Each Monday we’ll bring you our take on the most notable and best podcasts of the past week.
BEST IN SHOW
Here Be Monsters: “Distant Warfare”
We love podcasts that take us to faraway places, but the circumstances in “Distant Warfare” are less than ideal: political unrest and civil war in Myanmar. Still, Here Be Monsters gives guest Bridget Burnquist’s story of backpacking into the Burmese jungle the perfect balance of wonder and dread. HBM has always stood out by using an atmospheric soundscape, and here it backdrops the action in a really organic way. The production transforms the sound into something tactile and fragrant. There’s a palpable sense of being in the rainforest and drudging through the soggy fields and mud. Burnquist makes for good company, too. She’s inquisitive and bold, but she isn’t a fool. When she and her hiking partner cross paths with militants, she’s dealt a hard-earned lesson. The rawest cultural experiences often come with great sacrifice.
Death, Sex & Money: “In New Orleans” Series
On the tenth anniversary of the storm, there are a parade of Hurricane Katrina retrospectives. With that in mind, you have to give a lot of credit to Death, Sex and Money for tackling a well-worn topic with five excellent podcasts that showcase why radio documentary is such a compelling form. Popular media likes to focus on something like looting–a much admired bugaboo in the news cycle–but DS&M has no interest in sensationalism. The content from “In New Orleans” is borne on the backs of five New Orleanians who stayed around after the levees broke. You can tell by the final product that Anna Sale and the DS&M crew pounded the pavement to find their protagonists, too. Each personality is different, but the experience of living in the city after Katrina gives them a natural through line. One of our favorites, “Becoming the Demo Diva,” reveals how a woman started a demolition company with no experience and little more than a dream of hot pink excavators. After listening to “In New Orleans,” you learn a lot about how people cope during hardship and how the storm came to define some people and completely break others. As always, Sale exhumes the humanity that lives inside even our darkest moments.
While Kendra Holliday is a sex worker, it’s more accurate to say her work resembles therapy to her clients. She rehabilitates men who deal with issues of erectile dysfunction, suffer from premature ejaculation, or have little to no sexual experience. Holliday is compassionate, and her job causes her fewer complications than you might think. In “Sexistential,” Strangers showcases how much host Lea Thau contributes to episodes, even when she gets less airtime. Here she plays the audience surrogate, trying to understand how a woman–someone who has a lot of similarities to Thau–might get into a business that asks her to have sex with strange men. It’s never judgmental, just an earnest curiosity. The misgivings that Thau has make for a nice counterpoint to Holliday’s narrative, and they show why we like podcasters who ask questions.
RUNNERS UP
Our National Conversation about Conversations about Race: “The ‘#BlackProtestsMatter’ Episode”
The talking heads were abuzz this past week about the two women who interrupted Bernie Sanders to opine on the #BlackLivesMatter movement. During this week’s “About Race,” things get a little heated over the efficacy of interrupting presidential candidates. Raquel Cepeda and Tanner Colby make perfect foils for the episode, while Baratunde Thurston–with all his equanimity–picks his spots. The dialogue is civil, certainly, but it’s fun when it gets testy. About Race is not afraid of debate. The three hosts clearly tackle prearranged subjects, but the conversation still allows for a walk into uncharted territory where the gloves might come off. This installment of About Race underscores exactly why the #BlackLivesMatter interruption was important: Sometimes the point is simply that we need to be talking about these things.
On The Media: “Lies and Spies”
With razor sharp precision each week, On The Media’s Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield dissect media-related stories. Sometimes their subjects are thematically linked and other times the overarching point is simply to sniff out the puff and fluff that fill our 24-hour news cycle. On “Lies and Spies,” we return to Hurricane Katrina and the rampant misinformation that was spread in the days that followed the tragic storm. In a world where journalists can’t get the news to us fast enough, perhaps it’s unavoidable that a few would get the facts wrong–or perhaps there is something more nefarious at work here. Where is the line between rooting out a story and creating a story, and is our insatiable hunger for the news feeding this beast? We also learn about a legal case against Google with the “right to be forgotten” as the asserted argument. As always, Garfield asks exactly the questions on all of our minds. Stick around until the end to hear about an imagined dystopian future where Donald Trump reigns as the leader of the free world in a so-sad-it’s-funny, so-funny-it’s-sad segment adapted from an article in The Atlantic by Jon Lovett.
The Longest Shortest Time: “Should I Have Kids?”
For a show billed as a “bedside companion for parents who want to hear in the middle of the night (or day—what’s the difference, really?) that they are not alone,” The Longest Shortest Time often assumes parenthood as a natural state of its subjects. But this week it asks a more basic question: Do I even want to have kids? Being a parent is hard–a fact that the first 63 episodes have clearly demonstrated–and some aren’t quite sure it’s a job they’re ready to sign up for. We hear from LST producer Joanna Solotaroff who admits she’s wavered on the question of becoming a mother, in part due to what she’s learned reading countless emails from moms and dads detailing the difficulties of parenthood. It’s a sweet episode, but it’s never saccharine as Solotaroff describes a subway conversation that led to something of an epiphany on the matter. This podcast’s listenership is large and likely extends to many non-parents who harbor the same uncertainty and misgivings as Solotaroff. It’s terrific to see the show reaching out and including those views in its dialogue on what it means to have children.
HONORABLE MENTION
Fugitive Waves: “Wall Street: San Quentin’s Stock Market Wizard”
Fugitive Waves manages to tell such charmingly disparate stories each episode. One week it’s about My Little Pony, the next it’s prison. “Wall Street” stars Curtis Carroll, a convict-turned-stock guru. Carroll goes by the name Wall Street these days after learning how to read in prison and realizing he is preternaturally adept at picking stocks. The podcast is an insightful look at how prison might operate in an alternative universe, a place where people nurture their talents and improve the lives of those around them. Wall Street’s investment strategies have garnered such a reputation, he pins them up on the wall for guards and inmates alike. It’s great to listen to a show going outside the range of what it’s expected to do. The Kitchen Sisters take a subject that looks custom made for an economics podcast, and give it their own beautiful fingerprint.
Millennial #7: “What’s Your Worth?”
If you’ve followed Millennial from the start, you know it’s all about what it means to be a twenty-something negotiating the world. One of the biggest storylines of the show has been about the creation of the show itself. Producer Megan Tan walked us through the early steps of deciding to take the leap and create the podcast, and she didn’t hold back in documenting her fear of failure. Now, seven episodes in, Millennial has gained a substantial audience and she has begun to be courted by sponsors. It’s a rewarding episode that harnesses some of the same initial excitement that StartUp captured in chronicling the early stages of building a company. There’s a risk, however, in pinning the narrative of a podcast too close to its own success. Without other storylines, the show serves only as a means to an end–for StartUp it was raising money; for Millennial it could be landing Tan a gig in public radio. This is a pivotal moment for this podcast darling: will Tan set her sights on other facets of life as a millennial? Wherever it’s headed, it’s been a hell of a ride, and it’s great to see the hard work of this talented young producer begin to bear fruit.
The editors of the The Timbre are big Quentin Tarantino fans, but we recognize that few directors spark the kind of polarized emotional responses that he does. For this reason, Reservoir Dogs makes for an ideal debate subject between hosts Amy Nicholson and Devin Faraci. If you aren’t familiar with The Canon, it should be near the top of your movie podcast subscription list. Nicholson and Faraci decide each week–based on a series of loosely understood requirements (by design)–what movies will enter the film version of Valhalla–i.e. “the canon.” It’s definitely a fangirl and fanboy experience, but that’s precisely the point. The hosts nail down why this particular film makes for such good debate fodder. At the heart of their discussion is a question: Does Reservoir Dogs stand alone in its artistic expression or is it just a not-yet-stylistically-realized forbear of what Tarantino would fully develop in later films? We’re not so undecided. We throw our votes behind Reservoir Dogs’ entry into the canon—and The Canon’s entry into our list of the best podcasts.
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