📣 The return of Go Bayside! 🌭 to Coney Island 🎢 the endless pasta pass 🍝 the plastics 👚 private equity 💰
🍭 👂 TRUST ME! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, July 3. In case this newsletter is too long…after five years of silence, this beauty is back, “look at that bitch eating crackers,” and a wild adoption story here.
[I will never charge you to read Podcast the Newsletter. If you’d like to buy an ad, inquire here.]
xoxo lp
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Jonathan Menjivar
Jonathan Menjivar is a Senior Producer at Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios who made the hit shows Project Unabom and The Clearing. Prior to Pineapple, Jonathan was a longtime Producer at the public radio show This American Life and also served as the show’s Music Supervisor. He was also a Producer at Fresh Air with Terry Gross and was maybe the last producer in America trained to cut tape with a razor blade. He is the creator of Classy. Follow Jonathan on Twitter here.
Describe Classy in ten words or less.
Juicy, uncomfortable, moving, and fun stories about class.
Now you have a little more space to talk about it. Why did you want to make it?
I grew up working-class with immigrant parents who worked in factories and I’ve always quietly dealt with lots of class guilt/rage/feelings of inferiority and feelings of superiority and I wanted to find a way to air it out. It’s hard to make a show about that because so much of that is happening internally for people – there’s no real action or story. But I think all those twisted up feelings make us do really weird things and I thought maybe if there was a space to talk about it, the story and momentum would come. And it has – the stories in the show feel like we let a bunch of wind-up cars loose. There’s action and drama and humor. People are confessing things they’ve never told anyone before. I am confessing things. The really surprising thing has been how universal all these feelings are, no matter what your class background or current circumstances are. Every time I tell people the premise of the show, they start spitting out all their class hangups they’ve kept inside. That was a sign that there was something to mine.
Can you tell us about the team you’re working with? They sound incredible.
They are! Our producer Kristen Torres came from Pineapple’s The 11th. She has a very similar background to mine and we speak a shared language and love of the swap meet. And a desire to tell stories about the lives of working-class people without being condescending. She’s an incredible producer who’s keeping me in check and bringing lots of weird humor and joy to the show. Our Associate Producer Marina Henke is rock solid and somehow manages to find every dream story or character I ask her to – even ones I’m certain probably don’t exist. Our Senior Managing Producer Asha Saluja is keeping us all on track in the kindest way possible and we definitely would be lost at sea without her. She’s also nailed the core tension or theme of a story in edits a whole bunch of times when none of us could see it. Our editor Haley Howle came to us from Pop-Up Magazine and has that enviable editor skill of being able to both do micro copy edits and also see how all these disparate stories we’re telling across episodes add up to a larger narrative across the season. She’s also very good at telling me, “Jonathan, this joke isn’t very funny.” I’ve worked with our Executive Editor Joel Lovell for years starting at This American Life and we have a way of working together where we can be honest with each other when something isn’t working and instead of getting discouraged, we just dive in and try to fix it. And my boss and Executive Producer Max Linksy, he really is that curious and insightful guy you know from Longform and 70 Over 70. We’ve also got an incredible engineering team in Marina Paiz, Pedro Alvira, Sharon Bardles, Jade Brooks, and Raj Makhija.
When did you first feel like a class straddler?
I think I probably didn’t notice it for real until I started working in public radio. I’d been exposed to privilege and wealth growing up, but most of my friends and neighbors were working-class too. A lot of people experience a giant class shift when they go to college, but I went to Cal State Fullerton – a commuter state school that’s full of working-class kids. It wasn’t until I started trying to work in radio that I saw how much I was going to have to learn and catch up. It happened pretty much at every stage of my career, beginning when I first started volunteering at KCRW in L.A. The very first story I made was for Transom.org and at one point on a reporting trip, the subject of the story turned to me and said, “Are you going to ask any questions?” I was so naive about how it worked, I thought scenes just unfolded in front of the microphone somehow.
Did any podcasts inspire Classy?
When the first season of Articles of Interest came out, I was like, “Oh. You can make a limited run series out of a bunch of different stories that feel like they’re all connected somehow.” The way Anything For Selena mixed the personal with a larger story and ideas without ever feeling indulgent was definitely an inspiration. And you know, I’m also married to Hillary Frank, the OG indie producer who showed all of us how to make stories that are both raw and funny and give people space to say things they feel like they’ve never been allowed to say before. We were also thinking a lot about recent TV shows that treat class with nuance and humor – Reservation Dogs and Ramy and Somebody Somewhere were all on our mind.
You spent a lot of time behind the scenes in podcasting, what was surprising about becoming a host?
I’ve run shows with complicated narratives and lots of moving parts plenty of times before. But there really is a different kind of weight on a project when it’s your own thing. Particularly if you’re telling personal stories.
Fill in the blank: you will like Classy if you like ______.
String cheese, chicarrones, boiled hot dogs, eating spinach from the can, mussels, in season vegetables, a delicate piece of fish, a $25 cocktail, and bacon bits.
What part of the podcast are you most excited for people to hear?
Something very real is happening in the conversation I had with Terry Gross. It doesn’t feel like a staged conversation for a podcast and I think it’s going to resonate with anyone who’s ever had a job with people who are different from them. So like everyone. I’ve been a Pulp fan for over 25 years, so getting to speak with Jarvis Cocker was an absolute dream. I expected him to be charming and funny, but I was delighted that he also seems like just a regular dude. And I was shocked by some of the stuff I found out in the last episode. Things that really opened my eyes and connected my family’s story to a very weird, very twisted early reality TV game show.
Is there anything we (the readers) can do to help this show succeed?
Share the show with your friends and tell them your own stories! We all just really want Classy to be a show that opens up conversations about class in people’s lives.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
I have never seen an episode of the original Saved By the Bell (I loved the remake) but one of the first podcasts I fell in love with was April Richardson’s Go Bayside!, a Saved By the Bell rewatch show. April was always able to pull apart the most ridiculous parts of the Saved By the Bell, revealing all the anachronisms that resulted from the writers room being a team of old, out-of-touch, and white men. It launched ten years ago, which I guess is when I started listening. But it ended five years ago—that’s so long ago I wasn’t even subscribed anymore because in 2018 I was still listening on Stitcher. (RIP.) I was recently reading podcast Reddit (one of my favorite places to test my podcast knowledge—people are always asking if anyone can remember “that one episode of some show about a guy who attended a conference and then jumped off a building” or looking for podcast suggestions about really niche topics. Trying to answer their questions is my Wordle.) Someone came in with the breaking news that Go Bayside! was back. That after five years of silence, April was redoing old episodes she had formerly recorded without a guest. So we finally get episode 85, with Tim Chipping, about the episode of Saved by the Bell where the gang reminisce about Valentine's Days past. It’s particularly interesting because Tim grew up in the UK, where the Bayside hijinks seem even more ridiculous. This episode took me back and brought me so much joy. I could have written this entire edition of Podcast the Newsletter on Go Bayside!
hell yeah
✨ Read my Lifehacker piece 12 Incredibly Niche History Podcasts.
✨ Read about feed warmer campaigns in Podcast Marketing Magic.
✨ Read my Descript piece 6 podcast marketing tips for a show that's ended.
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Nerdette in her newsletter and podcast.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Maintenance Phase’s Brittany Dawn episode went to so many places, I felt like I had whiplash. What starts as a woman who gains a huge following for promoting a toxic, scammy weight-loss/fitness program and then pivots to batshit Christian messaging ends up being a story about the internet and how awful it is. To quote Michael Hobbes, “I resent the position these influencers have put us in.” Brittany Dawn is a bad person who made all of us worse. Somehow she manages to touch upon promoting anorexia, internet scams, religious insanity, police brutality, capitalizing on the death of a dog (who her husband shot in her backyard) and an icky fostering story. At least it gives us the opportunity to learn about Michael’s “bitch eating crackers” theory, where we hate someone so much that the mere fact they’re eating crackers pisses us off. Look at that bitch eating crackers. Listen here.
🎙️On Your Last Meal, Rachel Belle interviews celebs about what their last meal would be, but it’s much more than an interview podcast. Rachel jumps in with history and anecdotes about what her guest are talking about. (Someone brings up vanilla extract, Rachel explains how it can be that there is a LOT of alcohol in it but you don’t need an ID to buy it.) Rachel Bloom was a guest, sharing her unbridled love for The Olive Garden, and there’s a bonus segment with Marilyn Hagerty, the 96 year old newspaper columnist of the Grand Forks Herald, whose earnest review of The Olive Garden went viral. It’s a really joy-filled episode about Rachel Bloom’s childhood, having her Crazy-Ex Girlfriend party at The Olive Garden, and Rachel becoming an Endless Pasta Pass holder. Rachel Belle has so many great guests, from Tegan and Sarah to Mark Summers to Margaret Cho. Pick a person, any person, then become addicted and binge a whole lot more like I did. Listen here.
🎙️You Get a Podcast! has returned with more episodes examining The Oprah Winfrey Show and Oprah’s impact on the world. The last episode was about when Oprah ran a marathon and Kellie Carter Jackson and Leah Wright Riguer talked to Natalia Petrzela (you might know her from Welcome To Your Fantasy, Past Present, or her book Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession) about Oprah’s evolving relationship with weight loss and fitness, and the history of Black women and long distance running. Oprah’s marathon was just another way that Oprah opened up her life to us, allowing us to reflect on it, and continue our obsession with her body. Listen here.
🎙️On Shrink the Box, actor/comedian Ben Bailey Smith and psychotherapist Sasha Bates put fictional characters on a therapist couch to analyze their behavior as if they were real people. An episode about David and Alexis Rose from Schitt’s Creek gets into their magical, hilarious, and sometimes heart-warming sibling relationship and Jungian’s theory of the shy extrovert and the outgoing introvert. This wasn’t just an episode that helped me understand Schitt’s Creek better, it helped me understand myself better. Extroverts aren’t just people who like to go to parties, it’s more complicated than that. Ben and Sasha will help you realize which one you are, it all comes down to figuring out what feels more real to you—your inner world, or your outer one. Listen here.
🎙️What a weekend to finish Slow Burns’ series on Clarence Thomas. Toward the end, we learn about how Clarence Thomas benefitted from affirmative action and how he came to despise it. This whole series has done a great job illustrating how Clarence picked up his right-wing views, and how he found a seat on the Supreme Court despite being such a problematic choice. It doesn’t matter how many times you hear it, the Anita Hill part is sickening. But there were still things I didn’t know about how hard the committee came for her. Listen here.
🎙️The Daily Zeitgeist has a new summer schedule so that instead of five meaty interview episodes weekday mornings and five “trending” episodes that go over zeitgeisty episodes in the evening, they are doing eight episodes a week: One episode is released on Monday evening that goes over trends of the week, Tuesday’s episode is an interview with someone in the zeitgeist or someone interesting, then there are regular beefy interview/news episodes Wednesday-Friday. There are no mini trending episodes in the evening on Mondays and Fridays. Did you get all of that? It is confusing and has been really fucking with me, but I am Zeitgeist ride or die, I’m not letting it rain on my parade. I initially wasn’t too into the Tuesday interviews, but the one that dropped last week was about a word that has probably passed through your brain so many times because you couldn’t think it could possibly be interesting: private equity, with Brendan Ballou, author of Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America. I have never so closely hung on every word of a Daily Zeitgeist episode. It explains why it’s by design that rich people are profiting from things in the US getting worse. Listen here.
🎙️Attn: cat lovers. (The rest of you can skip.) Cat/Person is a sitcom about a broken/post-divorce man named Matthew and his life with his judgmental, selfish, sarcastic, and sociopathic cat Hobson. It’s a tiny series that isolates a conversation between two friends, the cat jokes are subtle and smart but completely pandering to cat-lovers. I found myself relating to Hobson. Listen here.
🎙️In the past eighteen months, more than 12 of Russia's wealthiest oligarchs have been found dead in suspicious ways—poisoned with frog venom, hanged on a handrail, fallen out of high windows. (Wives and children go down with them.) If you ask Russia, they’ll tell you these were depressed men driven to acts of suicide or double homicide. Sad Oligarch suggests that something else is up. This is a mystery/true crime story that is still unfolding as we speak (we could hit 15 dead oligarchs by the time you’re done reading this newsletter.) There has never been a more perfect content/voice match—the host Jake Hanrahan has this voice that makes you feel like you are about to be murdered. Listen here.
🎙️There’s a beautiful audio essay on The Dig presented by writer and critic Andrea Long Chu, who is part Chinese but was in a constant identify crisis about it. Did she feel Chinese? Did her family? In beautiful interviews she asks this question to uncover the many ways one family identifies, how they are perceived, and how that has led them to make their way through the world. (One unfiltered uncle says, “we’re regular old white people in sort of asian bodies.” Listen here.
🎙️You Feeling This?, which premiered at Tribeca Audio Festival, is taking us to the real Los Angeles with ten intimate stories from a diverse group of LA-based creators from Long Beach to the Hollywood Hills. If you binge it will feel like you’re pulling stories from a hat, each one is a portal that pops you into shops, homes, and street corners to hear and feel the beat of LA. (Episodes are recorded on location, mimicking James Kim’s Vermont Avenue, which was the inaugural winner of the "Best Fiction Podcast" award at the Tribeca Festival in 2021.) Stories are sweet, funny, and surprising. It sounds like a concept album. Listen here.
🎙️Lucille Horn was born prematurely in 1920, a time before we knew how to incubate preemies to save their lives. Her father made a run (with her in tow) to Coney Island, where he knew there was an incubator exhibit hiding in one of the side shows. Dr. Martin Couney’s incubators weren’t taken seriously, but this one saved Lucille’s life. It is this tiny moment of one father’s desperation that made baby incubators a viable option for hospitals. An episode of StoryCorps tells the story, then talks to a woman who lived underneath Coney Island’s Thunderbolt rollercoaster before it was torn down. This podcast is a time machine that takes you back to old-timey Coney Island. Listen here.
🎙️On Makeover Montage (formerly Fishnet Flix) costume design superfans and avid movie-watchers Marie Lodi and Blaire Bercy break down the fashion and glam seen in movies, TV shows, and music videos. Beauty editor and on-camera expert Marianne Mychaskiw was a guest on a Mean Girls episode that was absolutely bursting with plastics (as in the girls, but also plastic PVC skirts,) butterfly bra clips, slogan tees, fake designer bags, and the traumatic store that actually was, 5-7-9. This is for the Mean Girls obsessed, who have seen the movie hundreds of times and love it so much they can’t even explain why they love it so much. Maybe what you loved so much was the costumes, which I’m sure you haven’t properly scrutinized yet. This episode was like a Mean Girls vow renewal ceremony, where I was reminded how good this movie is, and taught me how it’s even better than I thought. Listen here.
🎙️On Touré Show, Touré interviewed DMC, one third of Run-DMC, maybe the most important group in hip-hop history and the reason hip-hop became a global phenomenon. Behind DMC’s success was a deep unhappiness, addition, suicide attempts, and the murder of another third of the group, Jam Master Jay. This is a long interview that is also relentlessly entertaining. There are so many nuggets, but at one point DMC tells Toure about finding out he was adopted at thirty-five and calling his birth mother. “What do you do?” “Hip-hop.” “What’s the name of your group?” “Uh, it’s called Run-DMC.” “I love Run-DMC!” The world is nuts. Listen here.
🎙️I have never been more physically uncomfortable listening to a podcast than I was listening to The Retrievals from Serial Productions. When a group of women went to Yale Fertility Center to pursue pregnancy, they experienced excruciating pain during their egg retrieval procedures. They were gaslit into believing that their pain wasn’t real, that they weren’t taking it like all the other women who came before them. But behind the scenes a nurse was stealing their fentanyl and replacing it with saline. It’s not true-crime, it’s true-horror. Listen here.
🎙️As long as we’ve existed we’ve been denying our similarities to animals, thinking ourselves superior (not really what I’d consider proper “dominion” as instructed by the Bible, Christians.) On The Ezra Klein Show environmental philosopher Melanie Challenger explains how artificial those differences are, and what this means in an age when machines are quickly catching up to humans. What happens when they finally do? How will that change the hierarchy we’ve constructed? Will we need to find peace with animals once again? (And since we’re getting a bit dystopian, would they forgive us for the way we treat them?) Listen here.
🎙️Have you ever gotten into a conversation with someone who loves bridges? They really love bridges. Every time I have (my friend, a civil engineer, for one) it seems there is something I’m not seeing. I listened to the first episode of Abridged then later that day ran over the Williamsburg Bridge and tried to feel with each stride its beating heart, the way it was full of life and carrying people back and forth, the inclines and graffiti, the strange feeling of the wind hitting or how the air feels different, the sound of a train blowing by. And the way it transported me from one borough to the next. I still don’t know shit about engineering, but I was aware that the bridge I was running over should not be overlooked. That’s what Rebecca Seidel is trying to get us to do with Abridged, her beautiful storytelling podcasts that forces us to take a second look. The first episode is about The Bridge Man, who has photographed and roped across many bridges, and sees them as conduits to new worlds and full of personality. There’s something about him, too, and all the other people who love bridges as much as he does. Abridged is about those people, too, and what we can learn about them. Listen here.
🎙️Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud is CBC’s daily show that covers the latest entertainment news and provides really smart commentary to go with it. It’ll give you a lot of stuff to talk about at dinner. I just started listening—a break down of how The Flash bombed, EMO in the early 2000s, historic tropes around Black people in horror, and obviously Subgate. I felt like I had discovered a secret, but then I saw an episode with Kattie Laur and Nick Quah about the podcast’s 20th birthday, how the medium has changed our culture, and what the future of podcasting sounds like. You’ll like Commotion if you can’t get enough Sam Sanders. With two episodes of Into It and an episode of Vibe Check every week, I get a lot of Sam Sanders. But I could always use more. Happy birthday, podcasting. Listen to Commotion here.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
[From February 14, 2020] The first season of Motive begins with the mysterious death of a college student studying in Spain—her body was found below the balcony of her tour guide, Manu. The death was deemed an accident by authorities, but after other young women started coming forward with allegations of rape by the same tour guide, the stories all started to snowball, making it harder for Manu’s story fade into the background. I a) studied abroad and was so stupid I cannot believe I did not die and 2) have a friend who did die studying abroad. So far this show is shaking me to my core. I underlined a quote mentioned in episode 3 with my brain: “If you’re robbed while you’re drunk, everyone still understands that’s a robbery. Or if you’re beaten up while you’re drunk, everyone still understands that’s an assault.” Why is the same not true for victims of sexual assault? Like Chasing Cosby, this does a great job highlighting the voices of women who clearly have been empowered by #MeToo. These women are able to pull their stories together with others and become stronger than they ever thought they could be.
From the Desk of Tink
Today we’re talking to one of Tink’s clients, Aline Laurent-Mayard, host of The Tribeca Film Festival 2023 Audio Nonfiction Award-Winning Free From Desire, about 35-year-old Aline, who grew up in the city of love, has never been attracted to anyone — sexually or romantically. On Free From Desire, they tell us how difficult it was to realize and accept their asexuality and aromanticism in a society that only talks about exactly that: love and sex. This acceptance is what also allowed them to now have a child on their own via artificial insemination.
Describe the show in ten words or less: Trying to understand why we're so obsessed with sex.
Who is it for: Anyone! Whether you feel sexual attraction or not, whether you have sex or not, you'll get something out of it.
Favorite listener interaction: A 70 years-old telling me that thanks to the podcast she finally understood that she asexual and that there was nothing wrong or broken with her. It felt like a second start. she quit her husband and is happier than ever.
If I could force one person in the world to listen to my podcast it'd be… The men who convinced/forced me to have sex with them even though they could see I didn't want to.
I love maintenance phase! I don’t think I’ve recognized another podcast mentioned in this newsletter-