🌙 Night walks🚶🏼♀️city objects💡The Urban Legends Hotline ☎️ the kill queen 🔪 Frankenstein guitars 🎸
🍭 👂 TRUST ME! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, May 8. There are 3 days until my next Disney cruise. (If you want me to send you a postcard while I’m gone, fill out this form.) In case this email is too long, stop what you’re doing and binge this short series, my heart grew three sizes when I listened to this, Chelsey Weber-Smith put themself in DANGER FOR YOU here.
[I will never charge you to read Podcast the Newsletter. If you’d like to buy an ad, inquire here.]
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Sarah Goodyear
Sarah Goodyear is the co-host of The War on Cars. Follow her on Twitter here. Follow The War on Cars on Twitter here.
What made you want to start the show?
We wanted to contribute to the growing international movement to reduce car dependence and promote less destructive modes of transportation. And have a good time doing it.
What are the three worst things about cars?
They ruin cities, they melt glaciers, and they put people into debt.
Can we be good car owners? How?
By using cars only when they’re needed. Maybe that means replacing some trips with walking or biking. Maybe it means having one car in a family instead of two. Buy a smaller car rather than a bigger one. Try to buy electric or hybrid. Drive with care and consideration for people and nature. Remember that when you drive you are wielding lethal force.
Do you think there’s a feud raging between cars and pedestrians on the New York City streets?
I think cars take up a wildly disproportionate amount of space in NYC and that pedestrians—which means everyone, at one point or another—are left with crumbs. That leads to anger, frustration, fear, and a sense of helplessness in the face of lethal threats, constant din, and the filth that cars throw off.
What’s your solution to get rid of cars?
Fund better public transport to give people real alternatives. Regulate vehicles by size in cities—people shouldn’t be able to drive 22-foot-long Escalades around central NYC because they think they deserve a deluxe rolling living room. Price parking. Why do people get to store their enormous expensive pieces of property in public space for free? In Japan you have to prove you have a parking space where you can store your car before you can buy one.
Who loves your show? Any fan comments/interactions you can share?
We have fans all over the world. I have been staying for a few weeks in a small village in southern France and a man walked into a party I was at here and told me he is a huge fan of the show. He lives in Sweden! It was amazing to really experience that reach in person, so unexpectedly. I gave him a sticker, of course!
Who hates your show? Any hater comments/interactions you can share?
Judd Apatow recently tweeted that we were “projecting” when we talked about how Hollywood portrays people on bikes as losers. Judd! Come on the show! Let’s talk!
How do you come up with ideas for the show?
Every day we see something that makes us think, we could do an episode on that. Our culture is saturated with cars. They affect literally every aspect of our lives and yet they are invisible to most of us. Once you see the effect they have…you can’t unsee it. We will never run out of show ideas!
Self-care tip: Audio production is time-consuming. Remember to pace yourself.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Constellation Prize is one of the most beautiful shows. It feels like host Bianca Giaever is sharing a section of her heart, bringing her mic around as she interviews people about art, God, and loneliness. It’s insightful, intimate, and feels alive. I cherish the first season and was never expecting it to come back, but it has…for a 4-part miniseries that started in a way that amuses me. Bianca got a terrible pitch letter from writer Terry Tempest’s publicist pitching Terry to the show. This technically makes no sense. The show hadn’t aired since 2020 and isn’t an interview podcast. (This is my pet peeve in podcast PR.) However, Bianca got excited and decided to run not a series of interviews, but an experiment in which Bianca and Terry asynchronously went on night walks and then shared their thoughts and experiences and via audio messages. For the first scene of the series, Bianca thinks back to a photo she took of her grandmother the last time she saw her, her grandmother was waving goodbye. I always get sad when old people wave goodbye at me. It can be terribly heavy and ominous. (I can remember my Uncle Buddy and Grandma Wanda waving to me a lot towards the end of their lives, I think they knew something about how much time they had left.) Bianca worried about her grandma being alone, she had been alone for so long. And now that her grandmother has passed, I wonder if she is still alone. Bianca reflects on her own loneliness, and her experiences of these night walks, communicating with Terry from afar, and what we believe in when we see nature. This series seems like it was somewhat accidental but it was a very happy accident that was possibly written in the stars. Enjoy this series, and the first season of Constellation Prize. I think it is something you will return to in order to feel things and be reminded of the magical things audio can make us feel.
oh hey
✨Arielle and I were on The Business of Sound with Nick Castner to talk about podcast growth and collaboration, and our Adopt-a-Listener day in Washington Square Park! Listen here.
✨Sign up for my June 5 Podcast Marketing Radio Bootcamp class.
✨Read my Descript article: Every podcast needs a newsletter — here's how to make it a good one
✨Read How to Get More Ratings Reviews (Plus: Does it Matter?) via Podcast Marketing Magic
✨Check out these podcast newsletters written by women!
✨ Tink was nominated for Quill’s Best Podcast PR Company of the year. Full list here.
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Radio Rental in her newsletter and podcast.
~sponsored!~
F*cking Sober: the first 90 days is a semi-comedic, mostly non-fictional narrative serialized podcast about the first 90 days of getting f*cking sober. This self produced indie podcast is the 2021 Webby Award Winner for Best Podcast and Nominee for Best Limited Series. If you want know what it looks, acts, and feels like to get f*cking sober, give us a listen. Season Two BETSY out now! Find us everywhere you stream your podcasts.
💎BTW💎
🎙️From the file of The City Reliquary comes Undiscarded, which exhibits objects of New York City that tell stories about its people. Each episode starts with something like a lightbulb from The Statue of Liberty or a sign from Second Avenue Deli to launch into a history of that object’s place in New York City’s history and the personal stories that make it uniquely New York. Meet the man who cared for that lightbulb, the family that holds up the world’s most iconic Jewish deli, the alligators thriving in the sewers. I love New York. I’ve lived here for eighteen years, I thought I couldn’t love it more. My heart expanded three sizes listening to these beautiful episodes that shine light on the city’s quirkiness, stories that couldn’t happen anywhere else in the world. I recently heard someone who has lived in LA and New York say that if you fall on the street in LA, people will ask you if you’re okay but then dash off without helping. A New Yorker will call you a stupid asshole and help you up. These stories illustrate the city’s rough edges and beauty, the kindness found in the chaos, and the heart of the people who live here. I imagine if you have loved New York and left, it will make you want to go back. And if you’re like me and live here and sometimes get tired of the harshness, the tightness, the seemingly impossibility of keeping up with the pace, it will make you realize it’s all worth it. There couldn’t be a more beautiful love letter to a place. Listen here.
🎙️I have also been plugging into NYC Now, a feed from WNYC of the most up-to-date local news from across New York City and the region. It’s a regional newspaper for your ears, and will educate you about everything from The Department of Buildings issuing a partial vacate order for a Time Square parking garage to a bunch of State Island residents talking about why they love Staten Island. It’s a mix of hard news and human stories and drops three times a weekday. Listen here.
🎙️Prepare yourself for Jackie’s Hole. I have been talking to Jackie (Johnson, of Natch Beaut) about this project and I’ve been thinking of it as a mixture of a more feminine version of Comedy Bang Bang and Walt Disney World’s Country Bear Jamboree. Do whatever you want with that information, this is the stuff of my dreams. Listen to the pilot here.
🎙️American Hysteria’s Chelsey Weber-Smith has opened the Urban Legends Hotline, where you can call describing the lore of your childhood. Chelsey and the team will jump into the American Hysteria mobile to either digitally or literally/IRL investigate it. The first one is from a caller named Lauren (this will surprise you—it’s a different Lauren) who wrote in about a legend outside Chicago which was the site of a school bus-train crash that killed a bunch of kids. Legend has it that if you go at night, you can feel the kids pushing your car and see their fingerprints on your vehicle. This legend has sprouted up all over the country. So Chelsey buckles up and drives to a site in Washington to see what happens. And guess what? Something happens. Don’t worry, Chelsey’s okay, and a bit of debunking is required. But there’s still a lot to think about. Like…what does it say about us that we love to reinvent this story in particular, over and over, all over the place? How does it fit in with other mythology? Why are teens and young people (and apparently Chelsey) the ones obsessed with getting to the bottom of it? Listen here. Call the Urban Legends Hotline here.
🎙️Girlboss alert: Juliette D'Souza became notorious for posing as a witchdoctor and stealing millions of dollars from vulnerable people in the UK, a crime that sent her to jail for ten years. She used manipulation tactics to promise bogus sacrifices to a tree in exchange for payments to cure vulnerable people experiencing health problems, fertility problems, and disabilities. On Filthy Ritual, Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala of Redhanded are telling the story which is dark, but the tone is plucky and bright. (The cover of the podcast, a teacup full of money and a mischievous-looking monkey, looks more playful than true-crimey.) Juliette was able to con people the way parents con children every year at Christmas time. “Give me money…the spirits are watching you at all times.” “Don’t tell anyone you’re doing this, the spirits won’t like it.” She found the people who needed a helping hand, were willing to do anything for it, and then she dragged them along to such depths that they experienced the sunk cost effect, so hopeful that they weren’t paying Juliette for bullshit that their only line of defense was to pay more. Hannah and Suruthi talk to victims about the wild trip Juliette set them on, piecing together how she was able to get away with it. Listen here.
🎙️In 2010, a photographer named Reuben Cox opened LA’s Old Style Guitar Shop, where he made and repaired Frankenstein-esque guitars cobbled together from spare parts and neglected guitar bodies found in flea markets and estate sales. They’re not just pieces of art, they have come to define the sound of the LA indie folk scene. Charlie Harding of Switched on Pop takes us on a fun exploration to meet the man (now a mini celebrity in the LA indie music scene,) the store, and the rubber bridge guitar that has been influencing artists like Blake Mills, Andrew Bird, Madison Cunningham, Ethan Gruska and Phoebe Bridgers. If you listen closely, you can hear it. I usually link to pod.link in this newsletter but I’m linking to the Switched on Pop website, instead. It is beautiful, thorough, fun, clean, simple. Check it out if you want to see how a podcast site is done right. Okay, listen and look here.
🎙️I could turn this into a Louder Than a Riot newsletter but I won’t. The season is exceptional, you should listen to every episode. The last one is all about the “no homo” rule in hip hop, focusing on rap’s relationship to masculinity, hyper-focusing on the story of Makonnen and his presence as a queer artist in the hyper-masculine trenches of rap, and super-duper hyper-focusing on a moment when Drake told Makonnen for reasons we still don’t understand, Look, next time I see you, I'm gonna fuck you up. We look at Makonnen, who bridges the gap of the changing world of queerness in hip-hop by studying his life, what the reception of his existence tells us about Black masculinity, and how we don’t know what to do with a Black man that is too emotive. Listen here.
🎙️Science writer Ashley Hamer’s Taboo Science answers the questions you're not supposed to ask, the science that makes these taboo subjects tick, the reasons we don't talk about it, and the impact that has on society at large. Stuff like butts, head transplants, cannibalism, and disability. It feels like the fun science class we didn’t get in school but should have. Episodes are friendly and smart. The new season has an episode about asexuality that had me underlining words in my brain. Guest Canton Weiner shares fascination research about the many different kinds of attraction that prove what we think about asexuality is wrong, the way asexuality (newer than the GIF) is seen as impossible by men because of its improbability, and impossible by women because of how unremarkable it is, and what that says about consent. Myths about asexuality get busted. Listen here.
🎙️This episode of Spooked gave me goosebumps, but it also had me laughing out loud. A woman wakes up in the hospital to witness a series of unusual events happening around her. The doctors seem as un-doctorly as possible (they want to take shots) and she can hear her husband reading to someone in the hall. As her hospital stay gets stranger and stranger, she takes it all this with stride. There’s a twist at the end I won’t give away. But for awhile, it’s absolutely the funniest paranormal stories I’ve ever heard. Listen here.
🎙️Killed is all about the journalistic stories that for one reason or another almost didn’t see the light of day, usually because they were considered too dangerous, too fringe, too something by the media. Which means they are probably the most interesting. The stories are fascinating because they’re spicy, but Killed tells the stories behind the stories, what was going on behind the scenes that made articles nearly impossible to be surfaced. An episode in the new season is about Anna Wintour, a woman who would so effortlessly kill an article if she didn’t like the art that went with it, and a few times she should have killed a story but didn’t. This one seemed like an episode in killing things in general—the art of killing, and a woman who used it to define herself and her craft, and to become synonymous with her industry. Listen here
🎙️Leo Schofield, the subject of Gilbert King and Kelsey Decker’s gripping true-crime podcast Bone Valley, was denied parole again. I was eavesdropping on the hearing via phone on Wednesday and my heart was speeding up and sinking at the same time. TLDR: Leo didn’t murder his wife, everyone knows this, but it doesn’t matter. He will be transferred to a prison with a transitional program and wait a year for another parole hearing. A heart-wrenching episode of Bone Valley, with audio of the hearing here.
🎙️On Jim Harold’s Campfire, Jim interviews people from all over the world to tell their scariest stories, and for a special haunted podcaster episode, he interviewed some of the best creatives in audio. You’ll hear from Joe Fisher of Midnight Burger, Jody Avirgan of Good Sport and This Day in Esoteric Political History, Chelsey Weber-Smith of American Hysteria, Ophira Eisenberg of Parenting is a Joke, and more. Listen here.
🎙️I was expecting Brainwashed to be full of facts about the CIA’s covert mind control experiments. (Think: Cold War and MKUltra.) I was unprepared for how human it would be. Archival tape and personal anecdotes make these stories seem less like obscure nightmares and more like personal trauma that has lived on to impact future generations of people who were subjected to torturous mental experiments. There’s a part about how the CIA brought LSD to America, and how it was the spark that started the work of people like Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg. And it reminded me of a conspiracy theory I’m obsessed with, that ties the Manson murders to the US government. (When I worked in book publishing I worked closely with the publication of this book, which is probably what brainwashed me into a believer. Don’t get me started on Chaos, you’ll think I’ve lost my mind.) This is a story of military and medicine, but by telling the stories not just of what the government might have done, but also of the family members left in the wake, it becomes a story about generational trauma, too. Listen here.
🎙️If Sentimental Garbage was a person, she’d be your sharpest, funniest friends you’d want to share all your secrets with and talk to about everything you were watching on TV. Every episode is a thesis statement about how the things considered silly guilty pleasures are often the most telling and important things being made in our culture. A recent episode about how and why we celebrate wealthy people in media. Using shows like Below Deck, Succession and The Real Housewives franchise, it looks at wealth as a storytelling tool, one that strips characters of relatable problems, making us ask: if money isn’t the issue, what the hell is the problem of the story? Listen here.
🎙️On Shrink the Box, comedian Ben Bailey Smith and psychotherapist Sasha Bates give fictional characters one-sided therapy sessions and let us sit in on their discussions. It’s like Where Should We Begin? but the patients aren’t there because they aren’t real. They chose to therapize on Ross and Monica’s relationship in Friends. It seems like it’d be too silly and fluffy to actually learn anything, and it is a lot of fun to imagine Ross and Monica as real siblings with real trauma. (Why is Monica so Monica? Why do Monica and Ross love Rachel?) But there’s a lot of insight on sibling relationships I found fascinating, partially because I don’t have a sibling. But I am rewatching Friends. And this episode was a fun way to expand the Friends universe a bit and make Ross and Monica more human, and to get a real explanation as to why they do the things they do. Listen here.
🎙️Mother’s Day can be great if you have a good relationship with your mom, but the opposite if you have the opposite. Paulette Erato, the host of La Vida Más Chévere (a Spanglish podcast for modern childfree Latinas and Latines on the journey to unlearning all the bullshit and toxicity in our culture about traditional family values and the martyr/mother complex) happened to have been born on what is celebrated as Mother’s Day in her mom’s native Mexico, May 10th. In celebration of her 45th birthday, she’s giving subscribers who might be dreading Mother’s Day some extra love so they can look forward to celebrating la vida más chévere, their best lives. She’s bringing two interviews with childfree women, one who wanted kids and one who vehemently did not, discussions around shame especially around sex, an emotion far too prevalent in a Latina’s life, and a replay of her favorite episode to date: her mother telling other parents that no one is entitled to be a grandparent. Listen here.
🎙️Where healthy habits, mindset adjustments, and busy schedules combine, there’s Baggage Drop. Hosted by experts from Wondermind’s Advisory Committee — Dr. Jessica Stern, Dr. Ryan Howes, Alo Johnston LMFT, and Dr. Nina Polyné — Baggage Drop delivers repeatable and powerful mental fitness tools to help rewire your mindset for personal impact. New episodes land every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday during the month of May. Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
[From January 20, 2020] I listened to the entire 6-episode series Fake Heiress from the BBC, which tells the insane story of Anna Delvey, who conned New York high society into believing that she was a multi-millionaire heiress. I love a good con story, and a good New York City story, and this story hits all the good points, and even goes international. What Anna Delvey did is unbelievable, the whole time listening, you are thinking "how did she do it?" The show explores how. It's written by a journalist and screenwriter, and it really does feel like a movie for your ears. Voice actors read transcripts, emails, and text messages, which brings the story to life. There is also a lot of creative postulating as to what Anna was thinking, and because the research is so solid, I think we have a good idea of what she was thinking. It's a wild story no matter what, but it's so well done that I'm already guessing it's one of my favorites I've listened to in 2020 (although it came out in 2019.)
Today we’re getting a look at the listening life of Andreea Coscai, a Tink digital marketer and podcast producer passionate about multicultural investigative reporting. Her latest podcast is titled Who Holds Up Half the Sky. In 2020, she founded the first NGO that promotes leadership and networking for young women, Her Time Romania. She spent her childhood in Romania, lived in China for 2 years, and moved to the United States in 2018.
The app you use to listen: Spotify Premium but lately switching between it and Apple Podcasts.
What speed do you listen to podcasts? 1.5x before I have to rewind and play on x1 because I got distracted and missed the last 5 minutes.
How do you discover new shows? Newsletters and sometimes social media.
One show you love that everybody loves. Radiolab.
One show you love that not enough people know about. Let's Talk Attachments with Jessica Da Silva.
Hot take: There's a real need for listeners to go outside of their comfort zone. Popular shows with a big reach are cool. But independent podcasters and smaller shows also produce amazing valuable content that deserves love.
Self-care tip: Spend time every now and then reconnecting with your inner child. It'll be the most wholesome experience ever.