🏀 three-pointers ⚰️ thirsting 💦 shag dancing 💃🏿🕺🏿 poetry in a casino 📸
🍭 👂Sorry did I ruin the podcast already 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday August 4, 2025. This newsletter was too long for me to include links at the top.
xoxo
lauren
~sponsored~
What happens when cultural traditions collide with the whirlwind of modern dating? Welcome to Love-ly, the podcast where host Mehak (@whathemehak) explores the beautifully messy, deeply personal stories of love, identity, and connection.
From first and second generation immigrants balancing family expectations to Gen Z navigating dating apps and “situationships,” Love-ly dives into the heart of what it means to love in today’s tech-driven world. Whether it’s a cringeworthy first date from 10 years ago or a fresh heartbreak from last week, Mehak and her guests share unfiltered realities and laugh-out-loud moments we can all relate to. Tune in for heartfelt conversations that remind us of one universal truth: no matter where you’re from or what your relationship status is, everyone has a lovely story worth telling. I recommend the polyamory episode.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
In order to tell a fascinating story about basketball, numbers, and life meaning, 30 for 30 made “Chasing Basketball Heaven,” a series about a brilliant sports statistician named Martin Manley who created the NBA’s efficiency rating and wrote Basketball Heaven before anyone was caring about basketball stats. It starts out super granular about basketball stats (so many numbers!) and ends in a graveyard, asking huge questions about life and death. At the beginning my mind was kind of glazing over the numbers (so many numbers!,) but this series proves that numbers can be beautiful storytelling tools, moving and elegant things helping us, in this case, to understand Martin, a very complicated guy. (The way Chasing Basketball Heaven talks about numbers made me think of Walt Disney’s “Donald in Mathmagic Land.” I am not kidding when I say you know I love something when I’m able to make a Disney comparison.) [spoiler alert] Martin’s tragic death was meticulously planned and in style of the logic he followed his entire life—he organized and published a detailed website documenting his life, beliefs, and reasons for ending his life, which he scheduled to go live on the day he shot himself on his 60th birthday. It was his obsession with efficiency that made him incredible and also made him an insolated person. He left us with a lot of analysis and numbers to look at, but also a lot to ask. Do not sleep on this one, it’s unforgettable. The hosts are friends completely in love with basketball, and even in the final, sullen scene at Martin’s grave, they cannot stop themselves from remembering basketball stats.
notes
✨Arielle and I are keynoting in Dallas and need an audience participant! If you're planning to be there on Wednesday the 20th and want in, fill out this form (it takes 30 seconds).
✨Audio Flux just announced their new circuit: Creative Tension. Their creative partner is textile artist, educator, and researcher Lorna Hamilton Brown MBE, who has long advocated for the recognition of Black knitters and crocheters, and is known in fabric circles as “The Banksy of Knitting.” Anyone and everyone is invited to participate through an open call. Submissions will be accepted August 01 through September 15. Learn more about and listen to fluxworks from Circuits 01 through 05 here.
✨Yesterday, Arielle Nissenblatt featured podcast recommendations on the music and politics of Bad Bunny in EarBuds.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Alex Lewis is a Philadelphia-based independent radio producer and musician and the co-founder of Rowhome Productions.
This interview was conducted in my office overlooking my street in West Philadelphia, where Alex and I both live, and edited for clarity. We like to meet in person, because, it’s like Alex says (spoiler alert!) “audio people are great, and we should all hang out more often.” (Alex is known for organizing activities and we have semi-regular audio dinners with other Philly people!)
Lauren Passell: Hi. So when I tell people I moved to Philly, they’re like, “Why Philly?” Here are two questions for you WHY PHILLY? And also…why are there so many goddamn audio people here? I love it, but why?
Alex Lewis: I don't feel like Philadelphia is seen to the wider world as an audio city, but it really, really is. I'm from New Jersey. I went to college in Chicago. I moved to Portland, Oregon, after college. Then in 2012, I went to the Transom Story Workshop in Woods Hole, MA and afterwards thought I wanted to move back to the East Coast but I don't want to move to New York. I wanted to be close to my family and friends. Philadelphia had at least three public radio stations I knew of. I was like, If I move there with my background and my skills, I bet I can find a job making radio.
Most people go to New York.
That's where a lot of energy is.
What was the vibe at the time?
This is pre-Serial. Gimlet didn't exist. This was just a couple of years before all that stuff started blowing up. Back then if you said you wanted to do anything with audio, people were like, I don't even have any follow-up questions because I don't care that much.
I felt like I was becoming a public school teacher, choosing public media or public radio because it's a job that has a ceiling for how much money you can make in your career, but it's a good thing to do. It's a good thing to do for the world. It's a good way to spend your life. The people in public radio are the best people I've met.
So what’d you do once you got here [to Philly]?
I moved here in summer 2012. I thought I’d just work at a coffee shop or something. Someone had connected me to Yowei Shaw, we got beers at Dock Street in West Philly. (Now called Carbon Coffee.) Yowei was like, ‘do you want a producer job at World Café?’ I thought my work life was sorted from them on because literally the next week, she connected me with the executive producer there. They hired me pretty much on the spot because of Yowei's recommendation. I was like, Philadelphia is a magical place where people give you radio jobs when they barely know you.
Then why are there so many other audio people here? Did they take similar routes to you?
There are two main reasons. One is that there are so many public radio stations here - WHYY, WXPN, WRTI, the classical music, jazz one. And there are community media stations, PhillyCAM, Scribe Video Center, and others. In 2020, when big podcasting, was really blowing up, a good number of people moved here from elsewhere because they had a remote job with Pineapple Street or something and could just have a higher quality of life for cheaper than living in New York, DC or LA.
Tell me about Rowhome.
So I had been working in public radio here, and became a full-time independent producer around 2014. Post-Serial, the opportunities just ramped up and up and up for people who had experience making stuff. It went from being like, ‘I'm pitching stories to the local or national public radio stuff’ to being getting reached out to by all these companies who needed a producer. By 2018, 2019, I had at least 5-10 years of experience and my inbox was crazy with opportunities to work on interesting things for more money than I thought was possible.
Do you remember having a moment where you noticed the change?
Seeing how many people were excited about Serial and using their phones to listen to audio. I remember being on the subway in New York when a Serial episode came out and noticing that everyone was listening. I mean, everyone's listening now, but not everyone is listening to one thing. Then you’d go and meet up at a bar and then talk about it. I thought, ‘people are going to get used to this and they're going to want more of whatever this is.’
So I had been working all these freelance jobs or year-along projects at places like Pushkin and Audible and WHYY and WXPN here in Philadelphia. And I met (Rowhome’s co-founder) John Myers at WHYY, where he had been a producer for Fresh Air for many years. There was all this work available but no podcast company here. John and I had a lot of intersections. We went on this reporting trip to New Orleans with WXPN, and I got breakfast with him and was just like, “Have you ever thought about starting a company before?” I thought we could become a one-stop shop, a really high-quality production team based in Philadelphia.
How are you and John different and how are you alike?
As soon as we started going, I knew we complemented each other so well. John's about 15 years older than me, a long-time public radio guy, has all the skills and knowledge, and has lived in Philly forever. Unlike John, I'm not a business guru. I love being out in the field with a microphone talking to people. I'm a little bit more by the seat of my pants. John is very fastidious and meticulous. My eyes glaze over when someone sends me a long agreement or someone's like, “You need to do your taxes now.” From the production standpoint, John is really good at the sound design, mixing, final master delivery part of things, which I think comes down to his fastidiousness, too, and just his level of experience and skills. Often, our projects break down, generally speaking, to me being the managing producer. I help assemble our teams and listen to things, manage things, or run out in the field and collect tape, and get everything to the point of delivering him a session, and then he does all the back-end post-production stuff. My biggest advice is to find a partner who's very different from you.
Why did you call it Rowhome?
Many of us here in Philly live in rowhomes, and we wanted a very Philadelphia-oriented identity. And we didn't just want to work on podcasts, we still wanted the opportunity to work on radio programs and documentaries, audio tours or other creative things. More than 50% of our work is Philadelphia-based stuff and I think that's a really cool niche for us. Also, I live here and I love it here and I want to be part of life here in a certain way.
Will you do video for your clients?
We're really an audio-first company, that's our area of expertise. I'm not against video. But if you're making something that is meant to be listened to, I think often adding the video element is just a distraction and it can really take away from the work you're trying to do. Because it's really rare that anyone is good at all of that stuff.
Do you get better tape with a microphone than if you have a camera?
I think so. The video element is someone caring about the way they look, the way they're saying stuff on tape. Right now, if we were filming this conversation, I worry I'd be acting a little bit.
John said something to me that I had never thought about before. Terry Gross still doesn't do Zoom. She's in a studio. We don't need to be seeing things.
Yeah, it’s like what is the goal of this recorded conversation? Terry Gross' goal is just to have the best radio conversation possible.
That's really good. What is the goal? Take it back a step. What is your biggest hope for Philadelphia, the city?
I just want us to have a really healthy and growing and expanding ecosystem of audio here. It's just going to keep getting better and better for everyone if we just have a thriving audio scene: We're going to make better shows. We're going to have cooler events . That includes Rowhome. That includes all the other people who are working in public media or for companies. I would love it if we had things like RESONATE or like Tribeca Audio here or any of those things.
We spend too much time by ourselves in this world of audio making. I think any chance to hang out with other people is just generally good in the world we live in. And audio people are great, and we should all hang out more often.
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
👂Crybabies is an old show hosted by writer Susan Orlean and actor Sarah Thyre about what makes people cry. It hasn’t had an episode since 2019 (the fist episode, with Christopher Guest, was in 2014,) but man, I think about those interviews a lot. I listen to new stuff all the time but someone on Reddit asked how to listen to the episodes, which were moved to Stitcher Premium at one point, and it inspired me to treat myself to some relistening. The tiny, weird cues that the guests select always end up spinning into beautiful conversations about emotion and vulnerability, and obviously they’re very funny and just smart conversations about pop culture you want to obsess over or learn about for the first time. I went straight to the Guy Branum episode because I specifically remember being moved by the way he talked about Freddy Mercury, what the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” is really about, and how Queen music went from queer-coded to jock jams. But something I had not appreciated so much at the time was a conversation about the movie Babette’s Feast and the idea that no artists are poor. Everyone should listen to this episode, then go listen to s’more. There are so many podcasts out there promising to cheer you up right now because the world feels like it's crumbing all around us. You an also unleash tears, feel feelings, get moved by art. Goddamit I miss this show. For a second I was bummed nobody has tried to carry on its spirit or do another version but come to think of it, I’m really really glad. Listen here.
How I discovered it: In 2014 there weren’t as many podcast options—I would just go to the Earwolf site and listen to whatever was there.
👂The newest season of The Plot Thickens has the camera pointed toward the camera pointed to the chaos that was happening on the set of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1963 film Cleopatra. The Plot Thickens has five very good seasons under its belt about Peter Bogdanovich, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Lucille Ball, Pam Grier, and John Ford. I think of them as juicy, well-reported and in-depth cinema deep divers but not SO in-depth that you feel like you have to commit a portion of your life to listening, or that you are about to be served way more than you want to know about something. It’s You Must Remember This-lite (and maybe a good introduction into that show if you haven’t listened already.) Ben Mankiewicz, Joseph’s uncle, is sharing stuff from archives, family, people in the biz, and stuff that feels like it’s pulled from the gossip columns. It’s even worse than you would expect from a movie that was the most expensive ever made at the time and so wildly over budget, had a star, Elizabeth Taylor, who nearly died from pneumonia, switched location in the middle of shooting, switched directors in the middle of shooting (from Rouben Mamoulian to Mankiewicz, who really didn’t seem to want to do it in the first place,) and was so drastically cut from its original 6 hour length that major plot points were lost. (But don’t worry, it’s still four hours long.) Episode three, about Joe, could probably work as a standalone How I Built This episode…it’s a good story about how an unusual way someone became a skilled director. Start here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber.
👂Sometimes, a show includes a moment that haunts me—and I think Charlie’s Place has one. The podcast tells the story of Charlie Fitzgerald, a Black businessman who ran a trailblazing nightclub in 1940s–50s Myrtle Beach. Charlie’s Place was one of the few places in the Jim Crow South where Black and white patrons danced together under one roof, and Charlie was a man few seemed to understand then, and even fewer remember now. How is that possible for someone who made such a huge impact? Host Rhym Guissé revisits the site and speaks with those who still remember it, piecing together who Charlie really was—and what Charlie’s Place meant to the people who danced there. The scene I can’t shake comes from an interview with Ms. Pat, who danced at Charlie’s Place years ago but also worked as a nanny for a seemingly kind white family in town. One day, the little girl she cared for threatened her after noticing that Ms. Pat has seen one of their Klan hoods. It’s chilling moments like that that are interwoven with stories of wild, innovative dancing and unforgettable music that illustrate the complexity of Charlie’s Place. As one person puts it, it was “segregation during the day, integration at night.” But integration didn’t mean harmony—the presence of white patrons at a Black nightclub changed everything down to the ways Black dancers subdued their moves in white company. This is a beautiful, vibrant show about an important piece of history—and a search for a mysterious figure we still know surprisingly little about. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Press release
👂Comedians Julia Davis and Vicki Pepperdine play Joan Damry and Jericha Domain for Dear Joan and Jerica, a podcast that allows Julia and Vicki to flex their skills as life coaches, female sexual health and psycho-general counselors, and sports journalists, to answer thorny questions about sex, marriage, and relationships. Julia and Vicki have fleshed out the characters a bit (Joan has been married several times and has five children, while Jericha has been married for 30 years and has an only daughter, Cardinal; Joan recently turned her hand to erotic-romantic adult fiction, whilst Jericha has written 5 books on depression) but all you have to know is that this show is filthy and so funny I have no idea how Julia and Vicki can record without bursting into laughter. Release the outtakes!!! Joan and Jericha are here for women but seem to hate them. Their advice is usually a mixture of mocking them for their disgusting, disgusting bodies or encouraging them to be foot-fisted by their husbands or to explore sex with their young nephew. I wish you could have seen my face the first time I listened, not quite understanding what I was getting into. The more I listened, the funnier it got. How dirty will these two British, well-spoken and proper-sounding women get? This reminds me so much of one of my favorite shows of all time, FeMANism, that I actually tried to do my own cross promo by writing in the FeMANism Apple Podcast review “if you’re here you’d like the podcast Dear Joan and Jericah!!!” and in the J&J review “if you’re here you’d like the podcast FeMANism!!!” I have never felt the need to do that before. Joan and Jericah haven’t been putting out episodes for the past few years and many of the reviewers express how they long for more, it makes me so sad to think that these two shows wouldn’t know about each other. FeMANism is hosted by two funny women playing the male versions of Joan and Jericah. They are the same people. But Joan and Jericah are way filthier. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Bridger Winegar (I Said No Gifts) recommended it in my favorite Podcast the Newsletter interview, which I was just rereading for fun.
👂Patrick Fore is a photographer and art director, and also the host of The Terrible Photographer, which is not a podcast for photographers. I mean it is, but it’s also for designers, filmmakers, writers, and yeah, podcasters. Anyone who makes things. The Terrible Photographer is a personal memoir-ish reflection on what it means to be a creative, especially as a freelancer. Patrick doesn’t rely on blasting you with tips or lifehacks, he uses beautiful storytelling—detailed accounts of his own career—to project big, thinky takeaways. In a way it’s like what Blindboy is doing—listening to this podcast is like sitting on a therapist couch. Patrick is honest, likeable, and kind. I think a lot of you will find him relatable. (Especially if you, like me, like Patrick, come from the midwest.) One episode opens with the story about having to unclog a nasty toilet on the set of an expensive photoshoot and ends up being a manifesto on why creatives do what they do, because it is the job they hate the least. Patrick talks about survival, struggle, and anger (especially for not getting paid on time. That comes up a lot.) He assumes his listeners are smart and tired of making things that a world that rewards shitty content, people “making poetry in a casino” who feel forced up against an algorithm they despise The writing is good. There’s even a smart, meta bonus episode all about what it was like to be featured on Apple Podcasts and see his numbers spike. Put this on my “podcasts that pleasantly surprised me” list for 2025. Patrick definitely knows something about podcasting that so many people in other industries who make podcasts don’t. That it’s not just about what you say, but how you say it and how it sounds. This show is proof that you can go hardcore niche and yet make something so undeniably universal and I’d like to see way more of that. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Apple Podcasts feature
👂kill switch, hosted by Dexter Thomas, is a show about living in a fast-moving tech world. There are a number of shows that have a similar description, but there are two reasons I clicked on this one—it’s made by Kaleidoscope (they have made impeccable things like Skyline Drive and The Sicilian Inheritance) and the episodes really piqued my interest. They were either about things I hadn’t seen talked about or things just framed in a new way. The first one I clicked on was “can AI create ‘ethical’ true crime?,” an episode about whether or not fake true crime, where nobody gets murdered, is better than actual reporting on real cases. It ends up being an interesting conversation about true crime, something that surely you’ve thought about a lot (especially as a podcast listener) but trust me—not in this way. (The AI-created crime in question was about a death death of a real estate agent who had a secret affair with his stepson.) But the second episode I listened to is the one I have been texting to everyone. “the algorithm made me say it” is about how algorithms are changing the way we speak and how communicating under surveillance and censorship changes things very IRL. (The example that keeps haunting me is about how abbreviations people use online in order to not get shadowbanned are bleeding into protest signs and graffiti.) That interview is with Adam Aleksic, aka the Etymology Nerd, who was so funny and smart it made me add his book Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language to my TBR list. Listen to that episode here.
How I discovered it: It was in a Kaleidoscope collection on Pocket Casts???
👂On First Thirst, sex expert and porn actor Siri Dahl gets into conversations about their first pop culture crushes. This is a fun topic but that’s not the only reason this show is so good. Siri is a just plain great host. I first heard of her as a guest on The Daily Zeitgeist and followed her immediately without knowing much about her. She can talk about anything and is the kind of cool, funny friend you want to have in your life. Her (and her guests’) knowledge about the sex industry is what takes this show to the next level, from an easy breezy listen to a thoughtful one that might make you really examine the feelings you had when you first saw the cover of Blink-182’s “Enema of the State.” In fact, that’s a great episode to start with. Siri and her guest Austin Archer talk about why exactly we find nurses hot, along with other care-taking professions. And they really do scrutinize that album cover. I mean if you were young, did you really understand it? Did you think it was hot even if you didn’t? More than one guest (including American Hysteria’s Chelsey Weber-Smith) mention Robin Hood (from the Disney animated film.) All of these conversations are tearing down stigma related to attraction and about the world we lived in that tried to shame us before the internet, and how it’s gotten worse and more authoritarian now that the internet is here. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Siri was on The Daily Zeitgeist
👂I’m assuming you’d be interested to hear this Switched on Pop episode about how podcasting got its sound, where musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding trace the music we hear alongside the podcasts we listen to. They find the very first time music made its way into an RSS feed (it was Grateful Dead, and it’s a good story) and share audio from the early 2000s when Adam “Podfather” Curry had started to use it in podcasts. And they explain how the theme songs have changed and what they are trying to tell us. What makes this episode truly unmissable is Charlie’s interview with Breakmaster Cylinder, the masked music producer and composer who has created hundreds of podcast theme songs. It is one of the most memorable interviews I’ve heard in a long time. Breakmaster Cylinder seems a bit of an odd ball who is part-genius, part-totally normal and humble guy who doesn’t want to be interviewed or doesn’t seem to care. He seems as interested in Charlie as Charlie is with him. Charlie does get him to open up to talk about how he got his start (thank Alex Goldman) and all the thought that goes into these songs that most of us are not thinking about enough. This interview is perfect, the more I think of it. I don’t care about celebrity interviews, but Breakmaster Cylinder is not a celebrity, except maybe to me, so now look at me I’m suddenly back to caring again. And I care about the topic. The history is important. But even if you didn’t really care about podcasts and just wanted to hear a kind of funny interview with a guy who doesn’t quite seem to realize why he’s in the hot seat, you’d like it, too. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Subscriber.
👂You might know of Salt, Maine’s prestigious audio documentary school. They hadn’t dabbled much in podcasting until now, with Essential Salt, the place to go to enjoy the wonderful pieces the students have made. They're all about Maine and the people who live there, the unique things they care about. I was just writing about how much I love Brave Little State because I love local stories. These are local stories, beautifully made with so much care and attention. Every single one of these stories was one I wanted to hear, and I loved the different approaches the students took. All of the episodes dropped at once, which seems like a real embarrassment of riches, and include stories of a bandit plastering red hearts every February around Portland, a chess scene at the local grocery store that makes you feel like part of the game, a reporter who has lost his vocal cords. A cruise ship. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Email from Theo Balcomb
👂I love you!