💎 Diamond Princess 🏜️ snapping desert whips 🌬️ the miracle of a peach 🚫 the quit 🍑 reading the Bible queerly 🏳️🌈
🍭 👂 TRUST ME! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, April 10. There are 31 days until my next Disney cruise. In case this email is too long, this episode deserves an award and I listened three times, a (beautifully-produced) real estate story audio nerds will love here, finally someone is asking the perfect people who seem to have it all if they are actually happy, here.
[I will never charge you to read Podcast the Newsletter. If you’d like to buy an ad, inquire here.]
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Toby Ball
Toby Ball is the host of Strange Arrivals and a co-host of Crime Writers On…. Follow him on Twitter here.
Describe Strange Arrivals in 10 words or less.
Why are UFOs interesting, beyond the real/not debate?
How is this new season different?
Each season has a theme. This season, the theme is how researchers influence the way that UFO encounters are reported and the way the public thinks about UFOs and aliens.
Anything you want to tease about the new season?
This season there’s a bit of a true crime tie-in as we look at a researcher who spectacularly crossed ethical lines in “researching” alien abductions. We also look at a case out of Zimbabwe that has received a lot of attention recently, an older American case that has left a strong imprint on popular culture, and much more.
How are true crime and alien encounters similar? How are they different?
I think the biggest similarity has to do with the unreliability of witness memories. The consequences are definitely bigger in the true crime realm. There’s this idea that witness testimony is reliable, but what we know about how easily memory is corrupted by any number of things actually makes it really unreliable, especially as time goes by. Just because it feels like a real memory, doesn’t mean that it is.
The biggest difference is that crime is without question real and can be investigated using physical evidence. But there’s no real physical evidence of alien encounters. You have stories and sometimes you have poor quality video, but nothing you can hold in your hands. It’s all just speculation.
What’s your favorite thing about making podcasts?
I really enjoy the process of doing a lot of research and conducting a bunch of interviews and then looking at everything we have and trying to figure out how best to tell the story. What is most interesting about it? Who are the compelling people? What questions do we want people to think about in relation to the story? And, of course, how do we make it entertaining - something that people will want to listen to.
What’s your least favorite thing about making podcasts?
Listening to my own voice with headphones. It’s not even close.
What do you think is the best way to help grow a podcast?
Get reviewed on Crime Writers On of course!
Are you a podcast listener?
I end up listening to a LOT of true crime podcasts to review on the show Crime Writers On… But I also have other podcasts that I check out when I have time. I think if you’re in the podcast industry, you really have to listen to podcasts. I don’t think you can create great things in a vacuum.
What’s a podcast you love that everyone already knows about?
If Books Could Kill. It’s both funny and appalling. I guess it’s not surprising that these ultra-popular “thought books” are full of garbage; but to be actually walked through that garbage can be pretty wild.
What’s a podcast you love that not enough people know about?
Alabama Astronaut. It’s about an effort to document the music created in snake handling churches in Appalachia (I heard about it from you!). It’s unique, and a look at a culture that is usually treated with condescension or contempt. And the music is great!
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
On Louder Than a Riot, Sidney Madden and Rodney Carmichael take us to Miami (“one of the only places you can go to the super market in nothing but a bikini and not get looked at sideways”) to interview Trina, whose career sparked the “bad bitch” moment of hip-hop, a departure from the old stereotypes of Black women in rap. It all started with Trina, who sounds shy as hell, rapping on a Trick Daddy track, stealing the show, and going on to fully spin herself off to become bigger than a verse, breaking the mold with her sophomore release Diamond Princess. There’s this almost cinematic moment of Trina being pushed onto stage at a show where she was greeted by a sea of bad bitches singing her lyrics. She had set hip hop on fire, birthing a universe of bad bitches. But an uncomfortable interview with Trick Daddy reveals he doesn’t want to talk about it and wasn’t happy he’d been eclipsed by the baddest bitch. He may have gotten Trina on mic, but his support ended there. (In his interview, he storms out saying, “I’m Jesus Christ, I created the baddest bitch. If you feel offended, fuck it and kiss my whole family’s ass.” !) This episode feels spicy and important and a celebration of the original bad bitch, and introduces us to someone who was able to center herself and create art that struck a huge chord with people who needed it. We should all be taking notes. This episode deserves an award.
oh hey
✨I don’t know what time you’re reading this, but if you’re near Washington Square Park in New York City, swing by between 2-6pm and catch Arielle and me doing man-on-the-street interviews, asking people whether or not they listen to podcasts.
✨Reddit is hosting an AMA with Bear Brook host Jason Moon and NHPR on-demand audio director (and Crime Writers On/Netflix podcast host) Rebecca Lavoie! It's taking place today at noon ET over on r/podcasts.
✨Rough Translation’s Gregory Warner has launched a newsletter, Around the World in 85 Days (subscribe here) and is asking you to share your favorite Rough Translation episode and explain why it meant so much to you. Email a note or 3-minute voice memo to roughtranslation@npr.org. They might use your words on the show. You can also send one to me, I'll pass it along!
✨Sign up for my June 5 Podcast Marketing Radio Bootcamp class.
✨Read 5 things indie podcasters want to know when pitching sponsors via Podcast Marketing Magic.
✨Supercharge your podcast marketing with strategic feed swaps via Descript.
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Trailer Park: The Podcast Trailer Podcast in her newsletter and podcast.
✨Podnews, a daily briefing of news and information to those in podcasting launched in May 2017, acquired Podcast Business Journal. Podcast Business Journal will publish a weekly roundup of news, podcast business data, and a long-form interview every week. You can sign up for free here.
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April is Adopt-a-Listener Month
Adopt-a-Listener is a grassroots campaign where podcast lovers help non-listeners turn into listeners. Through resources, collaborations with podcasts, and even an “official” adoption process, we’re providing all the support we can to make this initiative move the needle. Learn more here.
We just made a playlist of The Podcast Classics, shows that are high quality, fan favorites, easily recommendable (aka not toooo niche). Pick a show and send it to a non-listener and let me know how it goes! [Spotify] [Podchaser]
If you listen to some of the great Glassbox shows listed above, you may have heard a promo for Adopt-a-listener. Let me know if you hear it, and on which show.) Thanks to Glassbox for all the support.
💁♀️ Kate’s Corner, week 5 🎧
is over. Adopt-a-Listener officially launched April 1, but I soft-launched it last month, when I started for force my friend Kate “the Podcast Hater” Later to start listening to podcasts. And I failed. We lost Kate, but through this process I learned a lot about why people don’t listen to podcasts. And a lesson: if you’re trying to convert someone, try someone who might be more open to them. Adopt-a-Listener month is about trying to find someone who says “podcasts aren’t for me.” Kate went in really disliking them. I should have gone after someone more on the fence. She does listen to Small Talk Baby Podcast with Miss Pam with her daughter Weezy every day. I’ll take that tiny win. Thanks for letting me torture you, Kate. I’m looking for someone new to adopt this month.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Fil Corbitt’s The Wind is a storytelling podcast driven by sound. The idea of the show was taken from the way they use the sound of wind to hear the topography of a place. For The Wind, this same technique is used to listen to “peaks and valleys” of the way people talk to learn about human speech and music. It’s another dimension of storytelling, set at a pitch not everyone hears. I’ve been a fan for a long time and recommend Frontier Music and They/Them from the early days. But a recent piece called Whip Law, which takes you to a place in downtown Reno, where people (many of them unhoused) use bullwhips to communicate, feel a sense of power, and leave a footprint in the world. Some in the community want the whip snapping, which sounds like gunshots, to be outlawed. So it becomes a real estate battle that audio nerds will find interesting, because it’s about noise in a space that nobody technically owns. This piece was featured on Snap Judgment, which is a huge deal. Congrats, Fil! But all of these episodes are treasures! Listen here.
🎙️Stiffed, hosted by Jennifer Romolini, dives into the untold story of Viva, an erotic magazine for women published by Penthouse founder Bob Guccione and made by a bunch of feminist writers and editors. Viva featured full-frontal male nudes, writing by Betty Friedan, profiles of Maya Angelou, and there was nothing quite like it. (Anna Wintour was the fashion editor at one point.) Viva started with (or was stolen with…Bob took the idea from a female editor named Gay Bryant) good intentions but Human Man Bob felt like he was the one to be in charge of the woman’s sex magazine (why oh why) and things went downhill fast. You get real “I love women so much that I can’t let them do anything” vibes from Bob. Stiffed is a story you’ve never heard full of names that you have and is an exciting and fast-paced snapshot of media, feminism, and work in the 70s, which reminds some of us that when people play that “what era do you wish you had lived in?” game, we can say, “I’m a woman, so never.” Listen here.
🎙️On The Real Question’s Should I Quit?, humanist and atheist chaplain Vanessa Zoltan has intimate workshops with listeners to help council them about something they wish to quit, whether they should or should not, and what all of their options are. I found myself flying through these conversations, the stories are relatable but specific enough to make them super interesting, and Vanessa is filled with empathetic, sometimes surprising advice that helps clear the noise and focus on what’s important to the listener and how they live a life that feels true. This is one of the most interesting advice podcasts I’ve heard. Listen here.
🎙️Cancelled from Mamamia is one of those shows that makes me perk up with excitement when I see it in my feed. (It was recommended to me by American Hysteria’s Chelsey-Weber Smith, if that is any indication of how good it is.) Each week hosts Jessie and Clare pick a famous person with a dicey reputation to build a case against them for their wrongdoings, and add a judgment at the end. (It’s always intended to be a bit silly but usually ends up making too much sense. For example, Prince William “is a cranky, angry boy who needs anger management, but only via reality TV with the whole family. We need to see more BTS.”) For their recent episode about Bridget Jones’ Diary, the case: “telling us that Bridget was fat and old and that those were the worst things a woman could be, when a) neither of those things are true and b) it’d be fine if she was.” On Cancelled, Jessie and Clare are interesting hosts. And as identical twins, they bring a kind of irreplaceable chemistry that will make you wish you were the third sister. The fact that they are twins is never the center of their Cancelled episodes, and I’ve always wondered about their relationship once the mics are off. Clare addressed that (and other things) in the first episode of her new podcast But Are You Happy?, which asks people who seem to have it all (with big followings on social media) whether their lives are as perfect as they look. Don’t we all want to know this? Have these people really been asked? For episode one, Clare (reporter and Mamamia's Editor in Chief,) puts herself in the hot seat and talks openly about living in the shadow of Jessie, “the hotter twin.” (They’re both smoking hot.) Clare gets into it. On the first real episode, Zara McDonald and Michelle Andrews talk about leaving Mamamia to start their own company, and what it’s like to to work with your friend. It’s smart, interesting, and funny women getting honest. Listen here.
🎙️If an alien landed and said, “why do you humans celebrate Christmas? Punish people? Get married?” What would you say? On Strange Customs, Sasha Sagen (daughter of Carl) examines the strange things we do to figure out why we do them with interesting humans, then dives deeper into the subject into an expert of the matter. Each episode is a philosophical look at our most ordinary habits, and the conversations never go where you expect them to. It’s a look at our intuition, tradition, science, and where the three meet. On a recent episode, Sacha and humanist rabbi Greg Epstein talk about Passover—the things they love, the things they struggle with. It’s not a Passover 101, it’s a Passover meditation. then historian of religion Dr. Carole Cusack comes on to explain how Passover is connected to the earth. Listen here.
🎙️Normal Gossip is back, baby! Samin Nosrat joins to dish about some farmer’s market drama. Topics include: what goes into the making of a perfect peach, Jordan the farmers market hottie, and the politics of organic vegetables sold to wealthy liberals. The moment Kelsey settled into the story I felt blanketed by the comfort of her storytelling. What makes this show shine is the details she gives to make the story a movie in our minds. They are details (like someone adjusting their ponytail) she couldn’t possibly know but who cares if they happened or not. It’s all about the complexities that unfold, the battling personalities involved, and the “what would you do” pauses Kelsey takes that make this show feel like a conversation you’re having with your sharp, funny friend at a bar, who is dragging out a low-stakes, high-drama story you feel completely invested in, and you wish the night would never end. Listen here.
🎙️For as popular as true-crime podcasts are, I know real audio-lovers who think it’s all boring chatter or readings of Wikipedia pages that lack journalism, ethics, and creativity. But there are some fantastic true-crime shows (You Didn’t See Nothin, Bone Valley, Believe Her, come to mind) that dig and report and solve things and make you think. Witnessed series do this all well, and have returned for a new season, Devil in the Ditch, a reexamination of the 20-year-old unsolved Greenville, Mississippi murder of Presh, through the eyes of the victim's granddaughter, Larrison Campbell. Presh was found bludgeoned to death in the parlor of her Greenville, Mississippi, home during the summer of 2003, and some of the potential suspects are very close to home. Larrison, who we find tasked with trying to get a small town to talk, has a real reason for reporting this, and the show has guts and heart and family ties that paint Presh as she was remembered, a colorful, kooky, and energetic Southern charm you’ll wish you knew in this life. I found myself missing her and I didn’t even know her. Listen here.
🎙️On the new season of the SAPIENS, host/cultural anthropologist Eshe Lewis is collecting stories about things like the origins of the chili pepper and how prosecutors decide someone is a criminal to stolen skulls from Iceland to illustrate how we use cultural beliefs and practices to explain what it is to be human. On I Do This For You, Mom, Brendane A. Tynes, a Black queer feminist scholar and storyteller and doctoral candidate in anthropology at Columbia University, brings us the story of Jeri Hutton Green, who was thrown into domestic violence and homicide advocacy in Baltimore, Maryland when her mother went missing in April 2020. A strange text message launched a 2-year battle for justice for her mother and other missing Black women. This episode is a collection of voices that collide to tell a story of what it means to survive domestic violence and police violence as a Black woman. Listen here.
🎙️You’ve read the Bible (or at least part of it, or no you haven’t) but have you read it queerly? On It’s In the Book, religious professionals and Harvard Divinity School alums J. Sylvan and David Waters tell Bible stories to Sylvan's wife, Sue Buzzard starting In The Beginning. They’re looking critically and constructively at these ancient texts, translating the Hebrew to tell us what these stories actually mean and how queer they actually are. It’s not what you were taught in Sunday School. The Bible is the best book ever written, is open to interpretation, and it’s a really fun experience to hear these stories from these lens and turn everything we think about it on its head. And isn’t that what Jesus was doing when he started Christianity? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do with religion? h/t Joshua Rae, my favorite podcast recommender. Listen here.
🎙️On Crawlspace, Tim Pilleri and Lance Reenstierna spoke with Daniel Stone about his book, Sinkable, our obsession with the Titanic, the eccentrics who have tried to recover the flotsam, and what has catapulted the story of the shipwreck into pop culture. Much of it has to do with the fact that so many men survived (it was like a scarlet letter for them—what ever happened to women and children first?) and the fact that so many survivors went on to tell their stories, creating a lore that hasn’t been replicated. It’s a story that’s more about the Titanic—it’s history, science, and obsession. I was also really excited to hear a promo for Adopt-a-Listener on this episode! Listen here.
🎙️In December of 2020, a nurse named Tiffany Dover fainted on camera while she was talking to reporters after getting her first COVID shot. She got right back up and gave another interview, but it was too late. A conspiracy theory was already racing around the world: Dover had died. She’d been replaced by a body double. Tiffany Dover Is Dead was a podcast trying to clear the conspiracy theory up, which was harder than you’d think, especially because the host Brandy Zadrozny could not secure an interview with Tiffany. This fueled the conspiracy theories more. But that’s changed. Tiffany Dover Is Dead popped back into our feeds with an interview with Tiffany, who is very alive. What now, conspiracy theorists? Listen here.
🎙️In the 1980s, there were only 63 films by, for, or about Black Americans. But in the 1990s, that number quadrupled, with 220 Black films making their way to cinema screens nationwide. The Class of 1989 is about what sparked this “Black New Wave” and the people who blazed this path for contemporaries like Ava DuVernay, Kasi Lemmons and Jordan Peele. Len Webb and Vincent Williams are analyzing six films that left a mark on the world: Harlem Nights, Lean on Me, Glory, A Dry White Season, Driving Miss Daisy, and Do the Right Thing. First up: how 1989’s The Color Purple inspired and provoked Black woman directors over the next decade. Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
[From December 5, 2019] The Long-Distance Con from The New Yorker Radio Hour is a two-part audio piece that tells the story of Maggie Robinson Katz, who inherited a box of cassette tapes from her stepmom after her dad died. On the audiotapes, she met a father she had never known. Her dad, Terry Robinson, had recorded his phone calls with Jim Stuckey, a West Virginian living in Manila who had bamboozled Terry into a scam that cost Terry almost a million dollars. It's a wacky story but the thing that makes it excellent audio is the personal touch added by Maggie, who is struggling to understand who her father really was. She even goes to Manila to meet Jim Stuckey. Would you have done the same? Part one here, part two here.