👻 SNES 1993 🎁 devils 😈 fires 🔥 spinning alone in a field 🏔️

🍭 👂 They’re just freaks trying hard to be normal 🌈 🤸‍♀️

Bonjour.

Today is Monday, December 16, 2024. In case this newsletter is too long, here’s a wild story beautifully told, I really don’t know why more people aren’t talking about this, and here’s the perfect cozy Christmas listen from one of my favorite people in the biz.

xoxo

lauren

P.S - If you’re interested in placing an ad in Podcast The Newsletter or Podcast Marketing Magic, fill out this form

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Castbox 🤝 Audio Delicacies!

Last week I shared that Tink released her annual Audio Delicacies, and Castbox users might have seen the list on the app! Building on years of partnership with Castbox, we launched a Tink-branded monthly podcast recommendation series, starting with Audio Delicacies. In the future Castbox will feature curated podcast recommendations from Podcast the Newsletter! She’s making moves, people!

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🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨

I first met Jasmin Bauomy when I interviewed her for her Audio Flux piece, Zephyra and the Whisper. We have kept in touch and it’s been great getting to know her and her sense of sound. She has an electric connection with it. I was so excited to hear about the show she is making, Little Devils, and the first two episodes are here now. It’s about our little devils, the things we consider flaws about ourselves. But Jasmin is going after them to explore their origins to find out if they are truly flaws. Because if we don’t, she’s positing, they could grow into something even more super duper evil. In episode one she meets a cartoonish guy who lives in fear of jinxing things and she unspools him a bit, we get to really understand him and by the end you feel like you know him. (This episode sparkles because he is a completely unforgettable human being.) Episode two is actually my favorite, it’s where I think you should start. The legendary storyteller Ray Christian tells a story about a prank that went too far, almost ruining his life. It’s a bit of a confession. Jasmin overlays segments of audio, sprinkles in surprising enhancements, tethers moments together with music, and carefully narrates to us in this way that makes you feel, I don’t know. Cared for. Her storytelling makes me feel cared for, like I’m being told a bedtime story. This is the upcloseness so much of audio is lacking these days, getting to hear it is is a rare treat.

How I discovered it: Jasmin told me about it at RESONATE and then emailed me with an advanced listen.

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Podcast Tink Loves: Blue Sky

…and there’s an episode I think you should hear! For the holiday season, Bill Burke made a sweet episode sharing how gratitude can help heal, connect, and inspire us. Featuring insights from Bill and past guests like Bert Jacobs (Life is Good), David Gardner (The Motley Fool), and neuroscientist Dr. Richie Davidson, the episode explores how thankfulness can foster optimism and resilience. The episode is both interesting and will just make you feel a little happier.

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notes

✨BIG NEWS Tink is hosting a TWO-DAY Podcast Marketing Intensive at the end of January. Learn more here.

✨I was so happy that CoHost asked me to participate in their Podcast Predictions for 2025 roundup! Read it here.

✨Philly friends! Thursday, January 16th. 6pm. Free. PLEASE join me at the Philly Podcast Mixer hosted by Rowhome Productions, co-Presented by (AIR) + City Cast Philly. I’ll be speaking in a panel discussion on The State of Philly Podcasting in 2025 with Yowei Shaw, Tom Grahsler, Lauren Passell. Get your ticket here.

✨Confirm your seat for Captivate and Adobe’s Podcast Growth Summit on Jan 7 here. I’ll be speaking with Dave Jackson, Hari Gopalakrishna, and Mark Asquith.

✨Eurowaves is the newest podcast newsletter in town! Andreea's mission is to connect European stories through podcasting. The first issue comes out this Friday, 12/13, and you can already read an intro issue here! Subscribe!

✨Content Is Queen’s micro-grant program is back for 2024, where they award funding to independent podcast projects. More info here.

✨ Here's something different: a podcast *campaign* to keep people home for the holidays! So many people are one crisis away from becoming unhoused, like Keoni Washington, a young boxer who lost his mom to COVID and had to provide for his brothers. The podcast Sharing Stories gives a window into their lives and how one-time rental assistance helped them through a tough stretch. They're encouraging other podcasts (like yours!) to spread the word about rental assistance this season -- like by running a “PSA” in place of an ad. More info here!

✨Take Arielle Nissenblatt’s How (and Why) to Start a Newsletter for Your Podcast Radio Boot Camp on Thursday!

✨Read I Listened to 75 Days’ Worth of Podcasts in 2024, and These Are My 10 Favorite New Shows via Lifehacker.

✨Podcast Marketing Magic is celebrating the 12 Days of podcast marketing, read ‘em here.

✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Happy Forgetting in EarBuds.

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💎podcasts i texted to friends💎

🎙️Snap Studios made a 10-episode story called Fire Escape, about a woman named Amika Mota, who was a young mother, midwife, and drug addict when she caused a fatal crash (cinematically, on her way back from getting kicked out of church because she was on meth) that sent her to jail for 10 years. There she joins an all-female crew of incarcerated firefighters, going from someone who feels like she broke the social code (nobody’s supposed to murder people, but especially not women, right? And now she’s left her kids!) to a hero. There is a moment toward the beginning where Amika remembers walking to solitary confinement that stopped me and made me really feel fearful for her, and me. This series has a lot of moments like that. Amika went from bringing babies into the world to ending a life to putting her life on the line to save other people, all while still in jail. Fire Escape has nailed everything. We have Amika’s beautiful voice, her honesty and insight, and the beautiful production from the Snap Judgment team. The host, Anna Sussman, asks hard questions but is taking us through this story with real heart. For Fire Escape, what starts out as an interesting look inside a prison system and an exciting story about badass firefighting women ends up being a beautiful reflection on life and death, trauma, and healing. (Can you imagine saving some in a drunk driving accident when you were in jail because you killed someone driving under the influence?) Listen here.

How I discovered it: I listened to the first episode on Snap Judgment in November and subscribed immediately.

🎙️Ross Sutherland is always making these mind-blowingly creative pieces for Imaginary Advice that make me say, “that’s it, he’s outdone himself, he’s thought of everything. He surely must be out of ideas.” But you guys, he never is. When will I learn? The last episode of the year is a Christmas episode, a jump into the (fictional) 1993 Super Nintendo game Christmas Carol. The way it begins is just plain fun, especially if you have nostalgia for old video games. You are playing Scrooge as he battles the ghost of his past, present, and future. (“The ghost of Christmas past has brought a T. Rex through a portal. He’s wearing a little paper crown, which is adorable.” “Now he’s flying into a ghost rage! He’s doing one of his chain attacks, which is tough to dodge.”) Ross brings up a good point—these ghosts were blessed with infinite memory, infinite foresight, the omnipotence of a god, and what do they decide to do? They try to convince a single old man that capitalism is bad. Well spoiler alert, in this episode you win the game, so now you’re in charge. The end of this episode takes you down a new path. How could the ghosts have really pushed back on the evils of capitalism? I cannot wait for Hallmark to turn this into a Christmas movie. Listen here.

How I discovered it: Long time subscriber, Patreon subscriber, it’s my favorite.

🎙️I have no clue how I missed Ripple, which was produced in January of this year. (As I type this I realize it came out a week before my daughter was born, let’s blame her!) It should have been on all the best-of lists, I hope it wins some things. It’s telling the story of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, the largest oil spill in American history, with super in-depth reporting that will anger you to no end. Dan Leone is taking us to the gulf, to get to the bottom of what happened and what is still happening. He starts off by kind of saying that we all thought we knew the story, but as soon as he starts talking to people down there he realizes we don’t. He’s pulling apart truth from lies, capturing real heartbreak, and telling us the real story about how BP was cleaning up the spill and the people put at risk to do it for them. Dan talks to people who risked their lives to do dumb things like paint Xs on dead turtles. But also people who lost loved ones, whose lives were destroyed, people who will never, ever recover. He fixes the entire timeline we were fed by BP and mainstream media and is able to prove how out of control this disaster was and how feeble our response to it was. Listen here.

How I discovered it: Ronald Young Jr. casually mentioned it to me, he wasn’t recommending it exactly I think he assumed I knew about it.

🎙️I thought that Sentimental Garbage was on a break but Caroline came back for an episode with Katherine Rundell about The Sound of Music, and it was an episode that turned me into someone who was fond of the movie to something with deep admiration for it. And someone who now understands how horny it is. Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen the movie since I was a child, but I never realized that Julie Andrews was really a hot woman with a bad haircut and the voice of an angel who had charismatic sexual tension with Christopher Plummer, who was also smoking. Katherine points out this moment where he tightens his gloves before dancing with Julie Andrews, it is absolutely erotic, very 2005 Pride and Prejudice Darcy hand flex. This moment stuck out to me when I was little and I did not know why. Caroline and Katherine pay special attention to the beginning and the ending. That gutsy, corny beginning! A girl alone spinning in a field. Cut to the entire family escaping the nazis—a dark contrast to that moment of Julie in the sunny mountains. The thing about this movie, they say, is that it is seven movies: a whimsical musical for children, a romantic comedy, a romantic drama, a society drama, a thriller in the last five minutes, and it’s also like a puppet show at one point. Listen here.

How I discovered it: In 2020 Anna Phelan sent me the Sex and the City series and she has great taste, I will listen to anything she sends me. I have converted so many (smart) people to this show.

🎙️You know when there’s a new episode of Butt Out, Baby, the Dirty Dancing deeeeeeepdeepdeep dive, I have to roll out the red carpet for it. (The last episode was in March.) I call it a deeeeeeep dive because this isn’t really a Dirty Dancing podcast. Yes, it’s going through the film scene by scene, and with such detail! But each scene is a launching pad to explore things like the white Freedom Riders and the history of tap and minstrelsy. We even get an episode zooming into what it would have looked like for Baby to really go to the Peace Corps. The music is beautiful, host Ellie Gordon-Moershel offers fashion commentary by visual artist Christy Kunitzky, and each episode will take you to such unexpected places that you won’t care you had to wait eight months for it. I don’t think this is technically a good marketing tactic, but it is for me and maybe only me, because I treasure each episode, listen more than once, and I always write about it. The latest is about the history of the Catskills and Borscht Belt comedy. (The best example of this is the joke that one of the comedians tells at Kellerman’s, “I finally met a girl exactly like my mother - dress like her, acts like her - so I brought her home. My Father doesn't like her!”) Ellie talks to Eileen Pollack about how the Catskills were a breeding ground for standup comedy, and how this Botchtbelt humor bridged the gap between the vaudeville era and the rise of comedy on TV. I love how Ellie uses this tiny moment, this bad joke, as a springboard into a study into one of the important eras in American humor. Eileen grew up in the Catskills around this time and is able to really help us get a sense of what Dirty Dancing got right and wrong about it. (The biggest thing it got wrong, and this never fails to astound me, is that this very Jewish film never talks about Jewishness or Judaism, not once.) Listen here.

How I discovered it: I wish I could remember, I think it was Pocket Casts?

🎙️Before It Had a Theme, another show that comes out so sporadically it’s either very good for marketing or really, really bad, release another episode and announced the show’s new name: Phonograph. Before It Had a Theme made more sense when the show was documenting This American Life, but now that it’s covering the best of recorded media and sound and the phonograph was the beginning of recorded media, that makes more sense I GUESS but it’s really hard to google, like really hard. I love this show for so many reasons, I think anyone reading this should listen to it. Podcasting needs criticism so badly, and Rob McGinley Myers and Britta Greene are really taking us through some of the greatest things made and picking out what worked and what didn’t. Even the best things contain both of those things. But the best part of this show is the way it’s able to do that. Rob and Britta are infusing their criticism seamlessly with the audio from the original pieces, so it’s a flow of their voices, the original audio, so you’re getting both sides, it flows and is cohesive. This doesn’t work in any other format. On the latest episode they cover an episode of Love + Radio and talk about how Love + Radio did a good job creating situations where we don’t know how to feel. This place of uncertainty can be exciting. And while some audio makers try to take you out of the dark, Nick van der Kolk knows that being in this place can be exciting. The story in this episode doesn’t end cleanly, it’s so unlike 99% of the stuff being made right now it was jarring to hear, but a pleasant kind of jarring. This made me binge a bunch of Love + Radio. But on Phonograph, Rob and Britta are able to point out tiny moments and sounds that make this piece unique as we listen together. Listen here.

How I discovered it: Twitter DM from Rob pointing it out

🎙️Basket Case is a mental health podcast, but I always hesitate to call it that because it’s approaching mental health from a beautiful and unexpected angle. Lots of mental health podcasts seem to aggressively challenge us to get our shit together, Basket Case is a gentle look inside mental illnesses so we can understand them, proving that sometimes we don’t need to be fixed. Maybe the problem is often not with us, but the world. Maybe the caller is calling from outside the house! Basket Case’s sound is stunning. NK is able to make us really feel what her guests feel when it comes to autism, depression, perfectionism. I love all of these episodes but the one about anorexia was kind of a masterpiece. We’re listening in on a friendship conversation between Maryam and Phoebe. Maryam is anorexic. She talks about how she’ll never get better, her relationship with fasting for Ramadan, the inspiring art she found in some pro-ana content, the problems with recovery, and the things about her that she LIKES that seem inseparable from her disease. The interesting thing, though, is hearing Maryam talk about what it’s like to be in this friendship. Her helplessness, confusion, support, love. I felt like I was eavesdropping on two long-time friends talking, curled up on the floor of one of their childhood homes while they were home for the holidays. Specifically that. Listen here.

How I discovered it: Email from Jazmine Green a long time ago.

🎙️Niche to Meet You, the investigative storytelling podcast about little-known niche interests and hobbies, did a three-part series about professional santas that was interesting and also made me think differently about Santa Claus. It starts with a quick history, and you see how we’ve managed to cobble together things from so many different parts of the world and periods of time to get this One Man. Then we get to heart from the people who portray Santa in malls and parades, and why. Leslie Thompson talks to Jerusalem’s only certified Santa Issa and Shed and George, Black santas seeking representation in the niche (although I’ve yet to see anyone even mention an Asian santa? Those asian kids just have to deal, I guess.) There is one moment that made my heart grow three sizes—Santa Donald, who specializes in meeting with kids with low vision, takes photos with them and says “that’s a good picture!” It’s a special job and to these people, it’s a calling. One Santa says it’s like a religious calling. Which is funny, because all of this talk of santas for autistic children, children all over the world, children all of all races, made me think about the saints in catholicism. Catholics believe that saints are in communion with god and can intercede for him. Why do we have to tell kids there is just one? This series was a kaleidoscope of history, voices, and sweet peeks into a community of people you might not know much about. Start here.

How I discovered it: Leslie sent a pitch letter about the turkey hunting season but girl I don’t eat meat, I liked this series way more.

🎙️Sing for Science, where musicians talk to scientists about science as it connects to their most famous songs, had a special episode with neuroscientist Dr. Kevin Ochsner and Hank Azaria to talk about the neuroscience of The Simpsons, specifically taking us to Moe’s Tavern. Science tells us why we are drawn to places like Moe’s and church, and AA, which is something Hank talks about a lot. He’s in recovery. This episode is about sense of belonging has helped us survive all these years, and it went to places I did not expect, like the neural underpinnings of practicing acceptance. Hank even goes into character as Moe to answer some of the questions. Listen here.

How I discovered it: Subscriber

🎙️I love you!