🎧 German techno DJ roommates 🪦 unmarked graves 👅 y’all 👠 shoe divas 🍸
🍭 👂 TRUST ME! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, October 2. In case this newsletter is too long…your dream home comes with a German techno DJ roommate here, you know the Shoe Diva when you see her here, Nury Martinez speaks here.
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Seraphina Malina-Derben
Seraphina Malina-Derben (she/her) is a child. She’s been called a young social impact hero and an upstart (by her co-triplet siblings). She began the podcast Seraphina Speaks ~ for Children who Think aged seven. By eight she’d won her first podcast award. She’s now ten years old. Her neurodiversity is an asset. Follow Seraphina here. Sign up for her newsletter here.
Describe Seraphina Speaks in 10 words or less.
A tween side-eying everyday social norms and ordinary things.
Why did you start your podcast?
My mum made podcasting look easy. I was seven trying to not interrupt her interviews. I wanted a slice of what she was having. Turned out it was harder than I thought. I had to have my own podcast because I had no idea where to home my opinions.
How do you make your podcast?
It’s a love thing between me, my mum and our editor. I’m usually in my pyjamas when we record. My mum just about hangs onto her mental health by the time each episode is done. I often say she’s a legend. Seriously, I do. Most kids of my age would be able to read notes fluently before recording but my particular neurodiversity makes this tough, at the moment.
What has been your favorite episode? Where should people start?
My personal favourite is a tie between my early episode on the Queen and one of my newest called Being a Tween: Hair. The first because I’m so young and feisty. The second because it’s badass.
The way to start listening is this. Scan Seraphina Speaks episode titles. When you get a little hit of “ooh I wonder what angle she goes for”, click play and there you go. Repeat.
Fill in the blank: you will like Seraphina Speaks if you like ______.
The sun shining - on your face, across a room, and to make rainbows.
What do you hope your podcast does for people?
I hope it makes changes in the way people think about things. I want the show to start up conversations about things that might seem ordinary or taken for granted. Sometimes it’s the boring things that need air space. It takes just one person to make a difference and have positive impact.
Where do you keep the award you won?
You want the truth? I named my Golden Crane Award Jeffrey. He lives in a glass fronted cupboard in our drawing room. Jeffrey sits above the shelf where we keep Sammy the stuffed kittiwake. Make of that what you will.
What did you do to celebrate your win?
I was pretty quiet about my podcast win at the time. It was in Covid times. I’m owed a party.
Do you think you’ll always be a podcaster?
It depends. I’m quite happy with it right now. No-one can see the future. But between you and me I think I’ve a future in podcasting.
Give us a hot take. Spray cheese is an abomination. Wait, most people will agree with that.
Self-care ritual:
This isn’t something I’ve thought about much but it’s easy to answer as I live it.
Not being too tired has to be first.
Making sure my bed is cosy so that I can sleep easily is next.
Creating enough time so that I can think to myself is a must.
My arms and legs have to be warm enough so I make sure they’re covered when they need to be.
Having a flow of daily compliments brings happiness - compliments to others and to me.
Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you want to say?
It’s not a question for me but I have one for you Lauren. Who would you recommend as a mentor for a progressive child podcaster on a mission to do far reaching good in the world with their podcast?
Tagging Bridget Todd!
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
My Friday mornings are usually spent listening to new album drops, and last Friday I got what felt like the biggest album drop of all. The Have You Heard George’s Podcast? feed has been dormant for two years, but now we have George, the Peabody-winning London-born spoken word performer, back. The piece is about Ghana, the first African country to break free from colonial rule, and Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, who helped pave the way to Ghana’s independence. The first time I listened I let my mind wander around inside of it. It’s epically beautiful and dreamlike. I felt like I was floating in The Night Kitchen. It’s twenty-three minutes long but spans decades and feels timeless. The second listen I realized how devastating and hopeful it was. I wrote in my notes…
hell yeah
✨Read my latest Lifehacker piece 12 Podcasts With the Best Listener Communities.
✨I want to be famous. Who Weekly’s Lindsey Bobby mentioned ☝️ Lifehacker article on the show, crunch crunch.
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Past Perfect in her newsletter and podcast.
✨I tried to watch Based on a True Story and I experienced Rep Sweats for the first time. If you don’t know what that means, no, I will not use the Explanatory Comma to explain. And yes, I did learn both of those words in Code Switch.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Avery Trufelman was on Nymphet Alumni to talk about fashion intellectualism—I felt like I was in conversation frenzy, surrounded by four people who have the smartest takes on what clothes meant, mean, and will mean, all bouncing off one another. (They talk fashion as media and media as fashion, indie sleaze, occasion dressing, the Antwerp Six, digital fashion, and so much more.) Nymphet Alumni always make mood boards for their episodes, and their episodes sound like mood boards. They’re tornadoes of thinking. Listen that here. I was also excited about their episode on Shoe Divas, something I lived through in New York City in the 2000s. The Shoe Diva aesthetic is very Skinny Girl cocktail, very Sex in the City, very fashion drawings—think Eloise for women in their 30s and 40s. You know. They wonder where the aesthetic for these women is now. (We’ve “taken the olive out of the Shoe Diva martini and put it in the girl dinner,” which is sad.) Alexi, Biz, and Sam talk about wanting more 40-year-old friends, and I’d love to apply. Listen to that here.
🎙️Toure had a great interview with Tremaine Emory about why he quit Supreme after a little more than a year. My favorite part was hearing about how his dad taught him to be an artist. Listen here.
🎙️Somewhere near the western end of Long Island Sound, in the northeastern Bronx, lies Hart Island or “potter’s field,” America’s largest public cemetery. (More than a million souls are at rest, with no headstones. Just numbers.) It’s an island full of mysteries, and Radio Diaries is exploring some of them for a short series called The Unmarked Graveyard. The first story is a guy who became known well by locals of Manhattan’s Riverside Park as Stephen, for sitting on the same bench every day. In 2017 an unidentifiable body was found in New York—meanwhile, locals started noticing that Stephen was gone. It took a random park goer to connect the dots and find his true identity. Radio Diaries gets to know Stephen, his real name and identity, the mark he made on New York, and the people he left behind. I listened to this episode with bated breath. It makes you think about every person you pass on the street, or see sitting on a park bench. Listen here.
🎙️Animals are taking over the Everything is Alive feed for a five episode special series starring a beaver, a jellyfish, a flamingo, and more. The first episode interviews is a double doozie—starring kangaroos Joseph, and his mom Melissa. Joseph seems to be in some kind of failure to launch situation, refusing to leave his mom’s pouch. (He keeps his favorite posters up there.) And the woman wants to date! These two could have gone on Dr. Phil, but instead they went to Ian Chillag, and in true form, the conversation was funny but also touching and thoughtful. (There’s a beautiful part about how Joseph found his way to his mom’s pouch—have you ever thought of that? Or the fact that male kangaroos are called “boomers?”) These pieces always take me to this imaginative part of my brain that I didn’t know existed. It’s revived every time I hear Ian talk to his inanimate and now animal friends. I have noticed that this is one of those podcasts that comes up often when you ask someone with good taste “what’s your favorite podcast?” It’s absolutely worshipped, and I love this fun spin. Listen here.
🎙️On Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest, Adam Gidwitz presents classic fairy tales to real kids who share live reactions, and it packed my soul with so much cuteness I thought I was going to explode. First of all, I love these stories, and the beautiful way they are interpreted on Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest. But Adam has these smart conversations with the kids about how they relate to the stories, what they would do if they were to stumble upon an abandoned cabin in the woods, what makes them afraid. I feel like I was sitting on the floor of a children’s library with my head craned up. You know? It’s enjoyable for adults, kidults, and I wish it had been around when I was small. Listen here.
🎙️Remember Nury Martinez? She’s the former LA City Council President who had to step down after a recording of a conversation between her and three of the most powerful Latinos in LA politics was leaked. (I’m a lady and do not feel comfortable quoting her.) Imperfect Paradise has launched a four-part series called Nury & The Secret Tapes, where Antonia Cereijido takes us through the whole scandal, painting a picture of what really happened and also what it felt like to be someone who was targeted in Martinez’s rants. Antonia also sits down with Martinez to try to figure out what Martinez was thinking, and how the incident impacted her life. It’s juicy and raw and sparks conversation about anti-Black racism and colorism in the Latino community. Listen here.
🎙️Happy goddam Banned Book Week, this one’s a big one. (Last year, over 2,500 books were challenged in US libraries, the highest number in over 20 years.) In response, the Brooklyn Library announced Books Unbanned, a program that gave any teen who wrote to them access to their entire digital collection. All they had to do was write in. Over 6,500 teens have responded so far, with terrifying stories of attacks on our intellectual freedom. For a true-crimey series of Borrowed, they’re opening up these emails, these stories, to us. In episode one we hear from a high school teacher in Norman, Oklahoma who shared a Books Unbanned QR code with her students, putting her job at risk. What started by one teacher’s statement turned into a movement. Get a library card if you don’t have one (I recently tried to get a library card from my childhood library, the Hudson Library, and they said I owed them thousands of dollars because I never returned How to Draw Horses, which I borrowed in 1992…this is probably not a story I should be telling right now) and listen here.
🎙️You are NOT going to believe this but German techno DJ Flula Borg was trying to make a TV sitcom called Flula Makes Five, about The Roberts family, who just moved into their new dream house but didn’t know the house came with said German techno DJ, who is now living with them, too. Somehow while filming, the lens caps were’t removed from any of the cameras, so now Flula Makes Five is a podcast, and I couldn’t be happier. I love a show with a backstory, and Flula Makes Five makes you feel like you’re sprawled out on your couch eating nachos in the 90s. Or whatever your version of “complete TV-watching comfort” is. (There is a laugh track.) The writing is packed with jokes, and as always, Flula’s slightly-off way of phrasing everything makes even the non-jokes funny. Sitcoms are a dying breed. This is a real treat. Listen here.
🎙️I kept reading about the recent Hasan Minhaj debacle but refused to take even two seconds to look into it. For the best episode of Infamous yet, Natalie talks to the reporter who wrote about it for the New Yorker, Clare Malone. It’s a story about “emotional truth,” but also how Clare cracked the case. (I wondered about this, turns out she simply talked to “Brother Eric,” the F.B.I. informant who infiltrated Hasan’s family’s mosque in 2002—and was the star of some of Hasan’s fables he told in “The King’s Jester.”) Hasan made Clare meet her in a comedy club in the West Village—a strategic move. This article was great and important, but hearing Clare unfold the story behind the story was better. Listen here.
🎙️The Broadside is a brand spankin’ new show that shares nuanced news, art, and culture stories from the South and how their impacts make a ripple across the country. It starts with a fascinating language piece about the word y’all, a word once scoffed as stereotypical Southern or a supercharged word in hip hop, but that’s now being adapted despite the fact that regional accents are disappearing. There are so many reasons—it can be used as a much-needed second person plural pronoun, to indicate that someone is not in your camp (“So y’all are saying that Beyonce is overrated?” to come before a complaint, (“y’all, I’m exhausted”) and as a gender-neutral kind of inclusive pronoun. It’s the Great Migration, it’s living in a kinder world, it sounds nice, it makes sense. But as Antonia Randolph points out, we are good at stealing things from Black culture. (“Blackness without Black bodies is cool.”) Y’all may be loaded with Southernness and Blackness, but in the end it’s Blackness that might make it stick. I have adopted “you all,” because I didn’t feel like I earned my Southern card—I don’t feel Southern and don’t want to seem inauthentic…but this piece has changed my thinking. Listen here.
🎙️The way Uncanny host Danny Robins talks about ghosts sounds very much like the way Gordon Ramsey talks about cooking. (Except he’s a whole lot nicer.) It isn’t just the accent, it’s because of his passionate curiosity and skepticism and bewilderment as to what he is experiencing. He’s investigating real-life stories of paranormal encounters with the people who encountered them, listening very carefully, and poking some holes into what he hears with scientists to see if there is any explanation that could turn the ghost story into JUST a very weird story or a story that reflects our collective subconsciousness. The first story of the new season is about a teenager (she’s not a teenager anymore) who saw a blue man in her bedroom. Was he cold? Sad? Tied to the property? Or part of a mythology that makes him not real, but very interesting. Listen here.
🎙️My mom put me in swim camp when I was three because she was afraid of water and didn’t want me to be, and swimming became a huge, all-encompassing part of my life. But it’s not something I hear people talking about. Physical Capital just started a series hosted by Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell, the first Black woman to swim for Great Britain, about the human relationship with swimming—what draws us to it, how do we use it, what do we gain from it, and what it can take from us. What started as a necessity (imagine the first people who attempted to really do it!) and has become something people do for leisure and fun. What makes certain people better at it, what makes it more accessible to others, and how it is shaped by gender, politics, and race, is a rich place to investigate. I’m listening with interest to better understand this sport and to better understand myself. Listen here.
🎙️This week B the Way Forward dropped, a podcast that has Brenda Darden Wilkerson, President and CEO of AnitaB.org, exploring innovative solutions and groundbreaking ideas that are redefining the tech industry with leaders in the field. You’ll love episode one, which features Podcast the Newsletter fan favorite Bridget Todd, who touches upon digital defiance, biases in tech, and reclaiming our digital narrative. How? Remembering that we are not victims. Tech companies need us. It’s a reminder not to just lie down and let tech injustices stomp all over us. Listen here.
🎙️ICYMI had a great episode on Bobbi Althoff and how her podcast might have been funny but it also might be growing tiresome. Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
[From May 4 2020] If you take one thing away from this issue of Podcast The Newsletter, let it be this: listen to Mob Queens, a show about women and drag queen mobsters. I don’t listen to a lot of history or true-crime shows, but Mob Queens feels different. One reason is because of the hosts. Jessica Bendinger (writer, Bring It On) and Michael Seligman (writer, RuPaul’s Drag Race) are best friend armchair investigators diving head-first into a hugely under-recorded topic for the first season of Mob Queens: the story of Anna Genovese, a New York drag club maven, self-styled entrepreneur and bad-ass mob wife. Jessica and Michael do an A+ job conducing their research, and in a way this podcast is a model for other people trying to launch their own true-crime investigation. They look at primary sources, track down Anna’s family members, and take lessons from other investigators, to be sure they’re going about things the right way. It’s not just a story about the mob, it’s a story of queer New York City. I always knew the mob supported gay bars, and were the reason gay bars were able to thrive, but I had no idea that this was because of Anna, who has such a complicated story and actually had a girlfriend for a few decades. The writing on this show is fantastic, and the show is just so much fun, so New Yorkey! When I listen to Mob Queens, I feel like I’m running around New York City with Jessica and Michael. Anna’s drag club was located at my neighborhood movie theater, across the street from my old apartment. And when that club was shut down, she opened another one a few hundred feet away from where I live now. I was walking in Washington Square Park, listening to Jessica and Michael talk about Anna living on the park (her neighbor was Eleanor Roosevelt,) and part of my brain thought I would bump into Jessica and Michael running around in detective coats, with magnifying glasses. The episodes of Mob Queens rolled by, I gobbled them up immediately. Each episode held its own show-stopping surprise, including the facts that Anna may have been an FBI informant, and that she worked with Mario Puzo to inspire his writing The Godfather. The storytelling feels real and gratifying. And I mean please, Anna Genovese is FASCINATING and nobody has written a goddam thing about her. THIS IS HER TIME.
From the Desk of Tink
Today we’re talking to Jamil Simon of Making Peace Visible.
Describe Making Peace Visible in ten words or less: Shining a light on stories of peace and reconciliation globally
Who is the podcast for, and what do you want people to get out of it? Making Peace Visible is a podcast for people who are weary of the media's overwhelming focus on violent conflict, often portrayed in sensationalist and inflammatory news coverage. While war and violence frequently steal the headlines, compelling stories of peacebuilding and reconciliation remain largely untold.
Our podcast seeks to bridge that gap, helping listeners see conflict in a different way, one that celebrates the heroic efforts of individuals and communities working towards reconciliation and understanding. We speak with journalists, peacebuilders, filmmakers, and scholars who have covered these stories and provide insight into the human side of peace and conflict. Our goal is to help reshape perceptions, presenting peacebuilding as a viable practice that makes achieving peace an attainable reality.
What do you mean when you say ‘Making Peace Visible’? A few years ago, I set out to make a documentary about a remarkable story of a successful peacebuilding program in Burundi, a tiny African country next door to Rwanda that suffered from the same sort of ethnic violence as Rwanda. When I was seeking funds to make the film, people asked me, "What is peacebuilding? And where is Burundi?” The fact that so few people know what peacebuilding is concerned me, and it should concern anyone who thinks peace is better than war, which I’m guessing includes most of humanity!
When you think of peace, you might imagine two leaders shaking hands and signing a treaty, but rarely do we learn what led up to that moment, or what followed. Those are important stories, and hearing them can educate us all about the nuts and bolts of how peace gets made, the resources it requires and how to sustain it. But sadly, the media rarely covers these powerful stories. That’s why I started this podcast, as an effort to help make the practice of peace more visible and more tangible to everyday people.
How does your background as a documentary filmmaker influence your role as a podcast host and interviewer? I’ve been a peace activist and a documentary filmmaker my whole life. I became a conscientious objector at the age of 18 during the Vietnam war. As a filmmaker, one of the things I enjoyed the most is interviewing people. I’ve also worked on promoting reform in 25 developing countries around the world, 14 countries in Africa alone. All of this work – peace activism, documentary filmmaking, and my work in developing countries promoting reform – informs the work I'm doing now as a podcaster.
What has been your favorite audience interaction so far? We’ve been very grateful for the positive feedback we’ve received since starting the podcast. Making Peace Visible was actually born out of an international symposium I hosted at the New York Times Center in 2018 called War Stories Peace Stories: Peace Conflict and the Media. The conference brought together over 400 journalists and peacebuilders to critically assess the integral role the media plays in both peace and conflict. I actually started the podcast as a way to continue these crucial conversations. Recently, I ran into Heba Aly, the former editor of The New Humanitarian who attended our 2018 conference. She shared that our conference actually led to her starting a new project for The New Humanitarian called Beyond the bang bang: Reporting from the front lines of peace, in order to explore what makes societies resilient to conflict and mass violence. Hearing this was a dream come true because it’s the exact kind of response I’ve been hoping to achieve since I began this work, and the kind of response I hope to achieve with our podcast.
If someone is listening to Making Peace Visible for the first time, what is the episode you’d recommend them to start with and why? If you're interested in learning about how peace gets made and unmade and then remade, Colombia is an amazing laboratory. Colombia’s 2016 Peace Agreement between the government and the FARC rebel group put an end to 50 years of violent conflict, yet total peace is a long way off. We just wrapped up our Spotlight Colombia series, and for our last episode we interviewed Elizabeth Dickinson, a former journalist and now senior analyst with The Crisis Group in Colombia. She works on the ground with communities most affected by the civil war, and she and her colleagues facilitate dialogues and make policy recommendations to the government based on info gathered in the field.
I’d also recommend our episode with award-winning American journalist Deborah Douglas. She is the Director of the Midell Midwest Solutions Journalism Hub at Northwestern University in Chicago and talks about journalism as a “brave space” to excavate the impact of America’s racial history on the current moment. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the interview:
“The one embedded bias that we definitely have when we get up every day to cover the news anew is that we're biased for democracy. Let's just admit that. So if you're biased for democracy, then you have to be biased for racial justice, because racial justice is embedded in the democratic promise.” - Deborah Douglas