🎥 Gretzky-Susan Pelligrino ⚖️ Maxxinistas 🛍️ on-hold ☎️ the wildest of wests 🌵
🍭 👂The pepperoni pizza gets me neither high nor free 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday June 2, 2025. In case this newsletter is too long…I didn’t know this could be a podcast but it IS, Holly made me listen to a celebrity podcast and I cackled, and here’s a 2016 conversation about podcasting that if you’re reading this, you’ll probably be verrrrry interested in.
xoxo
lauren
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Last week I wrote an enthusiastic review for Selects. Signal Hill is its cousin. Jackson Roach and Liza Yeager publish audio documentaries (longform features, in-depth reporting, experimental essays, and more) from contributors across the print and radio landscape. All “episodes” drop in one day, it just feeeeels like a magazine, heavenly for those of us who miss magazines so much. One episode is the credits*, there are FEATURE episodes and PROFILE and DISPATCH episodes. People always ask me my favorite kind of podcast and my answer is always the same: something that makes me say, “I didn’t know that could be a podcast!” I didn’t know this could be a podcast. Jackson and Liza wanted to make an audio project that would appeal to people who thought podcasts were not for them because all they see are celebrities with mics, unoriginal chatcasts, or horrific true crime. This is not that. Each piece is different, there really is something for everyone—an oral history of Black communist organizing in the south during the great depression, dispatches from a military camp in a French farm (the writing on this one is SIIIICK,) a sweet story about a kid and a scientist who make discoveries about interspecies empathy via caterpillars, voices on what it means to fight a genocide in Palestine from New York, and maybe my favorite because it’s the silliest, a dive into a woman’s family text messages. I don’t just love this for the unusual format or for the great storytelling, it’s really the sound, the sound, the sound. So authentically captured. You simply must listen to an episode of Phonograph that really gets into more depth about each story and Jackson and Liza’s process. Signal Hill, what a gift.
*oh, the credits! To make things feel cohesive, the episodes are introduced by one of the creators from a different feature—they all workshopped pieces together. Each piece ends with a reading of the credits, and the creators were told to record them in a place where they liked the sound of that place. I LEARNED ALL OF THIS FROM THE EPISODE OF PHONOGRAPH!!!
notes
✨Growing Your Podcast with the Perfect Ad Spend IS TOMORROW. Sign up here.
✨Tribeca is coming up June 4-15. Get your tickets here and if you go let me know so we can hang out.
✨As pert of Tribeca, Talia Augustidis is hosting an In the Dark performance Tuesday, June 10th at 5:30pm. More information and tickets here.
✨Arielle spotlighted Impact After Hours in EarBuds.
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Brea Grant and Mallory O'Meara
Brea Grant and Mallory O'Meara are the co-hosts of Reading Smut.
Can you describe Reading Smut in 10 words or less?
Mallory O’Meara: It's a show about horny books and people who love them.
Smut, or erotica rather, has been around for such a long time. What makes this a lucrative time to talk about it? Why are you making this podcast specifically at this point in time?
MO: We were seeing, especially with Reading Glasses, how much readers love these books. There's so much shame around these books, even though they are the most popular books right now. These books are getting massive print runs, they're hitting bestseller lists, they're buzzy on TikTok, they're going viral. But still there's this sort of air around them of like, oh, they're trash. They’re guilty pleasures. But, we don't see them as that. We want to treat these books like the important literature that we think they are. There's a lot of really great romance podcasts, but there's not too many that are about smut specifically. The show was Brea’s idea. She was like, why don't we talk about these smutty books?
Brea Grant: I think the origins of it was because we both have a lot of friends who are very intelligent, smart, high-powered people with difficult jobs who were reading a ton of books that were smut or smut adjacent. That got me curious and made me start reading some. I think that we're kind of trying to figure out on the show is like what is interesting about these books at this exact moment for people who might normally read a literary fiction book but are and so are picking up a smut in addition to that or maybe even instead and what is that what is that reflecting in our culture.
SS: If your podcast was a person, how would they dress?
MO: They wouldn't dress. They would be nude. Or perhaps a loincloth?
BG: Or a nice silk robe.
SS: What was the first smutty book that you both read?
BG: My entrance into the world, which is not like a true smutty book, was Sarah J. Mass books. I think those are the ones that sort of blew up on TikTok, and started a lot of this for a lot of people.
MO: I've actually been reading romance since I was a teenager. For people who started reading romance really young, I think everyone has their own dealer. For a lot of people, that's a female family member –a mom, a grandma, an aunt. But, for me it was my friend – Tina. Shoutout Tina! She was and is still very into romance novels, and started letting me borrow them. I don't remember my very first one, but I do remember one that I really, that really hit me. It was The Enchantment by Betina Krahn.
What’s one thing you learned while making Reading Smut?
BG: One thing we started to realize was that there were certain books being stigmatized, and that included romance. So, we started picking up more romance and also books that are considered like beach reads or not obviously smart, but considered feminine. So, we started trying to read those books to see why people were saying this. We realized they actually have a lot of good to them.
MO: Reading occupies a very interesting space in the media landscape because it's elevated–elevated above video games, TV, and movies. It’s considered the highest intellectual form of entertainment. I think that's why these books get stigmatized and looked at as trash (and make people mad) because it's reading but it's reading for fun and entertainment. They are not looked at as real books or real literature, because these literary snobs are like, hold on, you're not supposed to be having fun here. What are you doing? That is the antithesis of our ethos.
Do you have any embarrassing smut-reading moments that you have had yourself that you've never shared with anyone before?
BG: I remember I was reading a Sarah Kuhn book for Reading Glasses. It was a romance and fantasy book. I had to learn how to shape these conversations without people thinking I'm horny at this exact moment.
MO: One time I was reading 120 Days of Sodom on a family trip. That's not quite erotica, but it's not not erotica. When a family member asked me– what are you reading? I said it’s about a man on a journey. Which is not incorrect.
BG: If you think about it, most books are about somebody on a journey, you know?
MO: And just how many boobs they see along the way.
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
👂Dr Lilli Cooper is a surgeon who is looking at the science behind tiny pleasures in her podcast Tiny Human Things. Like, episode one, about rainbows, examines why rainbows bring us joy and what that says about us. Scenery Studios (Lowlines and The Long Time Academy) made it, so you know the dedication to sound here is just obsessive. The combination of smart, human, poetic, and meditative sound makes it feel like if Brené Brown, Radiolab and Love+Radio had a threeway and someone got pregnant but no one knows who the birth parent is. Lina Prestwood knows how to make things that make you feel like you are somewhere else, and with Tiny Human Things, is helping open up new worlds to something you’ve seen many times (a rainbow) but never truly thought about before. This episode is not one thing but a collage of voices like scientists and the sister of the Double Rainbow guy. It’s nerdy and springy, the funnest academic lecture about why considering the rainbow will make you calmer and more satisfied even as the world erupts around you. You’ll find it on the Pilot Season feed, an initiative created by Bernard Achampong at We Are Unedited, which acts as an industry shop window for new shows (attn: network folks and funders!) Listen here.
How I discovered it: Email from Lina
👂I do not like celebrity podcasts. I mean, I believe that Amy Poehler’s Good Hang is technically good, I liked what I heard and think it’s well done and that Amy Poehler is amazing blah blah blah. But I’d rather hear about other things. Holly, who works with me at Tink and is also a good friend, recommended a specific episode to me and when people do this I obey. She said that it was with Mike Schur, the guy behind Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Office, The Good Place, and more. These are all shows I have never seen. But Holly told me that something Mike and Amy talked about, a creative project they worked on together, reminded her of something I would do. And as a narcissist, I will definitely listen to something if you make it about me somehow. So I listened, very skeptically, on a walk somewhere and had to stop several times to cackle, especially during the part when Mike explains why and how everyone on the shows he works on have absolutely crazy names. (Ssassandra Ssassnorp, Mona-Lisa Saperstein, Trodd Frankensteip, and my favorite, Gretzky-Susan Pelligrino.) The episode opens with a pretty good conversation about creativity (creative enterprises are always in either creative or survival mode; acting is hard and actually embarrassing) that made me wonder if I should start listening to more celebrity podcasts. But then Mike and Amy talked about Philly Justice, a fake show they really, actually wrote and filmed a trailer for with the Parks and Rec cast in secret, based on a throwaway joke one of them made on set. They used NBC resources to make it, with zero plans to do anything with it. This wasn’t made to go viral on the internet, to pitch as another series, to use as bonus content for anything. They made it because they wanted to, and what a wonderful thing—a piece of art made just to be made. Imagine if we could always make content based on joy like this! You can hear joy in Amy and Mike’s voices talking about it. It is a hilarious conversation. This episode includes the world premier of the trailer, so you can watch it on YouTube or, as Amy surprisingly suggests, just listen to it, because imagining what everyone is doing in the trailer is pretty funny, too. (But you have to watch the trailer to see Adam Scott and Kathryn Hahn kiss.) Adam Scott and Rashida Jones join the conversation and we get to hear them watch the trailer together. Kathryn Hahn is adorably late to the Zoom, joining in the last, like few minutes. This episode is a beautiful mess and I love every single thing about it, most of all the authentic laughing. I have to be honored that this idea for this stupid show made Holly think of me, but that’s giving me too much credit. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Holly made me
👂Debt Heads, the money show that is so good it gets me to listen to something I usually don’t like to think about, posted a new episode. Their schedule has not been predictable and I know that’s something that usually irritates listeners, but it’s really keeping me on my toes and I love the feeling I get when I see it in my feed. The latest takes us to the mall, and then specifically TJ Maxx. With crystal clarity we hear the ambiance, it’s a shopping trip with Jamie, Rachel, and Jamie’s mom and grandmother. Three generations of shoppers! We’re not just there to flip through the racks, we are there to learn about why we like shopping so much and how some of us have been trained to want new things. Jamie and Rachel could have told us why, but instead we get to hear it and feel it in our bones—the girls are bonding, connecting, they have purpose, they imagine things, they find beauty, and they spend…time together. That stuff is free. Do we have to go shoppng to do these things? Do we have to spend money? To answer this question Jamie and Rachel talk to someone who is an expert about when it comes to our relationships with the material world (this is so cool…she works in the intersection of house work, the mass market for consumer goods, and trash) who takes us through the history of wanting things via some great clips from Anne of Green Gables, introduces us to the demon who is Paul Mazur (“man’s desire must overshadow his needs!”) and explains the difference between planned obsolescence and the psychological kind. Listen here.
How I discovered it: First saw on Apple Podcasts then realized Jamie and Rachel had emailed me about it also and I hadn’t seen.
👂Supercontext hasn’t had an episode in more than five years, but it’s extremely listenable and when I saw all the episode offerings I got that “oh goody goody” feeling I get when I see a lot of stuff I want to buy at Target. Billed as an autopsy of different kinds of media, these are deeeeep dives. Charlie Bennett (librarian and radio producer) and Christian Sager (writer and graphic designer) are hosts. The 2016 episode about podcasting will be a ride down memory lane for many of you. Charlie and Christian talk about the history of the medium, how good 2016 was for podcasting and why they saw good things to come (“there’s this new thing called dynamic ad insertion!”) their predictions for advertising (oddly prophetic, they predict that we will be able to call out to devices to play our favorite podcasts and that the voice will be Scarlett Johansson,) mention some of your old friends like Infinite Dial and Audio Metric (“they call it Megaphone now!”) and Panoply. They talk through the tech and what the listener landscape was like back in 2016, too. (“Pandora is the most popular radio streaming service, and Serial is available on it!”) It truly is a 2016 audio time capsule into 2016, voices from the past whispering into our ears what it was like to podcast in the wildest of wests. You will like this episode, and the whole show. So many subjects to choose from! Listen here.
How I discovered it: Alison Florence Orr (Podcast Review) recommended it to me when I saw her in London
👂If you’re wondering what Jonathan Goldstein and his Heavyweight team were doing in between the time they were fired by Spotify and hired by Pushkin, you’ll be interested in the bonus episodes they’ve been dropping, like crumbs leading us back into the Heavyweight forest. They were, it turns out, creating audio stories for one another to keep in touch, and we get to hear them. The one I want to point out is brought to us by Stevie, who spent her time off on hold with customer service, and she created a piece about her family and relationship and the actual experience of doing it that was so expertly done it was like gold appearing out of thin air. Her piece on such a simple thing, waiting on hold, exhibits beauty and poetry and magic, it started making me think that there is beauty and poetry and magic fucking everywhere but because I’m not a Heavyweight producer I’m not always seeing it. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Longtime listener
👂THERE ARE SO MANY MOVIE PODCASTS so you have to trust me that when I bring one to you it’s great, and stands out, and That Aged Well does. Hosts and pop culture fanatics Paul and Erika watch movies from their childhood and wonder how bad they should feel about loving them. I really go to That Aged Well for Paul and Erika. They are outrageously funny and just have a way with words that stops me sometimes. These are creative, funny people with great chemistry. You feel like they’ve known each other since in utero. Go pick a movie that speaks to you, I’m obviously going to recommend the Father of the Bride episode because I’m predictable. Listening to them basically run through the entire film with their sharp commentary is almost as fun as watching the movie for the first time. They nail Martin Short’s accent, perfectly villainize Nina and Annie, and find real empathy for George. There is a loooong extended section where they give multiple solutions for what they’d do if they got caught looking through their future son-in-laws parents’ bank books. If these references don’t mean anything to you, it sounds like you need to watch Father of the Bride. At the end, I was crying right along with Erika. To quote Paul, “the voiceovers snipe your emotional life as best they can.” Listen here.
How I discovered it: Tink client! BUT true love for this show, plus Shreya threatened to murder me if I didn’t listen to this episode in particular.
👂On Outward, Slate’s queer podcast, Christina Cauterucci interviewed Erik Piepenburg, author of Dining Out, a new book that explores the history of gay restaurants in the United States. I don’t write about these kinds of episodes all the time because sometimes interviews feel like too-easy lifts, even if they are not hosted by celebrities. But I am such a fan of Christina as a host, and the topic stopped me when I saw it in my feed. We think of gay bars all the time, but what about gay restaurants? Food is so personal yet so communal. Of course restaurants play an important role in gay culture, too. Erik explains what a gay restaurant is, how you know you’re in one, and why they’re important. It seems like such a beautiful thing, made even more beautiful by the way restaurants can turn into queer spaces because of the people who attend them. I had never considered how good it would feel if you were queer just to be in a restaurant that also felt safe, especially if you go back in history, as Erik does, when people thought they would get AIDS and die from eating at a restaurant with a queer person in it. This interview ended and I thought, “I want more” so I bought the book. Listen here.
How I discovered it: I think I heard it promoted on an episode of The Waves back when that was around.
👂Surely one of the most talked-about podcast episodes ever is that one time Tom Hanks was on Dead Eyes. The Bechdel Cast pulled a similar move by booking Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist who helped create The Bechdel Test (a measure of gender representation in fiction,) which is the entire premise of The Bechdel Cast. Who knows if Jamie and Caitlin thought the show would get big enough, or run long enough, to land Alison. They thank her for not being mad at them for making a show based on the test (that she promises us she did not create—she credits her friend Liz Wallace and it must be a marketing thing as to why “Bechdel” is the name that stuck.) Alison takes us through her life and the history and evolution of the test, what its relevance is today. (Jamie and Caitlin have had to tweak the test for the show themselves, realizing that the original test, a true relic of the 80s, is not terribly inclusive.) This is a golden conversation about media and what you’ve been listening to is all about, if you’ve been listening to The Bechdel Cast all these years like I have. I can remember, in 2017, going to the basement of a pizza place in Brooklyn at midnight to see The Bechdel Cast live. There were like 15 people in attendance, one of them was Justin, who was like “what is this?” I creepily brought Jamie Loftus a jar of strange shaped gummies?? Years later I went to see them again, it was a sold-out show in The Bell House. (And at this point a big problem in my marriage is that Justin is team Dry Scabs and I am team Wet Scabs, IYKYK.) So this is a congratulations post to The Bechdel Cast for achieving a strange level of success that most podcasts can only dream of, and it is a reminder to all of you to go listen to it. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Started following Jamie Loftus when she was butt chugging Infinite Jest.
👂Americans are famously ignorant about European news, I am guilty of this, too. Sometimes I feel so woefully behind that I feel overwhelmed, it’s like trying to get into The Real Housewives. Who are the main characters and whom am I to hate? What happened on the last girls trip? I mean, I originally clicked on The Europeans because I loved the cover art and assumed it was a storytelling podcast, not a news podcast. But now I’m obsessed. Katy Lee, a journalist based in Paris, and Dominic Kraemer, an opera singer in Amsterdam, come together to cover everything from elections and climate policy to the best new European films and TV shows. There are fun segments like "good week; bad week," in-depth interviews, and "happy ending" recommendations, which make things serious and smart but really fun. Episodes like “What the hell just happened in Romania AND Eurovision” and “is a pregnant nun about to crash Poland’s selection" give you a sense of the vibes here. We want to know but we want to gossip at the same time. Listen here.
How I discovered it: I have been subscribed a long time but just started listening
👂I love you!
~friend of the newsletter~
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