❤️🔥 Love hoax ⛹️♂️ alley-oop 💊 erowid guys💄Sassy ☔️ weather girls 🤶🏼 Mrs. Claus erasure 🧑🎄
🍭 👂 TRUST ME! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, December 11. In case this issue is too long…this is either a love story or a story of financial abuse, but it’s definitely a fucked up family drama and I’m absolutely addicted to it, my favorite podcast guest on dunks here, if I was a podcast I’d be this.
xoxo lp
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Asa Merritt
Asa Merritt, he/him, is host of Six Sermons. Along with longtime collaborator Matt Kagen, Asa started First Rodeo (@firstrodeoaudio), an audio fiction studio dedicated to pushing the boundaries of genre, combining techniques of journalism and theater.
Describe Six Sermons in ten words or less.
Six Sermons is an American epic about mental health and modern church.
How did making this show change you?
Writing the show helped me reckon with my friend’s suicide (his death inspired the show). Initially, those feelings were so opaque to me, so foreign, so big and unknowable. I still don’t know them all, but since the day I started writing this show, I’ve come to understand a lot more of them. Dramatizing Pastor Alexis’ (the show’s protagonist) grief journey empowered me to have my own.
What is different about the sound that went into making the show?
So much! For the primary dialogue, actors rehearsed and recorded using sets. They had props to buttress their vocal performances, and could move around, to better embody a performance moment. The in-scene foley, accordingly, is much more organic, and the piece has a level of texture you can’t find in shows exclusively designed using SFX. We also field recorded in Dayton, Ohio, partnering with a community theater there. They play the church congregation and bring a very satisfying regionalism to the piece.
Why is this story best told via podcast, and not another form of media?
Prayers work best as audio. Sermons work best as audio (after real sermons in church, at least!). From the jump, this was an audio show. The music native to a church, the sonic potential of Ohio locales…so many of these factors are in the very DNA of the piece.
How did you lose your hearing in one ear?
I had a rare benign tumor in my middle ear that kept growing back despite operations. Eventually, they had to remove a few bones in that ear, which took away all hearing.
How would you describe what your world is like, with the ability to hear with only one ear? Do you listen to things differently?
My world is very loud and very exhausting. We have two ears for two reasons. One is to know where sound is coming from, the other is to focus on one sound amid many. If I misplace my phone, calling it doesn’t help because I don’t know where the ringing is coming from. Formerly simple events, like a coffee out, now require tremendous work. Just imagine that every clanking coffee cup is at equal volume of the friend you’re speaking with. Ultimately, it’s been humbling. Despite youth and health, my ear left me. Bodies fail.
What advice do you have for people who want to work in audio fiction?
If you want to reach a wide audience, think about how we are already trained to listen to audio (how we listen to music, podcasts, audiobooks) and use tried and true tools. Generally, society is still learning to listen to audio fiction. Meet listeners halfway.
If you were going to start another podcast, don’t worry about the logistics or whether or not anyone would like it, your budget is $1M, what would it be?
I’m sitting on a pitch about a fictional overland roadrace. Something like the Baja 1000. It involves a lot of fast cars and terrestrial radio. The $1M version will be the shoe string version, but will still sound amazing.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Carolyn Holland is 80, rich, and a widow, who claims to have fallen in love with a homeless man named David Foute 23 years younger than her who has moved in with her. Is this a love or con story? That’s what Intrigue: Million Dollar Lover is all about. Some (like Carolyn’s daughters, who are not. having it.) claim David has eyes on Carolyn’s fortune. They have reason to be nervous—not only is David much younger, he admits to have being a crystal meth addict and drug dealer who spent time in jail for making pipe bombs that police believed were linked to a possible attack on Walmart. (Dave thinks…still thinks…Walmart was intending to microchip us all.) But is it any of our business if an 80 year old woman finds sex and love? This is more complicated than that. Carolyn’s love for Dave might stem from her own trauma, which is intricately laced to his. This isn’t just a juicy story, the show is great. BBC Journalist Sue Mitchell seems to be the third corner of the love triangle—it’s like Carolyn and Dave have let her live inside their world. She hears and observes everything and talks to everyone. She is absolutely a character in the story. Million Dollar Lover might be a love story, it might be a story of financial abuse, it’s definitely a family drama.
~sponsored~
Visionaries Audio Drama is a fantasy podcast series created by Richard Seneque that tells the tale of privilege, conspiracy, betrayal and rebellion through the lens of its characters. In the year 2185, the world is distinguished by two races – the Visionaries and the Dead-eyes. The Visionary race is the next step in human evolution and have unique eyes, which endow them with special abilities. Humans who cannot evolve become slaves to the Visionaries... until the 'Dead-eyes' rebel, pitting two Visionary brothers against each other in a coming war... You can listen to season one wherever you listen to podcasts. Season two available now!
hell yeah
🎙️Read my latest Lifehacker piece, 12 of the Best Christmas Podcasts to Binge This Holiday Season.
🎙️Read The Podcast Marketing Year-End List 2023 in Podcast Marketing Magic.
🎙️A podcast industry docufilm, Age of Audio is crowd funding.
🎙️Wil Williams, Skye Pillsbury, and Ronald Young Jr were on KQED talking about their favorite podcasts of 2023.
🎙️Let’s Make a Horror…made a horror.
🎙️Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Visionaries Audio Drama in her newsletter and podcast.
🎙️My annual podcast Christmas wreath is here, and it’s beautiful not because I’m crafty but because the shows are so great.
🏆 The International Women’s Podcast Awards awarded Linda Marigliano & Amelia Chappelow’s Linda Marigliano's Tough Love with the Moment of Raw Emotion award.
💎BTW💎
🎙️I don’t know if this is a recommendation for Tell Me About It (it is, I love Tell Me About It) or a recommendation for listening to every single episode Josh Gondelman has guested on. (2 notes: I think I was an early discoverer of Straightiolab, which I found when searching Josh’s name in Spotify, and Josh was the guest on the episode of Normal Gossip that captured my story, and it’s really good.) On Tell Me About It, eccentric billionaire “Adal Rifai” invites people to prove that the thing they love most is better than the film Grease, and his butler Eric (Silver) leads the guest through a series of games, keeping points on the Most Interesting Thing High Score Board. On Josh’s episode, he defends dunks in an argument Adal and Eric compare to “a fourth grader who didn’t prepare for a book report.” Which is perfect. You don’t have to love basketball to fall in love with dunks, and Eric pulls Josh and Adal through this hilarious game in which he invents crazy names of dunks and makes the guys describe what they would be. I’m giving the book report an A+++. Listen here.
🎙️If I were a podcast, I think I’d be Sentimental Garbage, a show that pairs host Caroline O'Donoghue with guests who give a loving ode to something overlooked, basically considered low brow culture. Every single episode has me nodding along or… realizing how much I want to defend Shania Twain to the death. The episode about While You Were Sleeping pointed out all the reasons that I love this film, reasons I hadn’t yet realized. Caroline and guest Sam Sedgman walk us through the “sweaty premise—lots of moving parts—yet it doesn’t feel sweaty” and paint it as a film immune to criticism. “You throw a rock against it and it bounces right off.” While You Were Sleeping isn’t like the other girls. Some people say it’s too ridiculous to be taken seriously, but the directors do take it seriously. It is about how crushing it is to be alone on Christmas. Bill Pullman doesn’t fall in love during a Sandra Bullock makeover scene, he falls in love with her when they are moving a couch. It’s how real love happens, and even though this movie seems too laughable to contain truth, it really, really does. Listen here.
🎙️Theo Henderson started his podcast We the Unhoused while he was unhoused, living in a park in LA’s Chinatown, using only his cellphone. Now, We the Unhoused is an entire advocacy group that includes action, reporting, comics, and the podcast, which has grown to reach listeners all over the world. He is doing all of this in a LA county, where there are more than 66,000 unhoused people (75% of them do not have a permanent shelter,) half of those people experiencing violence on the streets, and anti-homeless laws on the books. All of Theo’s work is about debunking myths that drive policy, giving voice to the people actually impacted by the decisions being made, and helping people envision a better way. The show has been running for awhile, but is back with a little bit of oomph. I discovered this in a post in an Instagram post by Jamie Loftus, who is a producer for the show. On episode one, we hear from Theo how he found himself go from teaching in a classroom to living in that park, starting a podcast with his phone and resources at the public library. Then he talks to Martha Escuerda of Reclaiming Our Homes. Listen here.
🎙️I stumbled upon Guys (I picked it out because I noticed that host Bryan Quinby has on a lot of guests I really like) and on an episode with Jon Gabrus, Bryan mentioned he has a Nu metal podcast and I thought, Jesus how many of those things could there possibly be? John Cullen of Blocked Party has a Nu metal podcast. It’s the same podcast, which is just validation that … well maybe there aren’t enough Nu metal podcasts. But also that this show must be pretty good, because I like John. On it, Bryan talks to guys about different types of guys, it’s a vehicle for funny conversation about niche guy behavior. (Naked guys, rockabilly guys, Kevin Smith guys, loss prevention guys.) The episode about erowid guys had me losing my mind—it could be a whole podcast—guys reading the funniest erowid entries. (For the uninitiated, erowid is a site where commenters leave reviews of their experiences on drugs. It’s something that doesn’t seem so necessary now, but it’s so much fun to hear pretty serious reporting on what it’s like to be “on nutmeg.”) There was also an episode about menswear with Jesse Thorn that I loved. Listen to the erowid episode here.
🎙️From 1988-1994, Jane Pratt’s Sassy was the coolest magazine going for Gen-X teens. On Listen to Sassy, Tara Ariano and Pamela Ribon are reopening the pages, one issue per episode, to relive the columns, essays, and writers. It will really take you back, and the episode notes are fantastic—they take you straight to the stories, and visual aids will make you feel like you’re flipping through the pages of the actual mag. Each episode, like an issue of Sassy, floats around from topics serious (an article called “Boys Who Raped”) to poppy (Texas’s most impressive teen cowgirls!) to topics that still resonate today (what might make you a bad friend.) I miss magazines, and it’s relaxing to have Tara and Pamela read to me and bask in nostalgia for all the trends and headlines that were important to Sassy’s progressive readers. Sassy was that edgy voice teens needed, it was the magazine that made me think, “I didn’t think magazines could be like this!” Listening to Sassy is listening to a time capsule. Listen here.
🎙️In 2011, the blog Gay Girl in Damascus shared the first-person accounts of the Syrian uprising from the perspective of Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari, a gay Syrian-American supposedly living in Damascus. It was compelling, dangerous content, and some people started to suspect it was too compelling. It didn’t take long for people to start to put together pieces of the puzzle that revealed [spoiler alert!!] “Amina” was a straight American man living in Istanbul. Even though the story was completely fabricated, the shake up got people talking about media ethics, the role and responsibility of social media in conflict reporting, and the need for critical evaluation of online sources during times of political upheaval. Gay Girl Gone isn’t just a great and aggravating hoax story, it’s a story about how social media drove energy to the Arab Spring. It had me on the edge of my seat. Listen here.
🎙️Superhuman Public Radio is an audio drama that mimics NPR if you were listening in a superpowered world. If you weren’t listening to the words (which a well-scripted interviews with imprisoned superheroes, reports on insane technology that doesn’t exist…yet,a henchman seeking work…) you’d think you were listening to NPR.It comes to us via segments from different correspondents who have that public radio voice and cadence nailed, parodies of ads that as a podcast listener, you’ve heard a million times (think: Me-Outies—underwear you wear over your superhero costume,) and shows-within-the-show (like 100% Invisible, hosted by Ares Greco.) The production is amazing, it’s taken so seriously that you feel like you’re really getting to hear what living in a future run by super heroes would really be like. Listen here.
🎙️Can you imagine how much it must suck to be a female-identifying meteorologist? First of all, you’re not a meteorologist, you’re a “weather girl.” And then, your entire body is on display, you cannot possibly choose a dress to please the audience (it has to be stylish but not too sexy, it can’t mess up the green screen…not too many repeats!) and nothing you say is taken seriously because people basically view you as a B-grade Vanna White. And that’s today. Seriously has an episode of the history of weather girls, how far they’ve come, and how far they have to go. We get to hear from Sam Fraser, who was featured on a YouTube channel called Babes of Britain and whose ass had its own online fan club. It seems to be a sort of sexual harassment that is not just allowed, but encouraged. This is a great history piece and will make you watch the weather with new eyes. Listen here.
🎙️Dateline is here with a new podcast, Mortal Sin, not hosted by Keith Morrison (he can’t host every podcast in existence, I asked) but yes hosted by who I think is second best, Josh Mankiewicz. It tells the story of this monstrous pastor, Nick Hacheney, who murdered his wife Dawn in a fire. That’s not all, this guy went on to smugly pretend to mourn his wife and then sleep with her best friend and mother. Nick Hacheney is a monster, but I kept getting stuck on the fact that…Dawn’s friend and mom (and others) slept with her husband when she was dead. What must that have looked like? (I’m not picturing them having sex, I’m wondering how they got to that point.) I know they were under his spell, like so many people, but all this just adds to the insanity of the story, it had me screaming at my iPhone. Screaming at your iPhone is fun, and Josh is a the kind of host you want delivering this type of story, which is a dark look at how being a pastor could secure your hold on an entire community of people. Listen here.
🎙️Straightiolab’s Christmas episode featured Matt Rogers and a rollicking conversation about the straightness of Santa Claus. Matt fits so perfectly into this show, it’s like he could be a third co-host. We really let this animal abusing, womanizing Santa guy with a classic male genius narrative off the hook, I guess because he brings us presents. These guys are telling it like it is. This show is always funny, but I’m holding onto this episode (which also touches upon the queerness of the Santa myth) for my collection of great Christmas episodes. Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
From the Desk of Tink
Today we’re talking to Susie Banikarim and Jessica Bennett of In Retrospect.
Describe the show in ten words or less: Our pop culture past, reexamined for the present
Who is it for?: Anyone interested in history, pop culture or gender issues -- and how the cultural moments from our past (80s, 90s and 2000s) shaped how we view the world today, for better or worse.
Which episode to start with?: The swimsuit that spawned a generation of plastic surgery: Pamela Anderson's red one-piece on Baywatch (featuring an appearance by Pam)
Favorite listener interaction: When a man who one of us happens to be married to revealed live on the pod that as a teenager he used to spray Axe Body Spray on his balls (yes, we threw up in our mouths)
Dream guest: Jennifer Coolidge!
Would love to be a guest on…You're Wrong About
Dream partnership: We think our podcast could be developed into a great narrative documentary series (hi Netflix!)
If I could force one person in the world to listen to my podcast it'd be: Maybe Britney Spears?
“GUYS” is the best podcast of 2023!