👮🏼‍♂️ The kidnapping club 🍗 sleepytime chicken 💻 space is the place 💫 Champagne Supernova 🥁

🍭 👂Pouring minestrone soup into a pool is their favorite form of retaliation 🌈 🤸‍♀️

Bonjour.

Today is Monday, September 16. In case this newsletter is too long, this podcast that (not to sound dramatic but) the cops don’t want you to hear is really really good, here’s another really good internet podcast, and the queties are back.

Have a nice weekend.

xoxo lp

p.s. Want to advertise here? Fill out this form or let me know.

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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋

Dr. Chioke I'Anson

Dr. Chioke I’Anson runs the VPM+ICA Media Center at the ICA in Richmond, VA. He’s founder of RESONATE Podcast Festival and a voice of underwriting at NPR. He wants you to know that RESONATE is all capps.

What is your relationship with your voice? How would you describe it?
Every broadcaster has to accept that they will hear their own voice out in the wild, whether they want to or not. I am thankful to my voice for getting me this far in life. I also like to shut the fuck up when there isn’t a mic nearby.

Why’d you start RESONATE?
It was part of the plan for the VPM+ICA Community Media Center from the beginning. Our mission is to provide media education to the public. We knew that we wanted to have a conference--an event that would be a concentrated dose of podcast education for students and professionals in the south.

What’s the ethos?
I was a professor for years. I’m trying to bring the best parts of class. I think there is magic in giving someone a stage on which to freely share the lessons they’ve learned the hard way. And there is no better way to learn something than altogether in a room with others, where you can share your own mind with an interested crowd. I guess the ethos is class, recess, and community. Also, no panels. We don’t do panels.

Who is it for?
I think we serve the narrative audio people, the cats who like to make scripted, investigative, creative work, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. But really, it’s for anyone who wants to get better at telling stories.

Why is it needed?
Podcast people tend to work alone. They only see each other at special events and festivals. One could argue that, especially since the pandemic, there aren’t enough events where podcasters can gather, celebrate one another and improve their craft. A festival like RESONATE is simply a container for attendees to make magic with their peers. What we need is more magic.

How will this year be different than the first two?
We got themes now, yo. This year, it’s Telling Stories. It’s about fiction and non-fiction and what they can learn from one another. I figure that themes will allow us to have a new experience every year from here on out.

Was there a thrilling moment that first year of RESONATE when you thought ‘yes this is really something!’?
Nick van der Kolk gave Tawnya Pettiford-Wates a baseball bat, which she used to destroy a life sized hot pink paper mache salvador dali statue. That felt pretty good.

How do you spend your time at RESONATE?
I spend most of it being thankful that I have such an amazing team. For two days, the entire ICA staff work together to create the best possible experience for everyone in attendance. They work so hard, I don’t even notice my anxiety.

What’s your advice for anyone going to RESONATE for the first time?
RESONATE is in an art gallery. There are three amazing new exhibitions that you can see while you’re there. Also, it’s hard to get on our wifi. Make sure you follow the convoluted instructions.

What’s a podcast you love that everyone knows about?
I’m bad at knowing what everyone knows. But I sure do like Short Wave and Planet Money. It will shock you to learn that Snap Judgement is a good show.

What’s a podcast you love that not enough people know about?
Abridged. I will scream about that show from the mountaintops. But also, Benjamin Walker made a damn dissertation on his Theory of Everything feed called Not All Propaganda is Art. And also my co-host Kelly Jones did this amazing season of American Prodigy.

Who is someone in the audio space doing great work but who needs some recognition?
Oh man. Twila Dang. Priscilla àlàbí. Anna Deshawn is out here hustling like no other. Lisa Woolfork has turned her show into a movement. Amanda B Nazareno makes a podcast about cats that somehow I enjoy listening to. I am not a cat person.

What are you most excited about for this year’s RESONATE?
So many things. The film screening on Saturday morning. Ray Christian’s keynote. For the first time, there will be satellite events put on by other people happening around the festival. That’s gonna be cool. And we’ll have snacks.

How can people reading this support you and RESONATE?
If y’all could introduce me to potential funders that would really be great.

What didn’t I ask you that you wish I did?
No one is asking me about the parade. If you’re coming to RESONATE, you’re going to be in a “parade” fyi.

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🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨

Chenjerai Kumanyika is the host of the new Empire City, a show about the NYPD’s complicated, fucked up history. I hate to sound all tag liney, but…it’s truuUUly the history the cops don’t want us to know. I knew the police force had its roots in slavery, but in episode one, Chenjerai gives the details and names I was missing. Like the story of David Ruggles, the abolitionist who gave the nickname “The Kidnapping Club” to the judges, lawyers, and police officers who sanctioned the kidnapping of free and fugitive African Americans. (I love that he gave them this completely stupid sounding nickname, like they’re The Babysitters Club or something.) Or the story of Ms. Brown, a free woman who was kidnapped by a cop from the streets and then just…disappeared. And you think the cops suck now…imagine living in a time when there were two competing police forces that hated each other. Today, a lot of us know not to call the cops when something bad happens (after living in NYC for almost 20 years I have so many fucked up stories about the NYPD!!!!) but knowing the origins of why is important. Especially when you’re trying to explain it to your daughter, like Chenjerai is. The Kidnapping Club is alive and well. Every second I’ve listened to of this show so far has been well told, unfolding like a horror novel. The beautiful music and production is cinematic, it feels alive. Everything is unflinching and urgent, each detail more surprising than the next, it’s a shocking-shit sandwich. This all sucks but the podcast is good, and here’s a sweet detail: when Chenjerai tweeted about it the day it came out, he wrote “Empire City is here. When you listen TODAY make sure you listen to ALL the credits. Like all documentary work, our podcast was a team effort. Folks sacrificed. And I want you to know who made it possible.”

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notes

✨Friend and former client Brandon Reed has launched a BEAUTIFUL sleep app, Dwellspring, and is offering us a discount to your audience. (The audio is so impressive, I really think if you’re reading this you’d like it.) Go HERE and use code PIXIEDUST1 to get 1 month freeeeeee! (You all, he used to work at Disney, he does things with magic.)

✨Coming March 2025—Podcasthon, an incredible non-profit initiative that invites podcast hosts from all over the world to dedicate a single episode of their show to a charity of their choice. These episodes will be released simultaneously, creating a powerful wave of inspiring, awareness-raising audio content globally. Podcasters, LET’S DO IT! If you do, send it my way and I’ll feature it in Podcast the Newsletter. Learn all details at www.podcasthon.org.

✨DCP partnered with Barometer to create the first Black Podcast Coalition, a collective of influential networks and shows targeting a sizable Black audience. Learn more here and email your questions info@dcpentertainment.com.

✨Read How to End Your Podcast but Keep Marketing in Podcast Marketing Magic.

✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Feed the Queue in her newsletter and podcast.

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💎don’t miss💎

🎙️Tink's podcast discovery podcast Feed the Queue returned for season 4 this week! This season each episode will be hosted by a different member of the Tink Media team, so you get to know the people behind all the magical things Tink does. (They are all extreme audio lovers.) They’ll also be telling stories about how they got into audio, what podcasts they love, and what podcasts they want to make. In the first mini episode Devin and Andreea teed things up and hearing them talk about audio, I fell in love with them even more than I already was. Today Wil Williams dropped an episode about a show they’ve been loving. I have an episode coming up, too. It’s a podcast party. Become a (Feed the) Quetie, listen now!

How I found it: My team keeps emailing me asking me to be on it.

🎙️I subscribe to Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter and was so excited to see he has a new podcast, Panic World, which is all about trends that started in a dark the internet and somehow sprung to life in the real world. It reminds me of so many shows I love. It feels a little Search Enginey, it also reminds me of Everyone Knows That. It’s also kind of like 16th Minute of Fame but instead of telling the stories of the internet main character people, Ryan is telling the stories of the internet main character stories. Because really, the NyQuil Chicken (or Sleepytime chicken) story should have died down, but it didn’t. That’s what Ryan tackles in the first episode, which is the perfect first episode with the perfect first guest, Katie Notopoulos. They explain how the media turned this nothing joke on 4chan into an everything story that the FDA had to make statements about. (Remember that the NyQuil Chicken post encouraged people to douse chicken in NyQuil and eat it.) It’s stuff like this that gets people trying to ban TikTok. So the question lurking beneath this story is about whether or not we can stop people from thinking that obvious jokey challenges are hoaxes, or if the FDA needs to get involved every time. Also, Ryan and Katie made this NyQuil Chicken sound pretty delicious (they call it “zingy,” specifically, and go into great detail about how it might be prepared) and I’m definitely going to try it, though I haven’t eaten chicken in more than 30 years. If you try it, too, sue them. Not me. Listen here.

How I found it: Garbage Day.

🎙️Brian Reed reached a level of fame with his show S-Town that most podcasters don’t. (Not everyone gets to be on Jimmy Fallon.) When your show gets that big, you get a lot of love and a lot of criticism, too. Brian Reed got that, but he also got sued for his ethical treatment of John, who was at the center of S-Town. Brian is using that experience as an anchor for his new show, Question Everything, which is tackling big questions about journalism. I think. (He says in episode one that he doesn’t exactly where this show is going, but reaching that level of fame allows you to do that sort of thing in podcasting.) In episode one of Question Everything, Brian does something most journalists would never do, have a conversation with one of his biggest critics, Gay Alcorn, who when S-Town came out wrote, among other things, that Brian did not have consent from John to publish the story that he did. (Tragically, and…spoiler alert: John committed suicide in the middle of the S-Town story, before Brian could really figure out where it was going.) I went into this conversation (Brian and Gay are kind of interviewing each other) thinking that Brian was in the right to make S-Town. What are we supposed to do, not have stories ever? But it was more his own hesitation about the ethics than Gay’s questions that convinced me otherwise. We do get to hear tape from S-Town that illustrates some moments that Brian probably shouldn’t have shared. These are moments I hadn’t remembered from listening years ago. Keep in mind this is Brian’s show. He’s releasing this all. He even sent the episode to Gay before it was published to be sure she felt like she was represented correctly. She signed off on it. But even she said something to Brian like: why are you doing this to yourself? I guess the answer is: it’s for journalism. And we might ask people who agree to tell their stories to journalists the same thing: why are you doing this to yourself? It’s because when you hear a story that connects with you, it’s the best feeling in the world. It’s for the world, that’s all. Episode two of Question Everything is a roundtable with Ira Glass, Zoe Chace, Astead Herndon, and Jonathan Eig about their experiences being (or trying to be) ethical journalists. Ira Glass shares a story about a girl who was almost killed by a shark or a mongoose (or something, I certainly do not have a fact checker) and wondered why on earth she would tell her story to the whole world, what is the purpose. This example about the purpose of storytelling will stick with me. The group, several cocktails in, also talks about the death of journalism, the pointlessness of it. They talk about this as if it’s something new, but I think it’s always been that way. I don’t trust history, we have never ever really gotten stories right. But what the fuck do I know? I dropped out of journalism school between getting in and the first day of classes and moved to Rome instead. But enough about me, listen to Question Everything here.

How I found it: Press release.

🎙️In 2025 and after more than fifteen years of separation, Oasis, the Manchester band led by brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher, is coming back for an out-of-retirement tour to a few cities. On Switched On Pop, Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan sat down for a walk through of their discography to try to figure out what the fuss is about them, why they were so big, if the hype was real, what their influences were, what Charlie and Nate think their influences were, and whether or not they will recapture their fiery essence next year. And yes, I did just say “they sat down for a walk through their discography,” because that makes just as much sense as the line “slowly walkin' down the hall, faster than a cannonball.” This episode felt like it could be a series and there were so many smart moments I could slow down and sit with for awhile. (Charlie points out why we can blame Oasis for dudes pulling out their guitars at parties and strumming way too hard, ruining the night for everyone. This hit me way too hard.) This episode was funnier than I thought it would be. I mean, Oasis is funny. (Noel once called Liam “the angriest man you’ll ever meet, a man with a fork in a world full of soup.” And said, “I liked my mom until she gave birth to Liam.”) Their break up, their sneering vocals, their obsession with John Lennon, some of their songs, and that moment in time that they captured in the 90s, sweeping up the world with their nonsensical lyrics. But then again, it’s like Noel once said: if the lyrics mean something to 60,000 fans, doesn’t that mean they actually mean something? Another thing to sit with. Listen here.

How I found it: I subscribe.

🎙️For the next several weeks on It’s Been a Minute, Brittany Luce is hosting debates in cities and regions across the US to find out who and what are the most influential people and things from those places. I love this game, it should be an entire podcast, and I want to go to every tiny city in the United States and then all over the world. We’re starting in Birmingham, Alabama with Gulf States Newsroom sports and culture reporter Joseph King vs AL.com culture reporter Cody Short, both from Birmingham. We get to talk about Gucci Mane, Angela Davis, windshield wipers, sweet tea, and the thing that got me to click on this episode, Sun Ra. My ears always perk when I hear anything about Sun Ra, I really want a podcast about him and his Arkestra. It’s one of the nuttiest, coolest, most beautiful important stories in music and maybe in general. (I love the Arkestra so much they played at my wedding.) But this was a great episode over all, a great idea. Can’t wait for more cities. Listen now.

How I found it: I subscribe, don’t always listen, but I clicked because Sun Ra was in the title.

🎙️Ego Nwodim was raised by a single mom and on her new show Thanks, Dad, she’s asking people who have dads or who could be her dad to be her dad for the day, giving all the advice she missed by not having one. The first episode was with Adam Pally and there are lots of good ones coming up, like John Hodgman, Kenan Thompson, Scott Aukerman, and Tim Meadows. And Ego is a really good host. She’s funny and open but also just peppers her guests with questions. The pace is fast and fun. Still, she’s observant. At one point in the Pally interview she had asked a question about Adam’s kids and after he answered she said, “did one of them get in trouble recently? You have a look like one of them got in trouble recently.” Her instincts were right. So she’s telling us things about the interview that we can’t pick up with our ears. Listen here.

How I found it: Press release.

🎙️I cherish episodes of Valley Heat in a way I don’t cherish other podcast episodes. Maybe because it’s such a literary show (it’s fictional account of a neighborhood in the Rancho Equestrian District of Burbank, California) but listening to it reminds me of reading a book that I never want to end. I can feel myself reading those books slower when I start noticing that there are more pages in my left hand than my right. It takes me days to listen to an episode of Valley Heat because I listen slowly and I constantly rewind. So thank god we got a new episode this week (the first since April.) This time, Chuck is renovating Doug’s house, but what hasn’t changed is that the entire world seems to be working against Doug, whose life is one big Shakespearian tragedy comedy. Listen here.

How I found it: I subscribe.

🎙️Last year there was an episode of Rumble Strip about Erica Heilman’s friend Susan, whose office was robbed in the middle of the day by a woman with a heroin addiction. That inspired another episode of Rumble Strip about this “world under the world,” which is such a good way to describe addiction. She talks to people who are in recovery now, but can clearly remember what it was like to live in this exhausting, isolating, restrictive world with different rules, where they were pretty much unable to function fully as themselves in the world we are all living in now. It’s fascinating to get a look into this world that Erica says is invisible to most people. But I think we all have an idea of what this world is like. There is an old episode of Lemonada’s Last Day about addiction that I will never forget—Dr. Gabor Maté says we’re all addicted to something. I don’t think this world under the world is completely foreign to everyone. But listening to this episode will make you think about where you fit into all of that. Listen here.

How I found it: I subscribe.

🎙️The Royals of Malibu launched a special bonus season that is so smart I think other fiction shows (or non-fiction shows) should steal the idea. It’s called “Lattes with Lucy,” and Stephanie Sherry (who plays Lucy in The Royals of Malibu) answers listeners’ real life questions. I love the idea of expanding the TROM universe and keeping listeners not just engaged but involved. Plus I just love this type of call-in show. Smart, smart, smart. Listen here.

How I found it: I subscribe.

🎙️I love you!

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📦 From the Archives 📦

[From August 24, 2020] An episode of Endless Thread, Angel’s Glow, talks about something we may have found on Reddit boards in 1862 had Reddit existed (but is being debated on Reddit boards now.) Some injured Civil War soldiers in the Battle of Shiloh reported that their wounds were glowing—and the ones that did were more likely to survive. Is this science fiction or science? Two boys (and very notably, their scientist mom) cracked the case for a science fair project, discovering something about bacteria that nobody in 1862 could have known. Their conditions are also things that we can no longer experience, so it’s kind of a mish-mash of past and future, as the boys (and Dr. Mom) try to recreate the conditions of the glowing wounds.