✨The best podcasts of 2021, part II✨
🍭 👂 You're in for a treat! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour!
Here’s the second half of my end-of-the-year podcast review. (Read the first half here.) I hope, hope, hope you’ll find something new. I end each issue of this thing saying “I love you!” and I really mean it. Thank you for reading Podcast the Newsletter. Happy New Year.
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
✨July 5: Hit Parade has a two-parter on the history of musicians blurring the line between rapping and song. I would suggest this episode for the music you get to hear along the way alone. It opens up with one of my favorite songs—Just a Friend by Biz Markie (who we lost this year,) which is a great example of a rapper using song in an unconventional way. This episode goes year by year, song by song, to illustrate how this shift was made to go from singing in hip top, to Destiny Child’s Say My Name, which seems to have been a tipping point, to T-Pain’s autotune, coming full circle to the sounds that started it all.
✨July 12: I binged The Invisible Hand and was blown away by the top-notch quality in the writing, music, and audio. It feels extremely literary—each title and episode language is taken from the words of writers and poets like Chinua Achebe and J.M. Coetzee. (“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”) Georgina Savage is returning to South Africa to stay with her family in the Kruger National Park, where they are helping to protect the white rhino from poachers. Within the first few minutes you feel like you are seated in the front seat of a jeep bumping through the wildlife, with Georgina in the drivers seat. This podcast will pull you out of wherever you are and into the world of dangerous poachers, endangered animals, and the terrifying beauty of the Krurger National Park.
✨July 19: Silent Waves untangles the messiness of a family story in a completely raw way, with great sound, writing, and a literary feel. (It’s from the same people who did The Invisible Hand.) Raquel O’Brien is sharing some big family secrets (her own childhood sexual abuse, the discovery that her dad was a pedophile) to examine how the how the cycle of abuse has repeated in Raquel’s own life, four years into her first serious relationship at age 25. This podcast is her attempt to break the cycle, but a chance for us to feel like we’ve joined a family to try to put together the pieces of their trauma. I don’t want to become “the pedophile podcast girl,” but I do love seeing people open up about this topic—not enough people do. It’s helpful to hear Raquel’s honest and complicated feelings about her dad and I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through this process of examination with a therapist or alone, let alone in front of the entire world of audio consumers. Adding this to my library of good pedophile storytelling—This American Life’s Tarred and Feathered, and Ear Hustle’s Sorry Means Nothing.
✨July 26: The first two episodes of Sound Deals dropped last week and I was so angry when I finished them, I wanted more, more, more. It’s an improv comedy show / “Podcast Shopping Channel” in one. Hosts Max and Ivan give guests the names of made-up products and are prompted to try to sell them. This show is insanely clever and was packed with so many subtle jokes that I wanted to just grab them and roll around in them. On episode two, Max and Ivan sell us a “Lucky Pipe,” which “has the word ‘lucky’ in it so you’re hoping is going to be a lot of fun!” but ends up being a rolling isolation chamber, that for some reason, you must enter nude. I am cracking up just thinking about it. Stop reading this stupid newsletter and go listen now. [Ed note: just discovered these beautiful Sound Deals illustrations on Twitter.]
✨Aug 2: On A Bintel Brief, Ginna Green and Lynn Harris are bringing back the century+ Jewish column from the Forward (A Bintel Brief = Bundle of Letters in Yiddish) to your ears, with this advice show that guides Jewish Americans through their most pressing personal problems. Lynn is a comedian living Brooklyn with her Rabbi husband, and Ginna is a Black Jewish mom in the South. This is a comfy, fun, and interesting show that will prove that these universal questions can be answered with a little bit of timeless, old-fashioned guidance.
✨Aug 9: When Mark Pagán (Other Men Need Help + other wonderful things) recommended Soul Music in the Bello Collective Slack channel, I was unable to listen to basically anything else for two days. I know people say you get emotional when you watch movies on airplanes, but is the same true for podcasts? I listened to the episode on Fairytale of New York three times and had tears rolling down my face as I sat crammed in my tiny airplane seat. The show features one song and several beautiful stories from people who have found meaning in the song, and it’s mind-blowing to see the many ways music can touch us. Tell me which episode makes you cry like a baby who pooped his diaper 8 hours ago and needs a nap.
✨Aug 16: Bridget Todd started There Are No Girls on the Internet shining a light on the people who have shaped the internet, but have been overlooked. After a slate of mind-blowing episodes she started a series called Disinformed, which is like your hot-off-the-press update on the most pressing news in digital marginalization and gatekeeping. When Disinformed was running, I raced to listen to each episode as it dropped. (It won a Shorty Award.) Bridget Todd is the bearer of often terrible news, but she delivers it in a positive and constructive way. I feel light just hearing her speak. She’s funny and smart and checks every box for a perfect podcast host.
✨Aug 23: At Podcast Movement, I heard Hina Wilkerson ask a question at Twila Dang’s presentation on BIPOC podcasting and I grabbed her afterwards to learn more about her, and I’m so glad I did. Hina is part of Salted Logic, an indigenous, women-owned media collective that recently partnered with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center to bring their Youth Access program to a group of 8 students from Hawai’i. The students were asked to have hard conversations about language, identity, and culture centered around the word ‘hapa,’ a Hawai’ian word that means a person who is partially of Asian or Pacific Islander descent, but some believe is now being missused. They Called Me, Hapa is a 3-part series that lets us in on these interviews and tackles the word ‘hapa’ from all angles. It also feels like a workshop in itself, posing important questions about Hawai’ian culture, identity, and representation. It asks us to consider the weight of what we call ourselves and whether or not someone can “feel” Hawai-an enough.
✨Aug 30: On season two of This Land, Rebecca Nagle is (with an incredible team that includes Amy Westervelt!) looking at another underreported legal battle impacting American Indian tribes in the United States, this time a scorched earth lawsuit over the custody battle of a two-year-old in Dallas that tells the larger story of the 40-year-old Indian Child Welfare Act. Rebecca’s pulling us through this complex, emotional story that involves neglected kids and the ripping apart of families. Why this case was so important to not just to this family, but to Texas and our constitution, is a layer cake of fuckery. But I kind of picture Rebecca and Amy like two Rescue Rangers-like reporters (they have info that was not available in the courtroom) and I think they can bring us close to the truth. This story gets to your heartstrings but it looks so much bigger with every step you take back.
✨Sept 6: I never would have thought that I’d enjoy a podcast about 9/11, but I trust Jenna Spinelle and she recommended Garrett Graff’s Long Shadow, which maps out a clear picture of September 11th. It was hard not to binge, but taking it all in is a lot, and I wanted to save. The podcast contains audio from the planes that went down, the voice messages from people who were trapped in the towers. Each episode asks a pivotal question: Why weren’t more people rescued from the towers? What was the target of Flight 93 and who issued the order to shoot it down? Was there a fifth plane? It’s some of the most gripping audio I’ve heard on a podcast.
✨Sept 13: On The Just Enough Family, The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy tells the story of the Steinberg family, once amongst the richest families in NYC. The juicy part of the story seems to be how Saul Steinberg, the head of the family, lost everything. But that's not why I was hooked. The Just Enough Family drags you onto the pages of this family saga, which contains unfiltered moments with memorable characters, rich rich rich 1980's New York, and enough family drama to fill TWO podcasts. I have been googling everyone.
✨Sept 20: Harvard professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad and journalist Ben Austen are best friends who grew up together on the South Side of Chicago in the 1980s, and on their new podcast Some Of My Best Friends Are, they invite listeners into their conversations about race, culture and politics. It’s an interesting idea. Can Khalil and Ben, with their strong friendship and academic training, have better conversations than what we are all having in our own lives and online?
✨Sept 27: Saint Podcast is a history podcast focusing on the lives of saints—the first series is focusing on martyrs. If you love history I don’t see how you couldn’t be transfixed by these ancient, gory, magical stories that have shaped our culture and world. I pride myself in being someone who knows a bit about the saints but I found this podcast filling in so many gaps, making ties between familiar and new Bible stories. (Yet it’s thorough and easy to understand for the people less familiar with saints.) Start at the beginning with Saint Stephen and keep going until you’ve received the mark of the stigmata.
✨Oct 4: I’m no doctor, but I think my heart lifted outside of its chamber, if that’s possible, when I listened to the Brandon episode of Heavyweight. Brandon who remembers being a) a dork in high school and b) being asked to prom by a popular girl named Allie. And fifteen years later, he calls her and asks why. Was it a guilt-ask or did she truly want to go with him? They each have gratitude for each other and for that prom night. I feel like I should listen to this episode every morning when I wake up to remind me of the goodness of people.
✨Oct 11: I am as sick as everyone of clueless celebrities starting podcasts, but Seth Rogen is doing something different. It’s Storytime with Seth Rogen, a richly produced show that highlights the stories of others. Rogen is asking, “do you have a story to tell?” And then he helps tell it, with the help of executive producer and editor Richard Parks III, of Richard’s Famous Food Podcast. Parks’ touch is evident in the first episode, capturing his signature madcap, cartoonish style. And the first story had me smiling the whole way through—it begins with a comedian who remembers having a warm interaction with Paul Rudd, and goes backwards from there. Rogen attempts to find out how Rudd got so nice, by tracing a celebrity who showed him kindness (Dan Wilson from Trip Shakespeare and Semisonic,) and then how Dan got so nice, in turn. It’s a Russian nesting doll of kindness. And so much of Rogen is in this, his genuine laughter reminds you that he cares. That’s something I don’t get from a lot of these celebrity podcasts. So I don’t think I’ll think of Storytime as one. It’s a great storytelling podcast, and the host happens to be a celebrity who is respecting his medium.
✨Oct 18: The first season of Nice Try! focused on utopian places, and Avery Trufelman has returned with a series on the interior. This time Avery is asking: can a private home be some sort of utopia? Or is it just making private spheres more protected and the public sphere more public? The first episode was a fun and thorough exploration of the doorbell—who knew doorbells were so interesting? From how their evolution has reflected society to the future and danger of what video surveillance in doorbells will bring, this episode is the perfect start to the series—a threshold between the worlds of utopia and private, interior spaces.
✨Oct 25: The Rapa Nui Islands (“The Easter Islands”) hold great mystery, but the full story is one I did not know, and one that is layered and surprising. As each minute ticked by in this episode of Outside/In, an entirely new layer of the island’s history was revealed. The mystery that I thought was the mystery isn’t, actually. Who moved the “Easter Island” statues and how isn’t as unknown as we think. Two scientists made the “ground-breaking” discovery that the statues could walk, or be moved by rocking back and forth. But it turns out the walking method was something the people of Rapa Nui knew all along. This island’s whole story is about a culture cloaked in unnecessary blind spots from the outside, and about how hard it can be to cut through our preconceptions of a culture. It was so well done that I actually started to wonder how on earth it was so expertly stitched together. It gave me appreciation for all of the audio storytellers out there, making magic out of voice and story.
✨Nov 1: The Fifth Siren is a historic, artistic, cultural, and environmental look at Venice and the danger it faces of disappearing. The Fifth Siren represents the siren that has yet to be sounded—in the past there have been four to warn Venetians of the incoming danger, each one indicating a threat worse than the one before. A fourth siren was sounded in November 2019, but now the city braces for a fifth, and with The Fifth Siren, we are bracing ourselves along with it. The podcast feels like a dream. But it also offers a history that is lesser known, a history that seems even more important now. From a Pink Floyd concert to cruise ships crashing into its borders, to an all-encompassing tourist economy, Venice is taking hits from everywhere, it seems. In the before-times, I traveled to Venice once a year for the Venice Film Festival and at first I disliked the chaos but got to know the streets and the people and the food and honestly cannot imagine losing it, even though it is certain we will. I binged the whole show twice.
✨Nov 8: Awhile ago, Hillary Frank asked her fans to send her anecdotes from their awkward middle school experiences—it wasn’t an exercise in Schadenfreude, she wanted to weave real stories into her new scripted show Here Lies Me, which is about teens, but feels like it was made just for adults, too. 13-year-old Noa is the shy misfit who is encountering a BINGO card worth of humiliating adolescent-centric incidents, all of them are so weird and specific that they truly are able to capture what it’s like to be a teenager. (So weird and specific that you can tell that some of these are stories collected from Frank’s fans. Sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up.) The idea of awkward adolescence is timeless but in Here Lies Me it feels modern and true. The dialogue is sharp and hysterical, the feel of the show is friendly and alive, and I feel invested in this story in the same way I would if this was a non-fiction audio diary of a real teen. There is something so magical about middle school, as awful as it can be. This podcast makes the bad and terrible things fun, and makes me nostalgic for something I never thought I’d feel nostalgia for.
✨Nov 15: In the wake of the terrible tragedy at the Travis Scott concert, Popcast hosted a fascinating conversation about mosh culture and how ‘raging’ came to hip-hop. Roger Gengo joins Jon Caramanica to explain how the energy we usually associate with hardcore and punk music has leaked onto the hip hop scene, and how in the wrong hands, this kind of crowd energy can be deadly. Travis Scott encourages his fans to get rowdy and fuck people up, and the results in November were deadly. Roger points the difference between moshing and but crowd surging, and although young kids at the Travis Scott show may be too young to understand the danger of crowds, Roger predicts that this concert will go down in history and change their thinking (and impact their behavior) at future shows.
✨Nov 22: When I heard that the new show Limited Capacity was being called ”Black Mirror for your ears,” I was skeptical. Like okay. SURE we’ll see about that. (What does that even mean?) But in fact I think that description undersells Limited Capacity a(n ONLY) 6-episode fiction show about “strange and twisted ways we interact with the internet.” I listened to the first two (1. When fitness influencer Gigi leaves for a trip, Zoe is recruited to be a full stand-in for Gigi’s life; 2. Edie and her corporate coworkers discover they have dangerous powers in their Zoom meetings) and bits from both of them have been seeping into my thoughts all day. They’re dark and the kind of funny that will hit you later in the day/week. This was simply the most fun I’ve had listening to a podcast in a very long time.
✨Nov 29: Osiris’ My Own Worst Enemy is completely dedicated to Lit’s 1999 song that took over radio stations and defined a generation of pop-punk lovers all over the world who were rebelling against conservatism with everything from the things they listened to to the things they wore. You have to be able to stomach listening to “My Own Worst Enemy” more than you ever though you would, in more iterations than you ever thought possible. But if you can, I think you are in for a treat, not just exploring the layers of pop-punk but also the dreamy story of Lit, who went from broke to superstars backed by a manager who refused to spending money on payola. If you liked the song you will understand yourself better, but if you are just curious about pop-punk, the birth of subcultures, or the music industry in the late 1990/early 200s, it’s for you, too.
✨Dec 6: This episode of Snap Judgment tells the story of the men living in Muskegon prison who planned an extravagant feast in honor of George Floyd that involved a cinnamon raisin bagel sandwich. Hearing about how the guys came together to plan a meal and actual make it with such limited resources is reason enough to listen, but hearing about how the feast went down is powerful. But the story doesn’t stop there. One of the organizers, Silk, dies unexpectedly by the end of the episode, probably from receiving poor medical treatment in prison. You hear audio from his funeral, the moment where he is finally free from his prison cell. This is one of the best prison stories I’ve ever heard.
✨Dec 13: When I find out that Jesse Lawson is on a project, I get very excited. Their work is some of the best-produced stuff I can find. So I was excited to hear they worked on The Unfiltered History Tour, which dropped last week. It’s a show that tells the story of colonialism told through ten looted artifacts that can be found in the British Museum, interviewing people from the communities the objects were taken from. If you like Stuff The British Stole, you’ll be thrilled—it’s similar but the production is out of this world. I almost teared up, completely in awe during the description of Rapa Nui. I really wish I could be in the UK, because there’s an added interactive benefit for those who are. Visitors to the museum can use Instagram filters to reveal true stories of several of these objects, and how they ended up in the Museum.
✨Dec 20: On Secretly Incredibly Fascinating, Alex Schmidt and Jesse Thorn talked about myrrh, which ended up being a great entry point to the historical Jesus and what really “happened” the “night” “of” Jesus’” “birth” (I feel like I have to put, just like everything in quotations here) based on what we “know” from the gospels of Matthew and Luke. This is the story of the Bible I nerd out about the most, but I still didn’t technically know what myrrh was. (It’s a sap.) This is a great episode of a great show with two of the best podcasters about what I believe to be is maybe the best story of all time.
✨I love you!