🌳waldeinsamkeit👄the talks on the hill🛸 UFO eye roll 📺 episode 72 👵🏻 material girl🎶
🍭 👂in heaven he's ten feet tall 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, December 2, 2024. In case this newsletter is too long, I could have written ten issues of Podcast the Newsletter about this, this new show is refreshingly different and I want to live in it, an interview that is so bad it goes back to good here.
Before I forget: I was on All of It with Alison Stewart talking about the best podcasts to listen to over the holidays, you can listen here. I did not know it at the time, but the person who wrote in asking about an advice podcast was my mother.
xoxo
lauren
P.S - If you’re interested in placing an ad in Podcast The Newsletter or Podcast Marketing Magic, fill out this form.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
NK
Nicole Kelly (frequently known as just NK) is a writer, audio producer, and story editor who lives in Mexico City. She was one half of bitchface, an experimental audio project about art and power, and her audio memoir “Divesting From People Pleasing” (The Heart, 2020) was called “a shockingly intimate portrait of what it means to be alive in a human body.” She has published fiction, performed personal essays, and edited Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication for Co-Conspirator Press. She is now a story editor for TransLash Media and is writing a TV series about social anxiety and the art world.
She is the host of Basket Case.
Describe Basket Case in 10 words or less.
femme, mixtape, queer, vulnerable, playful, contradiction, decoder ring
How is it unlike most mental health podcasts?
Most of the episodes contain intimate narratives (although some are essays, and a few are standalone interviews), and in most cases the show takes a birds eye view of those experiences to talk about the social and historical and economic and cultural forces that lead someone to, say, see therapists as authority figures or to take a particular medication or to seek a particular kind of therapy or to feel ashamed of a certain diagnosis or to seek a certain diagnosis or to mask their neurodivergent traits.
So it’s more about illness and what creates it than it is about “mental health” – although most of the stories are about people who have found ways to feel good, ways to feel supported and connected and self compassionate instead of inadequate, inferior, isolated, and ashamed.
I like to think of it as for basket case/by basket case – I don’t want to uphold a hierarchy between mental health professional and mental health patient, expert vs… whatever the opposite of expert is. And most of the “experts” (people with PhDs or people who have published books or people with bylines) I talk to are queer and/or neurodivergent and/or mentally ill themselves.
I do hope it is helpful and a resource, but I also want to undermine the idea that you are a problem to solve, or that your mental illness is your problem to solve alone.
I love self help tbh, I’m always trying to be more confident, more intentional, the most expressed version of myself (after having to unlearn antiblackness, and unlearn white supremacy, and unlearn heteronormative thinking) and often consume “personal development” and CBT type stuff. But to the extent that our mental health, mental illness, and/or mental distress is in response to these kinds of structural and systemic forces, addressing that requires a collective, not individual response.
This podcast isn’t full of tricks and tips in the traditional way, but can you offer some advice from what you’ve learned about unraveling ourselves from the sociopolitical conditions that cause mental distress? What’s one thing we can do?
I’m learning as I go, alongside everyone listening, so this is what I know so far: Start with seeing your own experiences with mental illness/neurodivergence as points of connection with other people — even people who have a different diagnosis than you. See those experiences as potential avenues to political solidarity.
And then: There are issues you can organize around – universal health care, universal basic income, access to affordable and stable housing, and legal rights for disabled people. Those are all systemic issues that would have an impact on the rising levels of mental distress in the US.
Why are you the perfect host for it?
I’m a neurodivergent bad bitch with a probable anxiety disorder and no shame, and I love asking questions, telling stories, and connecting seemingly disparate ideas in a way that feels chill & fun.
What’s a podcast you love that not enough people know about?
I really love this series Julie: The Unwinding of the Miracle. It’s about a woman who is preparing for death. I listened to it right after my mom died and I felt like I got to have a conversation with Julie that I didn’t get to have with my mom. Podcasts are healing!
Loving plug for Juventud Maldito Vacío para los que escuchan podcasts en español. My friend Laura Ubate made it when she got laid off and it’s a poetic reflection on the confusion and possibility of early adulthood, from the perspective of someone que ya esta grande (someone who is now grown). (We started producing our shows around the same time and Laura talked me off the ledge more than once.) The first episode of the series came out in late September, the same week as Basket Case.
Shameless plug for the other series I work on, The Anti-Trans Hate Machine. The new season dropped Oct 8 and is about how since January 6, far right militias in the US are using transphobia and violence to enforce their white supremacist patriarchal world view. It's kinda scary, but stay ready so you don't have to get ready, ok?
What’s a podcast you love that everyone already knows about?
Heavyweight. Bring it back!
🕯️WE INTERRUPT THIS BROADCAST!🕯️
You’re Wrong About’s Sarah Marshall and American Hysteria's Chelsey Weber-Smith are joining forces for a historical, theatrical, ecstatic spectacular for the living and dead. Get tickets to their spiritualist séance (featuring fireside conversation, mystifying tricks, special guests, and music from the only Fleetwood Mac tribute band that may actually be ghosts) here. (I’m going to the LA one!) I talked to Chelsey about it.
Why a Séance?
Séances were the main event of Spiritualism, a religious and political movement that developed from the 1840s and lasted until the 1920s and had a massive impact on American culture. It all centered around this new idea that we could talk to the dead and that they could talk back to us in a variety of ways. These events were much different than the slumber party séances with Hasbro ouija boards we see in pop culture today (which we also love), so we want to show how these supposedly haunted spaces were actually very revolutionary in their time. Scientists and magicians like Houdini were always trying to prove that the tricks were faked and the mediums were frauds, and it turned into a kind of battle for spiritual truth. As people who make skeptical podcasts, we are very interested in leaving space for the unknown to come through, whatever that may be.
What's something cool we can expect at the Séance?
The first half of the show is a typical podcast conversation to teach the audience about the history of Spiritualism, and the second half is a rag-tag theater-esque performance of the paranormal. You’ll get some practical effects, a little bit of ghost burlesque, and a little bit of ghost drag. Also the ghosts of Fleetwood Mac, AKA The Little Lies, a tribute band fronted by American Hysteria and You’re Wrong About producer Miranda Zickler will be a big part of the whole ecstatic spectacular.
Fill in the blank: if you like ________ you will love the American Hysteria + You're Wrong About Séance.
If you like Rocky Horror, The Blair Witch Project, Fleetwood Mac, and our podcasts, you will love the American Hysteria + You're Wrong About Massive Séance.
Can you talk about the prep involved? Are you two in, like, rehearsals?
We are definitely in rehearsal. Our director and production manager Woody Shticks has been helping us build out what we created last year into something bigger and more polished. We get together on Zoom mostly, but we have had a couple in-person rehearsals and will have more as the shows get closer and we are all actually in the same place. When the bomb cyclone hit Seattle last week we lost power and had to have our whole rehearsal in the dark, appropriately lit by candles.
What inspired the event? It isn't like most other girls.
There was this special on the BBC in 1992 called Ghostwatch which was basically a War of the Worlds-type hoax pulled off by the news team. The real anchors that people had grown to know were doing a live Halloween special investigating a supposed haunting. They went in as skeptics, sort of like what we represent on You’re Wrong About and American Hysteria, but slowly more and more paranormal things start happening to them, shaking their skepticism. It was one of those situations where some people thought it was a real broadcast and it caused some controversy. The title of the show actually comes from a line in Ghostwatch.
What's something I didn't ask you that you wish I did?
To answer your unasked question, yes, Sarah Marshall will be singing and Chelsey Weber-Smith will be having an exorcism.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
The Telepathy Tapes is one of the most mind-twisty things I’ve listened to in awhile. It felt too hot too touch, like I want to pass it along fast. Inside is a theory—that non-speakers with autism are telepathic and have otherworldly perceptions—that is both unbelievable but when you really think about it, completely plausible and if true, changes everything science has told us about not just the capabilities of neurodivergent people, but also interconnectedness, communication, and whatever god is. It starts with host Ky Dickens toting her tape recorder to homes of autistic children all across the world (accompanied by a neuroscientist) for intimate conversations with their families to hear some incredible things. Things like “my son knows what I did today even though we were apart,” and “my daughter knows all about the Harry Potter books but she’s never read them.” They say these things with such casualness because to them, it’s real and normal. But to Ky and to us, hearing for ourselves a child tell us a number between 1-1000 we are holding in our minds is truly, like, stop the presses insane. “What’s her success rate?” Ky asked a parent. “100% accuracy so far.” Ky has some compelling tape. But she’s also setting out to prove something these parents never doubted—that these silent communicators are gifted in ways we do not have words for. And if you are to believe it…(and why shouldn’t you? How arrogant to think that we have this all figured out, that the quietest ones in the room don’t have something to say)…if you are to believe it, that means you have to question everything you know about communication. And worse, that we have been misdiagnosing people with special gifts for centuries, putting them in institutions or denying them an education. There is a reason why this stuff isn’t talked about more. Science doesn’t want to talk about it because it can’t be explained and many of the families with these kids are too afraid of being censored, ridiculed, and ignored to talk about it. (But still, I’m like, why is everyone not talking about this? I could talk about this show forever, I can’t stop thinking about it.) Like I said, it starts small, in a house New Jersey to meet a boy named Akhil. As the series advances questions get bigger and bigger and you realize this series is about understanding our greater reality. Drink every time you hear someone say “I know this sounds crazy but…” (And this stuff does sound crazy. But people thought the earth was flat, too.) Maybe start with my favorite episode, “Telepathic Communication between friends and groups.” It’s about about something people with autism called “The Talk On the Hill,” a meeting of minds that happens on this airwave they are all tuned into. It’s also about energy attraction and a beautiful relationship between a mother and son. Nevermind, listen to it all. I just finished and am starting again. The Telepathy Tapes is also a film, I recommend the website to dive deeper. How I discovered it: Someone mentioned it on Reddit.
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
🎙️When they decided to standardize the language in most of the world, they usually just went with the version that was being spoken in the biggest city, ignoring everything regional. So like they went with the French being spoken in Paris. In Italy, they gathered a team of writers and poets who, rather than just choosing the words from Rome, chose the most beautiful noteworthy words from all over Italy. That is something I learned in the preview episode of the new show Fifty Words for Snow and what inspired hosts Maggie Rowe and Emily John Garcés to make it. They’re trying to make up a new language of the best words from cultures all over the world. The English language has a lot of words but yet lacks so many. Schadenfreude is maybe the most common example of this, and the German language is rich with examples of these things that Maggie and Emily are hunting. But other languages have them, too. In the first few episodes you learn Dutch words gezellig and niksen, the Japanese words wabi sabi, and the German words torschlusspanik. This is a great idea for a podcast. But that’s not at all why this show is a total delight. Creativity is Maggie and Emily’s strongest mode of exploration. In the first episode they interview someone calling in from the bathroom at a house party, which wouldn’t always work but in this case it’s charming. To illustrate the Dutch word for “how long it takes to eat a banana” Maggie’s husband eats a banana while the two talk about the Dutch language. They put words (like should and lazy) on trial with judges and end things with a poem. Is there a word for a podcast that just sounds nice and cozy and bright and sparkly and smart and fun? A clubhouse you want to live in? Listen here.
How I discovered it: It was featured in Podnews.
🎙️I do not really listen to celebrity interview podcasts, but The Worst Podcast is the best one. I started listening to the Bob The Drag Queen episode and was greeted by a trailer read by my friend Kattie Laur (who does a lot of great stuff, see Pod the North) for another episode with Anna Sale, an episode I had missed in my feed. Kattie did such a convincing job explaining why it was such a special episode (there is SUCH a great marketing lesson here) that I turned it on immediately. And Kattie was right. On The Worst Podcast, host Alan Zweig doesn’t know who the guest is, or anything about them. Kattie has chosen them. Lucky for someone like me, that means we get a lot of guests who have podcasts. This is something Alan complains about, saying that they must all leave his show saying, “at least my show is better than that.” This show obviously could not be more self-deprecating. (Or sincere!) It is adorable how much Alan pretends to now know what’s going on (Anna calls the idea of a host “not bought-in and without a plan” similar to exciting performance art and I like that), and how Kattie, a major character on The Worst Podcast, is often the villain, feeding Alan prompts he doesn’t like. But between the questions like “is authenticity unsustainable?” Alan jumps in to steer things into his own direction. (“What could we do to our children that they would hate but we wouldn’t be arrested?”) The result is almost always better answers that get to profound aloneness, discomfort, regret. (When asked which conversations are the hardest to have, Anna answers “The hardest thing for me to talk about are things where I feel clumsy and stupid like I’ve messed up.”) Anna’s answers are crystals I want to put on pedestals. The Worst Podcast breaks every single rule and is funny, off the rails, transparent, vulnerable, touching, and hilarious. Maybe if following the rules is wrong, you shouldn’t want to be right. Oh the Bob The Drag Queen episode was GREAT too. Listen here.
How I discovered it: I think I first saw it on Apple Podcasts.
🎙️Oh how quickly I shrieked with glee when I saw, not on my player, but on Reddit, that Mobituaries was back, Mo Rocca’s celebration of his favorite dearly departed people and things. It is such a curious, funny show that constantly provides me with new things to appreciate and be delighted by. I’m not one of those people who needs, or really wants, to learn things from a podcast. I want to be in a pleasant place that asks nothing of me. I don’t generally flock to shows about weird science facts or the craziest history stories. But the storytelling and production, and Mo! the host! are so good that this is one of my all time favorites. (I have written about many of these episodes, “June Foray: Woman of a Thousand Voices“ is one of my favorite episodes of all time.) Mo returned with a really good episode about sitcom deaths and disappearances, remembering a missing brother from Happy Days, how replacing Darrin changed Bewitched, and a story about The Hogan Family that is so unbelievable that even the cast members from the show don’t remember it right. Listen here.
How I discovered it: I’m a subscriber but shout out to Redditor Autodidact2.
🎙️Despite the fact that MUBI Podcast has won ton of awards, it is completely underrated. It is one of the best movie podcasts (but it’s really a storytelling podcast) and not enough people talk about it. The storytelling and production are great, it is made with real care. Their new season is about great movies that flopped at the box office at the time (“success stories are boring”…so true!) starting with Sorcerer, which is considered one of the greatest films of the 70s now, was budgeted for $2.5 million, cost $22 million to make, and only grossed $9 million. There are a myriad of interesting reasons why—Friedkin was being a maniac, critics didn’t get it and were salty that Friedkin was trying to remake a classic, and there was a grimness fatigue happening when the movie was released that was not there when the film started shooting, marking a transition into a time when people wanted cheerier movies. And OH! It came out the same week as Star Wars. Episode two is about Babe: Pig in the City and that is one of the funniest and weirdest disaster stories I’ve heard. The episode explains how this dark, wildly complicated and expensive piece of art was delivered as a sequel to a children’s film, and it’s worth listening to. Listen here.
How I discovered it: Longtime subscriber.
🎙️Material Girls had an episode about The Golden Girls, but it wasn’t just a “lol remember The Golden Girls” episode, which is what so many podcasts are doing these days (not specifically about The Golden Girls but about culture in general.) It also wasn’t just about how The Golden Girls, with every episode, were making radical statements over there in Miami. I never tire of listening to that argument but it’s been done. (Although I liked how they pointed out how these older women were able to smuggle in radical messages about sex because nobody is ever really listening to older women, lol, something I had not thought about before.) Our Material Girls are here to explain, with the help of guest Marshall Watson, how The Golden Girls were modeling, on prime TV, the kinds of communities of care / chosen family / mutual aid that is “erased by main stream media under the assumptions of compulsory heterosexuality and the prioritization of the nuclear family.” That’s a podcast in itself but this episode was focusing on sex positivity in The Golden Girls, and how Dorothy, Rose, Blanche and Sophia were offering an alternative to the demonization of queer sex subculture that we were being fed, well everywhere, before, during, and after the AIDs crisis. In the 80s and early 90s, the queer community was navigating a deadly health crisis with very little government support or public awareness. You turn on The Golden Girls and you see Rose, on episode called “72,” afraid that a blood transfusion she had several years ago may have contained HIV-infected blood, and how stigmatized that was. Pop culture can sneakily change conversations. All this time we thought The Golden Girls was just revolutionary for older women, all the while it was telling queer viewers: we see you. And oh, it’s not wrong to have sex. Listen here.
How I discovered it: I wish I could remember how I found this show, it was probably via Hot and Bothered.
🎙️[Trigger warning: discussions of dead people inside chocolates.] A few weeks ago Shreya from my team (and of Shreya’s Audio Affairs) asked if she could write about Strangers on a Bench, and even though I had already written it up I let her do it because she is a much better writer. You can read Shreya’s review here, but in my sub-par review I talked about how Tom is able to ask unexpected questions meet these bench dwellers where they are, and in this delightful way allow us to really understand them. Queue the cheesy music: in the end, there are no strangers on this bench. In the first 20 seconds of talking to one woman he discovered she has an emotional relationship with keeping things clean. I’m obsessed with this shit because I’m nosy. I’m particularly interested in, and maybe jealous of, people alone in parks. Are they escaping something or someone? What a luxury, to go to a park alone! Strangers on a Bench feels like a little break, listening to it slows down the world. Turns out listening to people chat on a park bench feels like you’re sitting there, too. You can hear the birds, people walking by. In some ways, this podcast is a meditation. Shreya recently Slacked me about an episode in particular, “Deli Meets,” and asked if I think there should be a trigger warning on it because it dealt with death and dying. I’m not sensitive to that kind of stuff and immediately thought, “oh I doubt it.” Let’s get this out of the way: it is a beautiful episode. Tom meets a woman who talks about visiting her deceased husband and daughter at the cemetary. That happens in the first 10 seconds. Wham! But by the end we learn so much about this woman and discover all of the things she is other than that. Tom asks her a question she doesn’t like, “what would you do with your body if you woke up to find it was 50 years younger?” He asks normal questions, too. This episode starts out with a punch and ends like a balm. Back to Shreya’s question. I, someone who thinks we way over-do it with trigger warnings, thinks this one could have used one. Strangers On a Bench is a box of chocolates, you never know which stranger you are going to meet. So maybe you should be warned if inside one of the chocolates is a dead person. Again, I’ll do it, since Tom did not: TRIGGER WARNING if you listen to this episode. Discussions on death and dying. Listen here.
How I discovered it: I truly don’t remember!
🎙️The new season of Personally, Short Sighted, is hosted by a storyteller losing his sight, Graham Isador. In these short episodes he’s trying to get us to feel what it’s like to have Keratoconus via sound, using his storytelling, animation, and the rich sound of this show in lieu of words. Graham kind of compares this to an ad for a perfume—how does Adam Driver dressed as a Minotaur make us understand what Burberry perfume smells like? I’m so fascinated by this challenge, to listen to a world that doesn’t center sight. Grant’s writing is funny and playful—his voice, tone, and incantation, remind me a bit of Jonathan Goldstein. In the first episode he takes us deep into his experience of not getting a job for a TV host. In episode two, we hear from a myriad of sight-challenged people who explain how everyone always thinks they’re bored or angry or stupid because their eyes aren’t focusing on people and things the way, for example, my eyes focus on people and things.
How I discovered it: Subscriber.
🎙️Expanse, the award-winning podcast that explores big stories from the very big Australia, has covered a diamond heist, espionage, and a ship called the Blythe Star that disappeared without a trace in 1973. The newest season, Uncropped, actually starts small, with a little-known story that started on a small Queensland cane farm that became the source of the whole modern crop circle phenomenon. Technically this is a UFO story, but they’re not doing it the way I’ve heard before. Uncropped isn’t so much focusing on the UFOs and whether or not they are “real” because you could debate that all day and get nowhere (lol of course they are real.) What’s undeniable is the people behind these stories were impacted in ways you could not believe, these people put themselves out there to admit they’ve seen something. What do you do when someone says something that sounds absolutely crazy? What do you do when you become one of those people? How do we get along and function as a society when our truths don’t line up? (Good thing this isn’t a problem in the good ol US of A!) This is not a UFO story, it’s a story about media, society and human nature. Start here.
How I discovered it: A nice pitch letter that felt pretty personal.
🎙️Thanksgiving week is not typically full of interesting pieces. A lot of podcasts are running reruns, which is something to think about if you’re marketing, by the way. It might be an easy time to stand out! Switched on Pop did a three-part mini-series on Madonna that came out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and it would have stood out any time of the year. Producer Reanna Cruz and Charlie released three episode over the week about Reanna’s area of expertise, Madonnaology, to outline Madonna’s Musical Trinity of Exploration©, which includes gender exploration, globalization, and spirituality. I’m not the biggest Madonna fan so this was sort of like Reanna slapping me on the face and saying, “you don’t have to love the music but don’t you see what a genius this woman is!” I listened to Madonna lyrics, really for the first time, noticing what Madonna’s singing about when she’s singing and how she’s doing it. I noticed little things, like the meaning behind the playful way she says “hey!” in Like a Virgin and how she can shift the power dynamics of a song with the tone of her voice, and big things, like uh, the ways she has shaped our entire culture. Hearing these songs in this context will be new to you (unless you, too, are a Madonnaologist, I guess.) Start here.
How I discovered it: I’m a subscriber.
🎙️I love you!
BASKET CASE 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖
thx for the consistently awesome and helpful newsletter Lauren!
I followed 3 shows from this issue to check out later on Apple Podcasts: "The Telepathy Tapes", "Personally: Short Sighted", and "Listening 2 Madonna". stoked!