📬 Dear Peter Parker 🕷️ talking to boys on flip phones 📞 celebrating midness 👟 Black princesses 👸🏾 findom 💸
🍭 👂 TRUST ME! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, June 5. In case this newsletter is too long, this was one of the best first episodes of something I’ve heard in a long time, the last few minutes of this shook me, and this had me laughing and crying at the same time.
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xoxo lp
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Ashley Hamer
Ashley Hamer is the creator/host of Taboo Science and former co-creator/co-host of Curiosity Daily. Follow Ashley on Twitter here. Follow Taboo Science on Twitter here.
Describe Taboo Science in ten words or less.
The podcast that answers questions you’re not allowed to ask.
What made you come up with the show?
I used to write for a now-defunct science website called Curiosity.com, which we eventually spun out into a daily podcast called Curiosity Daily. The site and podcast were super family friendly and stayed away from controversial, dark, or sexy topics, but I noticed that whenever we made an exception, those stories were always the most popular (Curing the hiccups with your butt was an all-timer). On top of that, I was kind of tired of keeping everything lighthearted all the time and wanted to get into some more taboo stuff. Plus, I was in charge of content and scriptwriting for our podcast and wanted to get some experience in audio editing and sound design, so the idea of creating a narrative podcast all on my own really interested me.
How is it different from other science shows?
Other science shows tend to either cover science as a whole or specialize by field — astronomy, psychology, etc. The approach of only covering the science you shouldn’t talk about in polite company is a unique one.
If people haven’t listened to Taboo Science, where should they start?
There’s no right answer – start with the topic that most intrigues you! That said, the cannibalism episode is one of my favorites.
What can we look forward to in the new season?
I’ve got episodes about nudity, poop, makeup, heterosexuality…I recently had a baby so I’m particularly excited about the breastfeeding episode; turns out that the science of lactation is incredibly fascinating. Did you know lactation is older than the dinosaurs? Who knew?
Can you give us a fun fact of something you’ve learned?
The fact from the show I most often share at parties is that the people who most frequently practice cannibalism in the modern day are wealthy married white women. Because many eat their placentas.
What has making this show taught you about the world?
We think the things we sweep under the rug are the things we understand and have judged to be inappropriate. But in reality, they’re the things we understand the least. When you don’t talk about something, you don’t get a chance to understand it.
Fill in the blank: You will like Taboo Science if you like ______.
Searching Wikipedia in incognito mode.
Are there too many podcasts?
Ugh, NO. There are more new books published every year than there are new podcasts, and the average book from a publisher can expect to sell just 3,000 copies in its lifetime. If you’re getting more than 250 downloads a month, you’ll do better than that in a year. And yet there’s no hand-wringing over how many books there are. We’re in an era of hyper-individualized content and there’s enough audience to go around.
Are there any rules you think all podcasts should adhere to?
Search your show’s name in a podcast app before you make your first episode. So obvious, so often overlooked!
What’s a podcast you love that everyone already loves?
Everything Is Alive used to be my “not enough people know about” podcast, but at this point I think the secret’s out. I’m SUCH a fan of Ian Chillag; his shows are responsible for the majority of my awkward “laugh out loud in front of strangers” podcast listening moments. We used to live in the same neighborhood in Chicago and would wave at each other on runs, no big deal, I’m tired of talking about it, PLEASE stop asking me.
What’s a podcast you love that not enough people know about?
Science, Quickly from Scientific American is a perfect bite-sized science lesson in audio form – less than 10 minutes on one topic, three times a week. Its previous incarnation, 60-Second Science, was one of the inspirations for Curiosity Daily, and I’m still a fan to this day.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
The Fighty Pucks has a great name but an even better first episode. It starts with a brief background of AJ Galante, a hockey fanatic whose father bought him a minor-league hockey team called The Danbury Trashers when AJ was seventeen after an injury had him permanently benched. The players weren’t just bad boys because of all the violations, AJ’s dad had ties to the mob and the team was under FBI surveillance. This show starts out with Mighty Ducks nostalgia, great writing (loved the detail about how people can follow hockey by only hearing it,) a strong sense of humor, memorable characters, and it sets the table for a story almost too ridiculous to be true. If you want to listen to an incredible show, start here. Also check it out if you want to see how a great first episode is done.
hell yeah
✨ Read More to metadata than meets the eye (Podcast Marketing Magic)
✨Read 12 of the Best Queer Podcasts to Listen to During Pride (Lifehacker)
✨Read The dos and don'ts of podcast trailers (Descript)
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Black People Love Paramore in her newsletter and podcast.
✨Thank you to Buzzcast for mentioning my Apple Podcasts Rating-a-Day challenge. To answer your question, guys: I do listen to everything I review! Including your show. I love it! Listen to Buzzcast here.
💎BTW💎
🎙️On the eighth season of Slow Burn, Joel Anderson is taking us to where Clarence Thomas came from, literally, in the first episode, to talk to his mother in the house where he grew up (the one that is now owned by Republican billionaire megadonor Harlan Crow) to show who Clarence Thomas really is, and how he rose to power. Joel Anderson covers Thomas’ surprising beginnings as an almost-priest and a campus radical. Slow Burn is the podcast that’s so good I’d send it to people who say they hate podcasts. Every season has stuck with me. Listen here.
🎙️Undiscarded, the podcast spins objects of New York into beautiful human stories about the city, has an adorable episode about Spider Man, or more appropriately, Peter Parker. Somewhere in the history of the comic books, fans discovered a mailing address for Mr. Parker in Forest Hills, Queens, and started sending letters there. Lots of them were little kids who want to be like Spider Man, had questions for Spider Man, wanted to share stories with Spider Man. Oddly, the family that lived in the home had the last name Parker. (Coincidence, Mr. Stan Lee?) On Letters to a Hero, Pamela Parker (no relation to Peter) has kids read some of the letters and tells a story of the intersection between fandom and real life. Listen here.
🎙️Borrowed is the podcast for the Brooklyn library that presents stories that start there but go beyond, proving that a public libraries can be the heartbeat of our community. Stories feels so specifically local and broadly universal at the same time. The episode The Teens Are Offline lets us eavesdrop into the Luddite Club, a group of Brooklyn teenagers who come together every week out of a shared sense that social media and smart phones just aren't working for them. It’s adorable that they’ve found each other for a meeting that feels a bit like AA if you replace alcohol with smart phones. The meetings are about the wonderful lives they have without smart phones and what to do when an opportunity to use them creeps up. From my old lady POV their retro flip phones make them seem like the coolest kids on the block. (If they knew I thought they were cool they would probably want to die and revert to using smart phones again?) Hello, fellow teenagers. Listen here.
🎙️On Rumble Strip, Erica Heilman invited people who were both on the right and wrong side of guns to have personal conversations about them and what it’s like to have the presence of guns all around us. The piece was made with Brave Little State, a podcast of Vermont Public, which invites listeners to create story ideas and then vote on them. If you don’t know Erica’s work, go directly to her work, don’t pass go. (I recommend Finn and the Bell, which is also about guns.) Erica’s interviews don’t feel like interviews. Sometimes you forget she is there, but she has full control of the conversation, jumping in with the perfect kind of questions that get people to completely open up. For this episode, she talks to Vermont hunters and victims of gun violence, and someone who tried pulled a gun on himself. Stay for the end, when he seems lost in a feeling, having lost both his sense of smell and taste because of his failed suicide attempt, of appreciation for watching the snow fall outside his window. It’s a moment that’s both quiet and explosive. Listen here.
🎙️Logged On, Dazed’s podcast about all things internet culture, is back for a new season and despite the fact that it isn’t available on Pocket Casts, I listened and that should tell you something. I also took so many frantic notes with many !!!!!!s listening to the first episode of the new season, which is all about The Mid (basic bitch culture, sort of) and coolness. Writer Shumon Basar joins to talk about good taste, bad taste, cringe taste, base taste, and mid taste, “smoopid” (smart and stupid) and “stewart” (stupid and smart) things, and questions if it’s even possible to be cool anymore. The internet, which has completely flattened culture (If Books Could Kill just hilariously reviewed Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat,) is to blame, and has shifted the world to be a place that used to have only one village idiot, but now the idiots are all over the place. I particularly loved the part of the conversation about norm core, a cultural inside joke that leaves us wondering if we are celebrating or denunciating midness. If you’re wearing norm core, are you the butt of the joke or are you telling it, and who’s to say? In case you’re confused about mid (you won’t be if you listen,) cool is like the lightning and mid is the thunder. We all want to be there when lightning strikes. The internet might be making us too numb to know anymore, and that’s all before we introduce the idea of AI. I think I tried to be cool for a month in 1998, so I felt like an anthropologist listening to this conversation which was far more interesting than I’d anticipated. Not sure I’ve heard anything quite like it before. Listen here.
🎙️Dementia is a cruel disease that must be excruciating for everyone close with the person afflicted. I can’t imagine my mom, my best friend, not remembering me or turning into a person I did not recognize. Comedian Gavin Crawford is sharing his own experience of his mother Donna’s diagnosis on Let’s Not Be Kidding, a personal memoir that feels more like a tribute to his mom and their relationship than a eulogy of the person she once was, or a documentary on how hard it is to deal with this shit. He brings on siblings to remember the things that made her different than everyone else and shares small details that help us understand her big personality. I have strong visuals of Donna throughout her life, and now, shuffling her walker around. You have to reframe this kind of thing as funny, because it’s too painful not to. Gavin loves video games and compares Let’s Not Be Kidding to the walkthrough of a game, letting people see what it’s like so they can be prepared to do it themselves, should they have to. This show goes from funny to sad and back to funny again so fast, and is a sweet portrait of the pain that comes with loving someone you feel like you’re losing. Listen here.
🎙️The Dig Presents has a story about Jim Jones and The People’s Temple, focusing on something that often goes undiscussed—the Black women who made up the community. Nearly fifty percent of those who died were Black women and the church was at least 75% Black. It’s easy to see why Black people, who were disillusioned by a Civil Rights movement that failed them, were looking for a place to exist and raise their children in peace. And before the now infamous murder-suicide that took place on November 18, 1978, where over nine hundred members of the Peoples Temple church (including over three hundred children) died in the Jonestown, Guyana jungle settlement, a peaceful utopia was what The People’s Temple was known for. Today, we think of The People’s Temple as a cult, but it was really the visions of strong, socialist-minded Black women who congregated with the Nation of Islam and marched with Black Panthers. This episode looks at Jonestown with fresh eyes, ignoring the massacre, which is the must gruesome but eye-catching part of the story. I guess we were wrong about Jonestown. (Yes, there’s a You’re Wrong About about that, but it’s more focused on Jim Jones and how he wasn’t a total monster and things might not have ended so badly if he weren’t on a shitload of amphetamemes.) Listen to The Dig Presents here.
🎙️ Other Men Need Help had such a nice story that featured one of my favorite people in the universe, Zak Rosen of The Best Advice Show, who stumbled upon a photo of himself as a teen attending a dance school, which was a requirement for him and his friends before his bar mitzvah. He reflects on what it felt like to have to dance with girls at that awkward age, but also calls his old friends to see what they remembered. This episode also includes an interview with two teens who attended the same dance class years after Zak, plus an update with them as bearded 19-year-olds, one who had come out as gay. You could play this episode on loop and listen for something new each time: awkward teenage adorableness, male friendship, the memories of Zak and his friends juxtaposed with those of the younger kids he interviewed, the point of this whole ritual in the first place, and what it actually accomplishes. Listen here.
🎙️Readers of this newsletter know I am here for the blue balls content, which historically has been pretty limited. (Though this is the second week in a row they’ve been mentioned.) One of the only/best episodes I could find was a 2021 episode of Science Vs. about them. As a result of that episode, the show joined forces with sexual health researchers at Queen’s University in Canada to publish a study in Sexual Medicine, marking it the largest blue balls survey in a peer-reviewed journal. Wendy Zukerman is a co-author, and on the show she brought Sarah Marshall on to distill the new information. Listen here.
🎙️On The Afternoon Special, Bobbi Miller spent a month talking about Disney Princesses, from how they saved the Disney company to their “I want” and “I am” songs. All together, it’s a great look at who these women are in our culture and what they reflect about us and the time in which they were created. At one point Bobbi mentions that Kiera Knightley had banned her daughter from watching Cinderella, which made me laugh out loud and fact-check it immediately. It’s true. Can you hear me rolling my eyes? But I really appreciated Bobbi’s perspective and listened intently to the entire series. Start it here.
🎙️Over on Into It, Sam Sanders also had a great conversation with Dr. Aria Halliday, who studies cultural constructions of Black girlhood and womanhood at The University of Kentucky, about the new Little Mermaid and Disney’s other Black princesses. See, Kiara? We can have smart conversations about princesses. Listen here.
🎙️This is Uncomfortable is about money but really it’s about the human experience, and what financial ramifications the human experience offers. A recent episode was about Matt, a guy who got went into debt due to financial submission, also known as findom, a fetish lifestyle activity in which a submissive is required to give gifts or money to a dominant, usually a woman. Matt gets incredibly vulnerable, working through his own shame with us, and the reporter brings us to a dungeon to meet Hadrian Temple, a findom who helps some of his finsubs save money. This episode made me both sad and hopeful about people. We are all so interesting and dealing with so many nuanced pains and emotions. This Is Uncomfortable is about that, getting comfortable with uncomfy things, and makes money so much more interesting than I ever thought it could be. Listen here.
🎙️I finished Devil in the Ditch, a true-crime show that went to surprising places. New York-based writer Larrison Campbell returned to the southern town where she grew up to try to find out who murdered her grandmother. But it’s not really true-crime, it’s a memoir of a girl who goes home to find her grandma, and small town, and how family deals with something nuts, like having a matriarch maybe-killed by her nephew. Larrison doesn’t come down and shake the community members by the shoulders, demanding answers. She listens and lets us observe with her. She’s showing us the town, which allows a lot of the mystery of this case reveal itself, and letting us come to our own conclusions. I would call this a memoir-style podcast that lets us feel for ourselves what it’s like to be in this twisted situation. Listen here.
🎙️WILD is the fictionalized memoir of Erick Galindo’s crazy quest to find love and it feels like nothing else. Erick is telling his tale to his friend Megan, who is also a real person but also a character on the show. He describes what happened, we hear audio segments from the trip, and Megan chimes in with the kind of things we would say if Erick was our friend sharing his story at a diner. There it is, that’s what this show feels like. Eavesdropping on animated, engaging, interactive storytelling between two friends. Erick inserts details that make everything feel real (this is something I think Normal Gossip does well) and some of the scenarios are so oddly specific yet will feel familiar to you. Because love is like that, WILD. Listen here.
🎙️Journalist Richard Guilliatt is investigating one of the most confusing child abuse cases in Shadow of a Doubt, a podcast that showcases five year investigation into a family ripped to shreds by one daughter’s accusations of horrendous and unproven sexual abuse. Emily’s father is now confined to a maximum security cell and faces the prospect of dying in jail—he’ll be there for 48 years, a record in Australia. The allegations are the worst you could possibly imagine—Emily claims to have been repeatedly raped, beaten, nearly drowned, violated with tools and imprisoned naked in a shed by her relentless cruel father, who was aided and abetted by his wife. If they’re true, this is the worst story I’ve ever heard. And if, as many people believe, the Emily is suffering from dissociative disorder and creating false memories, this is also the worst story I’ve ever heard. Shadow of a Doubt is a collision of memory, therapy, trauma and conflicting ‘truths’ that lead to questions we’ll probably never know the answers to, and a finale in which nobody wins. Emily’s father is either a monster or a victim. Something is wrong with Emily, but we don’t know if her dad is to blame, or should be in jail. Everyone will come to their own conclusions, I’m stealing from Richard when I say this was a family made up of combustible elements, and something that happened to Emily lit the fuse. Listen here.
🎙️If you’ve made it this far in this newsletter, subscribing to How Does Tomorrow Sound? is a no-brainer. It’s a really beautifully made show that mixes interviews with experiments and brainstorm sessions with the hosts who wonder aloud what podcasts will look and sound like (and smell like?) in ten years. I loved the first season and was delighted to see a new episode drop, this one exploring one of the questions I get asked about the most in Podcast Therapy: to video or not video? How does video aid in podcasting, and how does it take away? One of the many segments is a visual rhetorical analysis of Queen’s 1985 Live Aid concert that proves how video requires additional visual communication skills. What was Freddie Mercury telling people with his bicep band? Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
[From January 24, 2020] Thanks to Ma’ayan’s recommendation in this week’s Bello Collective newsletter, I discovered The Intersection, a podcast that “tells a multi-layered story about a particular street corner.” I’m in the middle of season one, where we explore San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Listening brings you physically right to the streets, giving you a 360 degree view of the sidewalk, the buildings, the people, and the organizations there. It truly is a portal into another place, I’m addicted. Thank you, Ma’ayan!
This week we’re getting to peek into the listening life of Eric Silver, Head of Creative at Multitude, DM of Join the Party, host of Games and Feelings, producer of Defector's weekly sports podcast The Distraction, and co-host of the madcap gameshow podcast Tell Me About It with Adal Rifai. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter.
The app you use to listen: Pocketcasts!
What speed do you listen to podcasts? 1.1x, Medium Trim Silences. My app says I’ve saved 20 days, 12 hours, 17 minutes and 15 seconds using this feature.
How do you discover new shows? Either recommendations from friends or by hearing hosts guests on shows that I love.
One show you love that everybody loves: Any of the shows in the Michael Hobbes Podcasting Universe! For all the praise he gets, he needs even more for the sheer number of books and papers he reads per episode. There’s a reason why he’s produced this structure of podcast three times to wild success: prep a ton, let the hosts laugh, and cut down the tape to only the best parts.
One show you love that most people don’t know about: Although this show is off the air, I deeply miss Channel F, the former flagship podcast for Fanbyte. Merritt K prepped the best games in the videogame podcasting space, and the oddball but empathetic tone made me feel like I’m with my friends at the Weird Kids Lunch Table (appreciative).
Hot take: The term “chat show” is wildly disrespectful and only demonstrates how stuck up some “prestige podcaster” producers are. Easy listening is incredibly hard work — from the pre-production to make an interesting show to capturing lightning in a bottle during recording to creating the ideal conversation in editing. Instead of chat shows, I say “conversational podcasts.” These shows are the backbone of podcasting, both in terms of volume and in actual enjoyment.
Podcast production self-care tip: I try to put myself in the most casual setting possible when I am doing edit notes. I’m using airpods instead of Good Headphones and playing a video game, trying to simulate the experience of actually listening and figuring out what I’m bumping on.
Real life self-care tip: Buy yourself the thing you wanted the most when you were 10 or 13. I went on ebay and grabbed a Funtastic Grape-colored N64 and an atomic purple N64 controller. If you are not being nice to your inner pre-teen or teen, then what’s the point of being an adult?