reunited with their teachers.
What do you see as the role of arts education / mentorship today? How can arts educators save the world?
Arts education is the most important aspect of our education system today. Giving young people the opportunity to make art (in whatever form) allows them to express themselves, to use their expertise, to collaborate with others, and to develop a positive sense of identity through work that they make. Arts educators are the key to making this happen and we have heard on the show time and again that this process is life saving for so many.
How does arts education intersect with the political divisiveness we see today?
See above! We need arts education more than ever!
❤️ Podcast Tink Loves ❤️
The time for hol+ by Dr. Taz is now. From Make America Healthy Again to a global call for change and a resounding desire for a new healing experience, hol+ premiers as the home for science, medicine, all things health, and its influence on the human experience. Veteran TV personality and double board certified physician, Dr. Taz MD hosts, hol+, a brand new podcast show launching on the heels of her successful 8-year-long podcast, Super Woman Wellness, boasting over 1 million downloads. Bringing health, medicine, and wellness together, hol+ provides viewers and listeners an opportunity to lean into the wisdom, experience, and healing journeys of esteemed researchers and scientists, well-known celebrities, everyday humans, and kick-ass clinicians doing the WORK to get people better.
Try this episode: How Ovaries Influence More Than Just Reproduction