🙅♀️Downstairs boy, upstairs man 🍼fake baby🍻hangxiety 🚬 now sounds👂
🍭 👂 Tiffany had always dreamed of owning a smoothie bar 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, January 27, 2025. My next Disney Cruise is in 55 days. In case this newsletter is too long, this show was gone for five years and now it’s back, here’s something hilarious and sweet, and Rumble Strip’s Erica Heilman needs your help.
xoxo
lauren
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Hillary Frank
Hillary Frank is the host of The Longest Shortest Time, which is (yes you heard it right!) back!
Welcome back! What have you been up to?
A whole lot of things! In 2021, I made a fiction podcast about middle school called Here Lies Me. After that it was a lot of pitching new projects and consulting on other people’s projects. One of the coolest things I got to do was write and direct the audiobook adaptation of Tegan and Sara’s graphic novel Junior High. That gig led to an opportunity to write and direct Wedlocked, my first original audiobook — a feminist domestic thriller coming soon from Macmillan Audio.
For people who haven’t heard of The Longest Shortest Time, can you describe it to us in 10 words or less?
A podcast about the absurdities of life with a vagina.
Who is The Longest Shortest Time for?
When I’m at conferences or events, people often come up to me and say, “I love your show even though I’m not your target demographic.” Usually these are people who don’t have kids. Sometimes they do have kids but the kids are no longer babies. The funny thing is, all of these people are indeed in my target audience!
I think the confusion probably comes from the fact that in podcast apps, LST gets categorized as “Kids & Family.” So I get why people might assume that this is an advice show, geared toward parents of young children. The truth is, I’m not very interested in discussions about parenting style; I’m more interested in hearing people talk about how the act of raising other humans has changed them.
The Longest Shortest Time is a storytelling show in the vein of This American Life, which is not categorized as “Kids & Family” but often tells compelling stories about parents and kids. My approach is to use the universal topics of family and reproductive health as a launching pad to talk about all kinds of other things: dating, relationships, friendship, fertility, work, race, education, loss. Yes, we sometimes tell stories about parents of babies. But we also tell stories about parents of school-age kids, teens, and grown children, as well as people who don’t have kids and never will.
So who is this show for? It’s for new parents, experienced parents, people who care about reproductive health, and anyone who loves a great story about complex interpersonal relationships.
Fill in the blank: you will like The Longest Shortest Time if you like ______ .
The Netflix show Sex Education. It’s got the vibe I strive for: edgy with heart.
How has podcasting changed in the last 5 years?
Oh, wow. So much.
Just before I put the show on hiatus, I still heard industry gatekeepers talking about trying to find “the next Serial.” Or building “IP factories” for documentary or scripted shows with the potential for screen adaptation.
These days, barely any limited series are being made and many of the people who made them have been laid off. Chat shows, and particularly celebrity chat shows, are now king. Bonus points for video.
I think it was 2020 when I started hearing the term “always on” to describe shows with a regular cadence. This term makes me bristle because as a person who makes a show like this, it makes me feel as if I am expected to literally be always on — as a producer, as a public personality. For years, executives have been telling creators to do more with less. But to actually use the words “always on,” and to say that a show will only be successful if it is “always on,” implies that in order to do this work you must have a superhuman ability to churn out content without opportunities to rest and recharge. Burnout in this industry is real, so I wish we could collectively come up with another term like “weekly” or “bi-weekly” and acknowledge that it is to everyone’s advantage to create sustainable shows.
How has parenting changed for you in the last 5 years?
I have a teenager! She just started high school and she’s in the marching band, so now I go to football games. I’m finally, finally, starting to understand the rules of the game. Sort of.
How will The Longest Shortest Time be different?
A big motivator for me to bring the show back has been the fall of Roe and all of the chaos that has followed. So I will be leaning heavily into reproductive health — things like periods, menopause, perimenopause, puberty, bodily autonomy, fertility, birth control, childbirth, and the many ways that babies are made. I will still be telling a variety of stories and many listeners may not notice a difference.
The biggest change is that I will have an LST+ membership with a community and a premium feed with a whole other show in the Longest Shortest universe called You Know What.
Tell us about YOU KNOW WHAT.
You Know What features three college kids speaking candidly about sex, dating, and relationships. In each episode, they tackle a question from the audience, and those questions can come from adults or teens. The panelists all live in different parts of the country and were strangers to each other when we started recording. Since then, they’ve built an amazing rapport, and they’re super funny and thoughtful. One of them became a birth and abortion doula as a teen! Cool, right?
This show is a scaled back version of a concept I was pitching for a couple of years that never found a home. My goal is to use LST+ as an on-ramp for the show and eventually grow it into its full glory.
Coming back, are you nervous about anything this time around? How do you FEEL about all this?
I’m mainly nervous about the financial viability of all of this. Nobody is giving money up front anymore, so I’m relaunching independently and hoping that I’ll bring in enough revenue through ads and membership to support myself and eventually a small team. Even with all of the recent changes in the industry, I’m optimistic because I feel like going indie is actually more possible now than ever before. There are lots of options for ad sales and membership partners (I’m working with QCODE and Supporting Cast), a combo that allows me to retain 100% ownership of my show and brand. So while I’m in a tight spot at the moment, I’m hopeful that this arrangement will be better for me in the long run.
What’s a podcast you’ve loved in the past 5 years that not enough people know about?
Jo Firestone’s Murder on Sex Island. A delightful escapist romp!
What can we look forward to hearing this year?
My first new episode, “The Staircase," is about my misadventures in trying to get my daughter’s middle school to teach sex ed and consent ed, which are required by New Jersey state law. Things go… awry. We also get my daughter’s perspective on the whole thing.
Other upcoming episodes include a trans man who becomes a single parent by choice; the treachery of navigating the patriarchal obstetrics system as an expecting mom; a woman who opts to be sterilized; and a woman who finds out late in life that she was fertilized with a stranger’s sperm.
If you had 100K for the show what would you do with it?
Hire some help! It’s currently just me and my engineer, so I’m doing pretty much everything other than mixing, which is not sustainable. (Yep, very much in “always on” mode.)
Having some extra hands and ears would not only make daily production much more manageable but would also make it possible for me to get back to doing special series, like the ones we’ve done on “natural” birth, sex & parenthood, and discrimination against working moms. I’ve got ideas for other series that I think will be fun and impactful, but those are definitely team efforts.
If you could get anyone to listen to The Longest Shortest Time who would it be?
Amy Schumer
Is there anything I didn’t ask you that I should have?
Yes. What is the best audiobook you’ve heard in the last year?
Answer: Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
After five years, Hillary Frank has resurrected The Longest Shortest Time, the podcast that I used to associate with parenting (“stories about the surprises and absurdities of raising other humans—and being raised by them…” “..about parenthood in all of its forms. But you don’t need to be a parent to listen…”) I just interviewed Hillary (read above) and when I asked her to describe the show in ten words or less she said it’s, “a podcast about the absurdities of life with a vagina,” which gives you an idea of how the show has grown up. The first new episode is beautiful and emotional, taking us back to a fear Hillary had when she was pregnant (after a viewing of the film An Education) that people would one day hurt her baby. At the time it may have seemed ridiculous (the baby wasn’t even there yet!) but here we are, the baby is 14, and the baby is dealing with one of the worst forms of attack, unwanted male attention. Hillary’s daughter goes up a staircase to a Bat Mitzvah and returns back down someone who has to think about, well, the absurdities of life with a vagina, burdened with the knowledge that she could be minding her own business, having fun with friends, and a random guy could try to demand she pay attention to him, and get salty if she doesn’t. This isn’t just annoying, it can be scary. So that is the bridge we’ve traversed with this show. The storytelling is as beautiful as ever, Hillary has an eye for finding these moments worth exploring and using audio to make us feel them ourselves. Hillary also talks to “the baby,” who I’ll now be referring to as her adult, god-given name Sasha, about what sex ed is like in school, and man. It’s bleak out there. No wonder kids are turning to porn. Anyway I’m glad this show is back, I have a daughter now and I’m relistening to all of The Longest Shortest Time and even if you don’t have a baby daughter I think you should, too.
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notes
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✨Arielle Nissenblatt published one of my favorite blog posts of the year! Top Podcast Fun Facts! Where she asks podcast listeners to fill in the blank: “I was listening to a podcast and here’s what I learned…” Read it here.
✨Arielle spotlighted Century Lives in EarBuds.
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
🎙️I haven’t listened to the first few seasons of CBC’s On Drugs, but I should. The first season in particular looks really good. For now, I’m three episodes into the third season and I’m blown away, I think because I almost didn’t press play and I didn’t know what to expect and it seems like something that could be predictable or overdone. It’s not. The first two episodes are about alcohol and the second one is about smoking. They’re factual and look at the larger context of these things in our culture and psychology and the hosting is great, they’re very personal. But like so many CBC podcasts On Drugs they are made with so much care, so…not off the factory belt. This could have been a show handed off to an uninvested host, that is not what happened here. Nobody on earth could make and host this exact show other than the person who is doing it, Geoff Turner. He explores alcohol addiction, his own history with alcohol, the romance we associate with drinking, why we absolutely cannot stop, why culture allows this, and why we might be so impressed with the guy who seems to be drinking a ton but showing no signs of it when we really should be very worried for him. I know a lot of people who would not want to hear these first two episodes, Geoff says things even casual alcohol drinkers don’t want to hear. But the show is honest, approaching the topic of alcohol from new angles, and is a beautifully told story about Geoff and his life, and his cousin, an alcoholic who recently killed himself. The third episode revolved around On Drugs’ producer, Hadeel, who has been smoking her whole life. And yes, this was an episode about exactly how bad that is for you and how unfortunate it is that smoking looks so cool. But I loved the story of Hadeel, a Lebanese woman who grew up with smokers and seeing smoking as something that her family identified with, a bonding tool. She still feels that nostalgic pull toward smoking. And I got it. Hearing her describe the smoky smell of her childhood home made me miss my grandpa’s house. Would I smoke if I could go back to his house, even if it were just in my mind? Would I smoke if my entire family smoked? Yeah, probably yes to both. There is this emotional moment of Hadeel calling the expert they called earlier in the program and telling him that he helped her quit. This is not the drug podcast I thought I was going to get, and I loved it. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Feature in Apple Podcasts.
🎙️Talia Augustidis’UnReality came back for another season of fiction/nonficiton-blending stories, kicking off with an episode about going to Tarot cards when you’ve been laid off. It’s a great episode which should surprise no one who knows Talia. But I really want to point you toward the episode that was released last week, Breakfast On Tiffany, it’s one of my favorite things I’ve heard in a very long time and I had the pleasure of hearing Talia perform it live at Tribeca. In an attempt to read Truman Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Talia accidentally bought something called Breakfast On Tiffany on her ereader, unaware she had bought the wrong book the entire time she was reading it. She lusciously reads excerpts and narrates her thought process going from confused but accepting (they had jean mini skirts in the 40s?) to skepticism to the realization that she was reading smut. It isn’t just a great story beautifully produced, it’s a performance. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Email from Talia.
🎙️Erica Heilman wants to make a show about the sound of diffuse despair….the sound of right now. She was going to call it Diffuse Despair but decided to go with What Now Sounds Like, and you can find What Now Sounds Like on the Rumble Strip feed. So—you send her recordings that sound like this time we're living in, and she stitches them together to make something beautiful. Anything. The first episode features voices from South Africa, LA, North Carolina, Vermont, the Swannanoa River, Toronto, Houston, Nebraska, and Erica’s couch. (It’s a conversation with her mother.) There’s also music provided by the Northern New England Ensemble. I want everyone to listen to this and imagine all these voices pulling together from all over the world. They cover so many emotions, they contain everything. The one that I loved the most was the one that surprised me the most, a woman talking about her frustrating experience trying to get her small business a Google Business page. At first I thought, “really? There are so many other things that define now, so many worse things!” But hearing her speak you realize it is a good metaphor for now. It’s funny and annoying and perfect. I also want people to submit! (Send yours to Erica at rumblestripvermont@gmail.com.) Rumble Strip listeners are a specific type of podcast listener, and I can’t wait to hear from them and the kind of things they make. Listen here.
How I discovered it: I discovered Rumble Strip many years ago from Bello Collective.
🎙️I have been scanning new shows for whatever the new Scamanda or Believe In Magic will be, and by jove I think we’ve got it. From The Con, Kaitlyn’s Baby tells the story of Kaitlyn Braun, a woman coming to doulas in the Ontario area with stories of rape, abandonment, miscarriage, and even a coma, seeking help to deliver her (stillborn) baby. But she was lying to all of them. Kaitlyn was coming to these women only to manipulate them. This is a kind of scam story that raised my eyebrows extra high. A doula is someone who cares for you in intimate ways. This story is equally heartbreaking—what is wrong with Kaitlyn???—and scary. I mean there are points of the podcast that sound like they could be scraped from a horror film. Imagine: a doula realizes while inside Kaitlyn’s house, caring for a naked Kaitlyn in a bathtub, that this is a con artist who could or could not be dangerous but is definitely unhinged. Cue the psycho music and run. This story is so strange and unsettling that it’s difficult to believe it’s real. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Was already subscribed to The Con.
🎙️Normally I wouldn’t listen to Bobbi Althoff on a podcast and I rarely listen to WTF with Marc Maron, but the crossover got me. If you don’t know Bobbi, her podcast, The Really Good Podcast, blew up because she seemed to come out of nowhere, she had huge guests, and her interview style was not the norm (she was more argumentative than talkative with her guests, learn more here.) Many podcasters I talked to about it were irked. This woman who doesn’t seem to give a shit about podcasting was topping the charts. This conversation with Marc puts things into perspective. Bobbi is not in character, she’s being earnest and honest about how she went from a dark childhood with a pretty unstable dad who was always running from the IRS to interviewing Drake in a bed. She explains how she named the podcast, how she got her character, and the challenges she’s had. I came away understanding her in the podcast a lot more, and she gets into the future of her show and how she’s responding to the mistakes she’s made. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Longtime subscriber.
🎙️Michael Marshall (co-host of Skeptics with a K Podcast) and Cecil Cicirello (Cognitive Dissonance, Citations Needed,) two people who claim to know nothing about Joe Rogan, launched a listen-along show for The Joe Rogan Experience, The Know Rogan Experience. Joe Rogan is one of the most influential people in America and he does a ton of talking, and Marsh and Cecil are listening to him so we don’t have to. Joe Rogan needs some needs scrutiny and accountability for goodness' sake! They’re flagging things Joe is saying, drawing lines between those things and what is happening in America, and trying to figure out what Joe Rogan’s popularity says about who we are and what we believe, whether we like it or not. I don't get the sense the intent here is just to rip on Joe Rogan. Marsh and Cecil want to understand him, his power, his messages, and us. This show, they say (in the very first explanatory episode, which I recommend) is for people like me who do not like Joe Rogan and will not going to listen to his show, but also for people who like Joe Rogan and don’t have time to listen to four plus hours of content every day, or even just like him but still have some light critiques of him. I haven't spent (any?) time listening to Joe Rogan, and it was eye-opening to hear how dumb he really is. I had always assumed he was intelligent but armed with bad information and ignorance, but in the clips I heard, he asked so few follow up questions and believed every single lie he was told by his guests. In the clips I heard, he was shaking in terror to hear Marc Andreessen tell him about the evils of wokeness and rebanking like a kid being told a scary story. It’s like Marsh and Cecil are watching a huge fire to make sure it doesn’t get too out of control. I mean, it is getting too out of control, but we should know where the winds are blowing. They’re funny, too. It’s a good hang. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Trending on Pocket Casts.
🎙️Jane Marie’s The Dream has returned for a fourth season, but instead of a curated one it will be an interview show with guests and segments about “whatever they want!” This makes sense, it is the direction the industry is going. At first I was let down, but I think it was more a general nostalgia for those season one days. But Jamie Loftus went from making extremely limited things like the four-episode My Year In Mensa and the painstakingly researched Lolita Podcast to the always-on 16th Minute which is something I loe. So I’m invested in finding out what Jane Marie will be able to discern about The American Dream talking to people about whatever. The first episode of S4 The Dream is a conversation with Erin Bies, who has been on the podcast before, about the new ways MLMs are trying to fuck people: rebrand as an affiliate marketing company. This means they’re focusing more on product sales than on recruitment, which is shaking everything up. I listened to Erin’s explanation twice because it seems so major and I couldn’t find much on it. I think that could be an entire season of The Dream! Call your aunts, mom’s neighbors in the midwest, and that girl you went to high school with who you are still friends on Facebook with for some reason. I want to hear what they think of this breaking news! An episode that came out today covers something I love hearing about, private equity. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Longtime subscriber.
🎙️On December 27, 2022, Kimberly Renee found herself staring at an online troll’s home on Google Maps, reminded of just how easy it is to uncover someone’s name and address online. I am going to be pulling from her pitch letter here because it was… well it didn’t feel like a pitch letter and that’s what I loved it. She told me a story:
Earlier that day, an "anonymous" person took the time to email me, calling me a “house slave uncle tom b*tch" (among other things).
He had time. And that day, so did I.
As I stared at his Los Angeles bungalow, I wondered...
What if I didn’t have my wits about me? What if this wasn’t just a fleeting ADHD obsession that would pass as soon as another shiny object caught my attention?
Imagine the havoc I could have caused.
Instead of havoc she created Kenah, the fictional star of her podcast Un(con)Trolled, a social media influencer dead-set on uncovering her trolls’ darkest secrets and getting revenge with mental warfare. Un(con)Trolled is a stripped-down, first-person thriller that puts Kenah at the wheel the whole time. It’s a dark, intense, pretty funny exhibit on cyberbullying, revenge, and the blurred line between control and chaos. I felt like I was holding my breath the entire time (except for the many, many ads—it can be overwhelming, ignore them.) Kimberly is magic on the mic. She has complete control of not just the story but our attentions. I did not want to say goodbye to Kenah at the end. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Email from Kimberly.
🎙️Crumbs, Emily Olea’s extraordinary diary of family trauma, addiction, and the trans experience, is back. Emmy is talking about really dark stuff but she’s such a beautiful storyteller I find listening somewhat lulling. It’s something I could listen to on endless loop. Emily is telling her story—it begins in season one talking about dating as a trans person but gets deeper and deeper as it continues. For season two she talks to her mother in (who was a coyote…her grandmother ran drugs for the Tijuana cartel) and in season three, she’s taking us through her sobriety journey in 12 steps. Episode one: honesty. And damn, it’s honest. These episodes are so raw and well-produced, and Emmy is a great storyteller. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Longtime subscriber.
🎙️I love you!
I’ve been struggling to find something to listen to that matches my headspace. And of course the ‘what now sounds like’ was exactly what I needed to find. Thank u!!!!! Misss youuuu!!!! Ur newsletter feels like a cozy bookstore to me where I come in and browse when I’m lost and I find exactly what I need to find. Hugs from Boston!!!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️