☘️ She's my friend, she is 👅 what is...a podcast? 📺 perfectly unhinged 🤡 the legend of the poo bag 🚽
🍭 👂 TRUST ME! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, March 11. In case this issue is too long…the perfect amount of unhinged is this, the Flood Myth of poop here, if Ted Lasso had a podcast here.
xoxo lp
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Anne Helen Petersen & Melody Rowell
Anne Helen Petersen is a writer, author, and podcaster — she’s written four books (with a fifth on the way), wrangles the newsletter Culture Study, and is now co-producer of the Culture Study podcast.
Melody Rowell is a podcast editor and producer living in Kansas City, MO. In addition to her work on the Culture Study podcast, she edits and produces Strict Scrutiny, a weekly podcast about the Supreme Court.
Describe Culture Study in 10 words or less.
AHP: Smart weirdos trying to prove that everything is interesting.
Anne, how is the mission of Culture Study different from Work Appropriate?
AHP: Work Appropriate was a podcast built around one of my favorite sub-interests: the culture of work. Culture Study borrows the format and expands it to all of culture (conveniently, culture can be pretty much anything you want it to be — even though one of our listeners tried to argue that infrastructure is not culture, to which I say: false)
Fill in the blank: You will like Culture Study if you like ________.
AHP:…the ethos of Ezra Klein, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and your favorite celebrity gossip site COMBINED
MR: …the meandering conversations that happen late into a book club gathering.
How are you two similar?
AHP: We are both detail-minded, try very hard to suffer no fools (but are also people pleasers), and grew up around some flavor of Evangelical Christianity (and have since moved away from it). We both think that good work should be compensated fairly. We both have workism tendencies that we try to battle. Melody is SO much better at Google Drive organization.
MR: We like a lot of the same things! Good books, cute dogs, gardening, stupid TikToks, cool vacations. I think Anne is more chill than I am, which I definitely need in a creative partnership. I need someone to remind me that there’s no such thing as a podcast emergency.
Anne, you are an expert in burnout, what are your observations of podcast burnout and do you have any tips to combat it?
AHP: Podcasting is a passion job, and passion jobs will take everything we’re prepared to give them….until the point we’re huddled on the floor in a blobby mess incapable of giving any more (or just angry and rancid towards everyone we encounter and can’t manage to reply to even the most straightforward of emails — both are signs of burnout). When it comes specifically to podcasts and audio in general, I think a lot of people are stuck in jobs that demoralize and demean them but they’re terrified to go freelance, and I can’t tell you how much I understand that. But you have skills, and chances are very high that you’re being underpaid for them. Even if you’re not burned out now, you might be in the near future. Try as best as you can to cobble together an emergency fuck-you fund so you can quit when it becomes necessary and figure out what the future looks like, whether that’s independent and in-house. That’s the practical side. The philosophical side is remembering, over and over again, that your job is not your value as a person, and the insistence on putting guardrails around the rest of your life is not being bad at your job. If anything, it’s being good at your job — because if you’re working all the time, your ability to do your job well (to edit well, to catch things, to get things done) decreases. So much of combating burnout is working to silence that voice in your head that says that working all the time is being good at your job.
Describe Culture Study listeners.
AHP: We naturally have a ton of crossover from the newsletter, and the average listener is willing to think deeply — think more — about the world that surrounds them, even when it’s challenging. They also think it’s worthwhile to take “pop culture” topics seriously!
What’s the single best thing podcasting has brought you?
AHP: Going to geekily say: meeting Melody. Who also convinced me to read A Court of Thorns of Roses (and doing a forthcoming podcast ep on it) which has been buoying energy of my January and February.
MR: Friendship!! The years I’ve been podcasting have also coincided with years full of personal challenges and crises, and the people I get to work with have been so supportive and encouraging. A very close second is the free luxury mattress I got from a sponsor that has transformed my sleep.
What do you do to grow the show?
AHP: Crossposting to Culture Study is the way and the truth. Hopefully it’s expanding from there, but we’re also getting cohosts with built in listenerships as well (Sam Sanders, Jane Marie, etc.)
MR: We’ve DIY’d a few promo swaps with other podcasts, but the thing that’s worked best for us is creating a free version of the podcast that gets cross-posted on Anne’s newsletter once a month.
Were your newsletter readers already podcast listeners or did you turn them into podcast listeners?
AHP: Definitely podcast listeners. About once a quarter we do a subscriber thread about podcasts (usually like a podcast concierge, where people can say what they’ve listened to before and liked and what they’re looking for…..and it reliably tops 500 comments) but I do think having a slightly broader focus (than Work Appropriate) has been useful in bringing more readers into the pod.
If people haven’t listened yet, where should they start?
MR: The “Why Do Clothes Suck Now” episode haunts me in the best way-- I’m so glad we chose it to go first! The Paw Patrol episode is also so funny, even for people who aren’t parents. And of course I loved the nostalgia invoked by “The Curious Return of 2000s Music.”
What’s a podcast you love that everyone else already knows about?
AHP: My go-to is The Ezra Klein Show. Ezra has a team of producers helping him figure out how to guide the show but I know that he also does the fucking work — he reads the books, he takes the notes, he knows his shit inside and out, which is why the show is such a tour de force.
MR: My all-time favorite is Criminal, especially for road trips. For walking the dog, I’ve gotten really into You’re Wrong About.
What’s a podcast you love that not enough people know about?
AHP: I still feel like not enough people know about Stolen, by Connie Walker — the first season is about the disappearance of a Native woman outside of Missoula, which happened while I was living there, and the second season centers on Walker’s father’s experience in the Canadian boarding schools that forcibly removed and abused thousands of Indigenous children from their homes.
MR: Fated Mates is very much a IYKYK podcast-- all about romance novels. One of the hosts, Sarah MacLean, is one of my favorite authors, and it’s the only show longer than 60 minutes that I can listen to in full. During the pandemic I found a lot of solace in Aria Code, a podcast breaking down the storytelling in opera’s most famous arias. The combination of analysis and personal experience is so moving.
If you could start another podcast, don’t worry about the logistics or whether or not anyone would like it, what would it be? Your budget is $1M.
AHP: This is so out there, but the group of kids I was tight with from Evangelical-tinged Presbyterian youth group in the early 2000s in small town Idaho….people with parents from all sorts of backgrounds….we have all turned into flaming liberals. Some of us are social justice Catholics, some of us are deeply atheist, some of us are trans, some of us have moved hundreds of thousands of miles away and some have stayed put. But what was it about our experience that taught us to interrogate and figure out our own paths forward — instead of the one suggested by the often regressive and always contradictory teachings of our church? Niche audience, but wow is this the podcast I want to make for me.
Anything I didn’t ask you that you want to say?
AHP: I asked Melody to do this Q&A with me because the producers and engineers are out here doing the work in a way that’s not always or even often recognized — she is the co-author of every episode of this podcast, and I’m proud that we’ve figure out a 50/50 profit-sharing deal that reflects that.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Stolen is back for a new season called Trouble in Sweetwater, which takes Connie Walker to a remote corner of the Navajo Nation to seek answers and justice for two women who have gone missing. In the first episode we hear about Ella Mae Bega, an older woman who was seen driving her truck away and never came home, and the relative who might have something to do with it. This season is about her murder and the case, and also what happened to the case. Why this remains unsolved. Do I really need to say more? If I need to even lift a finger to convince you to listen to a Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award-winning investigative journalist Connie Walker podcast, I don’t know what you’re doing here.
hell yeah
✨On Feed the Queue, we featured Low Lines and Shreya interviewed host/creator Petra Barran. Listen here.
✨What is an episode zero and does your podcast need it? via Podcast Marketing Magic.
✨Thank you to Quill for naming me one of the 50 Trailblazing Women in Podcasting.
✨Eurovangelists Dimitry Pompée, Oscar Montoya, and Jeremy Bent have a worthwhile discussion about how Eurovision advances democracy and helps protect the independent Israeli broadcaster Kan, one of the few checks on government power, and how in fact Eurovision is one of the last stands of free and independent media in Israel. Something to consider if you’re thinking about whether or not Israel should be allowed to compete. Listen here.
✨Jane Marie is launching a show called Finally! A Show That Isn’t Just a Thinly Veiled Aspirational Nightmare. (That’s the name!) Listen to the trailer.
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Chameleon: The Michigan Plot in her newsletter and podcast.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Loyal Endless Thread listeners will remember its second episode from 2018 called Getting Home, about a guy named Shane who replied in a Reddit thread about being unhoused as a teen. That story sent co-host Amory Sivertson on a three year journey unraveling a cold-case murder, which you can now listen to on her new show called Beyond All Repair. Shane’s sister, Sophia, was accused of brutally murdering her mother-in-law, something another one of her brothers accused her of doing, something she has accused that same brother of doing. But nobody believes Sophia. Amory is taking a look at the case. I was hanging on every word for the first two episodes, and I heard Amory talk about it at On Air—she says it ends with “a solution,” not just “I dunno, what do you think?” It’s a confusing and complicated story but told with elegance and clarity, though you’ll still be, after the first two episodes, dying to know what really happened. Listen here.
🎙️We got a nice little bonus episode of Normal Gossip investigating a truly horrifying story from season two about a girl who clogged up the toilet at her hook-up’s house while he was gone, and instead of doing something normal, she put her poop in a bag. She meant to trash it on her way out but forgot, and left the apartment without taking it, so the poop bag was on the counter top with a note that said “let’s do that again” and the poor girl left and was locked out. Listeners wrote in calling this storyteller’s bluff—she had to be making it up, they had heard this one before. But that feedback interested Alex. What makes this story universal? How has it popped up all over the world with different iterations? Why do we care if it’s not technically “true?” Look at me I’m drooling—I was a religious studies major for this exact reason, this is the Great Flood myth of our time. Maybe the poop story is one of the lost stories of the Bible. Like so much of the Bible, I can’t prove that it is, but you can’t prove it isn’t! I listened to this twice. Listen here.
🎙️On the brand new WikiHole, D’Arcy Carden brings on a panel of comedians for a simulation of that thing you do when you read one Wikipedia page that leads you to another and another and another until it’s eight hours later and you can hardly remember where it all began. (How do you get from dolphins to Stetson hats?) I am not generally a big “fun facts!” podcast fan, but the episode that starts with Lenny Kravitz and ends up talking about vestal virgins of ancient Rome, starring Paul F. Tompkins, Drew Tarver, and Heléne Yorke, was so chaotic and funny I loved it. I read some people on Reddit say it was too unhinged, I thought it was perfectly unhinged. A donation to Wikipedia is made in the name of the winner. Every episode ends (and this seems to confuse the guests sometime, I absolutely love it) with everyone on the Zoom giving each other a big wet smooch. Listen here.
🎙️The native language in Ireland is beautiful, and on a sharp decline. In conversations with a scholar and a farmer who speaks Irish to his horses, an episode of Subtitle talks about why many of the Irish have turned their backs on the language, some even hiding it from their children. It’s an ode to an ancient art and a breakdown of what makes it so damn lyrical. (Why you’ll hear someone say, “she’s my friend, she is” or “I’m after reading the book.”) This episode was fascinating and the best part is that you get to hear the accent. Why aren’t the Irish commissioned to read…everything? Listen here.
🎙️Baby Geniuses is one of the first podcasts I listened to religiously, so I was sad to say that Emily Heller and Lisa Hanawalt were stepping away. (How will I get my updates on Martha Stewart’s Horse?) But Emily has been cooking up something else with fellow comedian and Blocked Party’s John Cullen…What Is…a Jeopardy Podcast, where they’ll be breaking down Jeopardy “game recaps, anecdotes, responses, and all the other stupid and fun content.” The first episode was more than an hour long and extremely in the weeds, perfect for people watching along (something I will not be doing) and maybe a bit confusing for people who aren’t. (Or maybe just confusing for people listening at 1.7x speed.) But Emily and John are funny enough to make this a show for anyone who wants to laugh—I will be living Jeopardy vicariously through them. My favorite segment is about what’s making the Jeopardy fans fuming. Listen here.
🎙️I look forward to the Iditarod every year because one of my favorite podcasts is Iditapod, which recaps the sled dog race in extreme detail every year. Or it used to, it’s absent this year, and I never even would have remembered that it was Iditarod season had not my dad emailed me this article about a musher incorrectly gutting a moose on the trail after killing it. (Read it, it’s fascinating.) I am still devastated there’s no Iditapod—does anyone know why? ANYway, we got a little Iditarod celebration with You’re Wrong About’s episode about Balto, with one of my favorite guests Blair Braverman. (Here I’m just keeping an ongoing list of her eps—Chris McCandless, Baby Jessica, Survival in the Andes, The Dyatlov Pass Incident. And by the way I had to scroll through a ton of episodes to find those and it made me want to relisten to the entire You’re Wrong About catalogue.) It’s a true story about Balto that almost brought me to tears sprinkled in with lots of fun facts and anecdotes about the Iditarod and also Blair and Sarah almost getting arrested for riding a comically small snowmobile where they weren’t supposed to in Noam, Alaska, a town built around dogs. Happy Iditarod to all who celebrate. Listen here.
🎙️There is a new Ted Lasso in town and his name is Todd Matthews, a missing-persons investigator and the host of Hello, John Doe. It follows Steve Patterson, who at 45 stumbled upon his own missing person’s page and called Todd to get to the bottom of things and they found a treasure trove of family skeletons that include kidnappings and murders. It’s dark, as almost all true-crime podcasts are, but this one is hosted by Todd, whose sunny personality uplifts and can-do optimism helps Steve flesh out his own story. Imagine if Ted Lasso was trying to solve a murder case. Todd narrates and investigates with a genuine kindness, connecting Steve with family members and tracking down his roots. How often does a true crime show make you smile? Here’s one. Listen here.
🎙️The new season of On Our Watch starts off at heart-racing speed, with a call from a woman who has come home to find her husband, correctional officer Valentino Rodriguez, dead. What may have looked like an overdose exposes the story of two whistleblowers who exposed a story of extreme violence, possible murder, and a culture of silence that was for so long trying to sweep it all under the rug. We’re in New Folsom, California’s most dangerous prison, where Sukey Lewis and Julie Small are pretty much flawlessly talking to Valentino’s family members and opening us up to internal records and interrogation tapes from the case to get closer to the truth. Valentino isn’t here anymore, we do not have his voice, his absence is loud. It’s like he’s leading Sukey, Julie, and his entire family toward answers. Listen here.
🎙️On an all-new series from Into America, Uncounted Millions, host Trymaine Lee follows the little-known story of Gabriel Coakley, one of the only Black people to receive reparations in the wake of the Civil War. Now wait…Lincoln never intended for Civil War reparations to be given to Black people, they were intended for slave owners. But Gabriel found a kink in the system that let him in through a loophole, that has allowed him to have a life they never would have had access to otherwise. Trymaine tracks them down to see the impact Gabriel’s move made on his descendants and descendants’ descendants, forcing you to wonder if more Black families had been given reparations decades ago, how might Black America look different today? Start here.
🎙️March is National Optimism Month, a great time to start listening to Blue Sky, where Bill Burke, founder of The Optimism Institute, talks to inspiring people who are taking on some of our world’s toughest challenges with optimism. The 50th episode is here, an interview with someone I am obsessed with, Kelly Corrigan. Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
[From December 14, 2020] Man, it’s a shame that According to Need came after most people have written their Best Podcasts of 2020 roundups, because I think it should be on all the lists. I’m enjoying every second—each episode could be a podcast itself, and all together, it’s telling the story of huge things we’re getting wrong about homelessness. There’s a moment in the episode The Hotline that stopped me (a 211 operator gets a call from a homeless woman seeking help—she realizes it’s her cousin) but something said in the episode The List completely blew my mind. It starts with the whole idea of “according to need.” If you’re homeless, you can register to be put on a list. You fill out a profile that basically lets the government know how screwed you are—have you only been living in a car for two months? Or have you been on the streets for years, and you have a mental illness or AIDS? Those with more problems get the help first. The most eye-opening part was learning why, exactly why, it’s so much harder to get the help you need if you’re not white. It’s more fucked up than you think.
SO happy to discover this newsletter from your episode on Grow the Show!