šfantastic 2024 shows that had one episode that really stood out to me š
š š Are you taking all this in? He was a saint! This man was a saint. š š¤øāāļø
Bonjour. Today is Monday, December 23, 2024, please settle in for some of the best podcast episodes of 2024. I canāt guarantee that this is a list of the absolute best ones. Next week Iām going to write about my favorite podcasts, and I didnāt want to cheat you and double up. So more accurately, this is a list of fantastic 2024 shows that had one episode that really stood out to me. Would you have opened this if I had used that title? Wait fuck it, Iām just going to call it that. OK. So the title of this newsletter went from āthe 10 best podcast episodes of 2024ā to āfantastic 2024 shows that had one episode that really stood out to me.ā Much better. I literally just cracked my fingers and sank into my chair a bit more. Maybe go through and line these babies up. Look, I made a playlist:
xoxo
lauren
P.S - If youāre interested in placing an ad in Podcast The Newsletter or Podcast Marketing Magic, fill out this form
First, behold my Christmas wreath.
notes
āØStop what youāre doing and open up Pocket Casts! They allowed me to curate a collection (my favorite podcasts of 2024) and you can see it in the app right now. You can also see it here.
āØTink is hosting a TWO-DAY Podcast Marketing Radio Boot Camp at the end of January. Learn more here.
āØPhilly friends! Thursday, January 16th. 6pm. Free. PLEASE join me at the Philly Podcast Mixer hosted by Rowhome Productions, co-Presented by (AIR) + City Cast Philly. Iāll be speaking in a panel discussion on The State of Philly Podcasting in 2025 with Yowei Shaw, Tom Grahsler, Lauren Passell. Get your ticket here.
āØConfirm your seat for Captivate and Adobeās Podcast Growth Summit on Jan 7 here. Iāll be speaking with Dave Jackson, Hari Gopalakrishna, and Mark Asquith.
āØA few of my recent Lifehacker articles for you: The ten best podcasts of 2024, the ten best true-crime podcasts of 2024, the ten best interview podcasts for 2024.
āØWe launched a Tink-branded monthly podcast recommendation series with Castbox, starting with Audio Delicacies. Check it out!
āØI was so happy that CoHost asked me to participate in their Podcast Predictions for 2025 roundup! Read it here.
āØCheck out the 12 Days of Podcast Marketing Tips in Podcast Marketing Magic.
āØArielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Threshold in EarBuds.
āØIf you want to listen to my favorite Christmas episode ever listen to Drifting Off with Joe Pera: Joe shares a poem he wrote about trees and reads 'The Fir Tree' by Hans Christian Andersen. Plenty more as well.
šepisodes i texted some friends and even some frenemiesš
šļøI have listened to hours and hours of Phoebe Judge on This Is Love, Criminal, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery, and if you do, too, you know that nobody narrates like her and that she has created her own storytelling style. Her voice, both soothing and deliberate, warm and with authority, is iconic. I thought I knew her, you know? For episode 100 of This Is Love she made a piece about her mother Valentine dying that is noteworthy for how beautiful it is, but also for how Valentine shows us a new side of Phoebe. When we meet Valentine, she has been diagnosed with cancer but she is sounds great. We immediately fall in love with this spunky woman. As the episode goes on, she gets worse and worse as Phoebe continues to mother her mother, and physically step into Valentine as Valentine fades away. We experience the entire progression from onion-gobbling mom to someone who is completely gone. The moment that Valentine dies is one of the most impactful moments Iāve heard in audio, certainly in all of Phoebeās work. Phoebe is holding her hand, itās peaceful. Itās over. Then Phoebe goes on a run. When she returns from her run, her motherās body is gone. That image, of Phoebe returning to an empty room, it kind of broke me. I have tears in my eyes as Iām typing this for chrissake. Listen here.
šļøJohn Meagher set out to make a ālighthearted documentary about Northern Ireland that has nothing to do with The Troublesā and failed miserably. The piece, on the Illuminated feed, touches on the history and trauma of Northern Ireland and is funny and fascinating. It starts in Johnās dreams, where he has been having recurring nightmares about some sort of ritualistic sacrifice ceremony since he was a wee boy. But the nightmares feel like memories. He goes back to his hometown to confront the nightmares, to find out if theyāre real or why they feel so real. It turns out it has a lot to do with The Troubles and the trauma ingrained in the people who live in Northern Ireland, and his dreams are a souvenir of his peopleās stress. Itās in his DNA. I loved this piece for so many reasons, one of them is for Johnās beautiful accent. I mean, just like I enjoy looking at beautiful people for absolutely no reason, I could listen to someone with a beautiful Irish accent talk about nearly anything. But this was exceptional. Listen here.
šļøYou think Jamie Loftusā Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) episode about Slide Cop is just going to be about how and why that story went viral but it was about so much more. On her mission to āfind his pig ass,ā Jamie dives deep into he lack of transparency in policing in the US, mail fragility, copaganda, Boston as a vibe, a physics lesson in slide projection that none of us could understand, how this is so funny and pro-Palestine protests also, somehow. She spoke to journalists, called the police herself, and even went down the slide. (This Boston girl walks the walk.) Finding the cop is harder than you think itād be, so then the story becomes about that and why. Slide Copās 16th minute of fame isnāt over until Jamie finds him. She is going to find him. Listen here.
šļøOn 99% Invisible Roman Mars is bookclubbing Robert Caroās 1,200 page book The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, the guy responsible for so much of the park, highway, bridge, playground, housing, tunnel, beach, zoo, etc formation of New York City. The book is really about power, how Robert Moses got it (without ever being an elected official) and kept it and was able to be one of the influential people in history. Every month this year heās going over 100 pages with people like Jamelle Bouie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If this doesnāt sound fun, youāre wrong. Roman kicks things off with Conan OāBrien, whose level of obsession with Robert Caro rivals my nephewās obsession with Minecraft. Robert Caroās interview in this series was one of the best episode Iāve heard in months. Caro sounds like a guy who needs his own 1200 page biography. Heās fascinating, itās like heās from another time and space. Listen to the Caro one here.
šļøWhat was happening to rural sissies in 1955 America was hideous! Iām quoting Patrick Haggerty, the subject of the last episode of Sissy. Gay little Patrick grew up on a farm in Texas which would have been worse than hideous if it were not for his father, who didnāt love him even though he was gay but because of it. Most queer people likely did not have fantastic relationships with their parents during this time, but this dad said, āI have to love this one special.ā He supported Patrick to a) create his first wig at age 5 out of baling twine and b) create the worldās first gay country album, Lavender Country, in 1973. This episode was about Lavender Country, being gay in 1950ās rural America, but also about this dad who just loved his son so hard. Are you taking all this in? He was a saint! This man was a saint. Of course it was me, I made the first gay country album because my dad said I could. I could have quoted this entire episode, I wrote down 75% of it. For this write-up, I just bolded the stuff I transcribed. (If youāre not crying when you write a song how can you possibly expect your audience to cry when they hear it?) I listened to this episode on repeat like it was a song, it sort of was. Listen here.
šļøWeight For It returned for season two with an episode that was made with heart. It just a really good storyteller sitting down to perfectly tell a story exactly the way he wanted to tell it. The story Ronald Young Jr. is telling in this kick-off episode starts with Ronald winning three Ambies for season one of Weight For It (I was in the audience cheering him on.) Then Ronald rewinds to just a little before, when he finds out that his mother is dying. Ronald calls his sister Marilyn to talk about what was like losing their mom, but really how death and dying make people, and the people in their orbit, lose or gain weight. And here is where he admits something we donāt always hear people say: that even when his mom was dying he wished he was losing weight instead of gaining it. Even in that moment he couldnāt quiet that voice inside his head. When his mother was dying she was losing weight, and so was his father. While his dad managed to remain within the ācongratulatory, complimentary threshold of weight loss,ā his mother got too thin. Until she was gone completely, and Ronald was shopping for caskets realizing that when itās his time to go, his family will have to pay extra for a larger casket. (The stress of being fat follows you not until the day you die, but after.) Weight gain and loss is not a moral issue, but it can be a sign that something is very wrong if you go outside that threshold either way. Ronaldās storytelling paints a portrait of his mother, father, sister, and himself in a portrait of spirits suspended in the air of their family grief, coping it different ways, but still connected. If we can go back to what I was saying at the beginning, how this felt like a story told the way Ronald wanted to tell it, I must point out that Ronaldās sister was an important voice here, as was Ronaldās mother. Ronald had recorded conversations with her before she died. I remember not long ago listening to Ronald on the Dear Prudence podcast, where Prudie (JenĆ©e Desmond-Harris) asks her guest to give a piece of unsolicited advice. Ronald said: āVideo and audio record your loved ones. Do it all the time. Do it as much as you can because the one way that I feel like my mom is still alive is through video and audio recordings that we took of her when she was here." Itās one of the many reasons this episode was so good. Listen here.
šļøRoss Sutherland is always making these mind-blowingly creative pieces for Imaginary Advice that make me say, āthatās it, heās outdone himself, heās thought of everything. He surely must be out of ideas.ā But you guys, he never is. When will I learn? The last episode of the year is a Christmas episode, a jump into the (fictional) 1993 Super Nintendo game Christmas Carol. The way it begins is just plain fun, especially if you have nostalgia for old video games. You are playing Scrooge as he battles the ghost of his past, present, and future. (āThe ghost of Christmas past has brought a T. Rex through a portal. Heās wearing a little paper crown, which is adorable.ā āNow heās flying into a ghost rage! Heās doing one of his chain attacks, which is tough to dodge.ā) Ross brings up a good pointāthese ghosts were blessed with infinite memory, infinite foresight, the omnipotence of a god, and what do they decide to do? They try to convince a single old man that capitalism is bad. Well spoiler alert, in this episode you win the game, so now youāre in charge. The end of this episode takes you down a new path. How could the ghosts have really pushed back on the evils of capitalism? I cannot wait for Hallmark to turn this into a Christmas movie. Listen here.
šļøIn 2024 we got the first episode of Nichole Hillās Our Ancestors Were Messy, an official Tribeca selection. Nichole is telling Black history stories focusing on the people who brought the drama, reading society pages and gossip columns of popular pre-Civil Rights era Black newspapers with a guest. Nichole is a masterful storyteller, the way she pulls us through episode one (the love story of one of America's first Black power couples Drs. Anna and Percy Julian) is a bit like the hugely popular Normal Gossip. Itās full of really juicy details that make you able to do more than just see the stories, and as Nichole pulls you along she sort of makes it a truly a choose-your-own-adventure experience. (āWhat would you do?ā) One difference, itās absolutely true. And there is real attention to the sound. This is a genius idea for a show on multiple levels, we are just lucky itās done with so much care. Listen here.
šļøOkay so what am I describing?: A killer whale is suspended in the air, a boy stands beneath, his fist triumphantly in the air. ā¦ ā¦ ā¦ Itās the poster for Free Willy! That is whatās at the center of The Good Whale, a podcast from Serial Productions hosted by Daniel AlarcĆ³n. It wouldnāt surprise anyone today that a large corporation would be abusing a whale, but back in 1993 when Free Willy was released, it only brought awareness to the plight of Keiko, the star whale who played Willy, and his tiny prison, an amusement park in Mexico City. Fans of the movie were pissed. How hard could it be to free Keiko? We freed Willy! Turns out you canāt just open the door and say best of luck Keiko, itās very hard. And that is what The Good Whale is aboutāthe wild things experts had to do to free an orca that became a symbol for the ocean itself. This show has beautiful production, it is measured and slow paced, methodically takes us through the whole story. I wrote in my notes that it sounds like a sad song. And speaking of songs, episode five encompasses a time after Keiko had been released, when scientists did not know where he was. Instead of just saying āit sucks that nobody knew where Keiko wasā they had Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who for, among other things, Dear Evan Hansen and La La Land, take the little we know about where Keiko started and how he ended up, and for one song, imagine what might have happened to him in that time in between, and how it felt to him. I would love to know whose idea this was, to have been a fly on the wall during these meetings. What a creative idea to make a podcast that was already so strong something completely innovative and memorable. Listen here.
šļøI wouldnāt consider myself a sports fan, and I especially would not consider myself a baseball fan, but I will listen to anything Richard Parks III makes, and his new podcast Dodger Blue Dream, a documentary of the Dodgerās 2024 season made in real time, is proof that he can dazzle me no matter the topic. This is an animated storytelling podcast packed with humor and Richardās love of baseball allows him to kind of be my tour guide for the sport, the person who isolates the interesting things Iād be missing otherwise, or the tiny moments of magic and science and athleticism that happen on baseball fields. All of these episodes are gems but for āShohei's Breathā (an episode born from a question submitted from a listener) Richard somehow unspools an entire story from a tiny thing like the observation that Shohei Ohtani might be holding his breath when he swings. Itās a little like an episode of Starlee Kineās Mystery Show, completely brought alive with Richardās trademark sound. Itās 16 minutes of perfection. Listen here.
šļøI love you!
šPodcast Tink Lovesš Legacy, Lyrics & Life
Have you ever thought about the kind of legacy you want to leave behind - and how to start creating it, intentionally, every day? Shawna Wells has, and sheās made it her lifeās mission to help others do the same. Legacy, Lyrics & Life features Shawnaās expertise on legacy planning, blended with life lessons learned through songs. Deeply personal conversations and reflections of her own are paired with stories from inspiring change makers and their passion for creating impact that lasts far beyond their lifetime. Listeners will learn about the seven generation principle - a guiding philosophy for building a meaningful legacy - and discover how to think deeper, open conversations and spark ideas around living a life of purpose.