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In Our Time, the great BBC radio show and podcast, should’ve spawned an entire genre of academia-core programming, and if the day ever arrives that we nerds get to formalize one, The Curious History of Your Home should fit in nicely. Hosted by the British social historian Ruth Goodman, the series offers listeners a fleet-footed romp through the many histories embedded in the everyday household objects we often glaze over: wallpapers, dishwashers, bathtubs, lighting fixtures … I can’t speak to the fidelity of Goodman’s scholarship, but the point here isn’t to provide a comprehensive history. Rather, The Curious History of Your Home is an accessible primer meant to help you take more delight in the world around you. There should be more podcasts like this: fun, light on its feet, something that would make for a great listen on a lark. Bookstores are filled with this kind of stuff. Why can’t podcast directories be stacked with the same?
Yeah, it’s another rewatch show, but when the formula works, it really works, you know? As the admirably generic title indicates, this podcast features Seth Meyers, former head writer of Saturday Night Live (2006–14), anchoring a breezy retrospective of the collected works of the Lonely Island (a.k.a. the comedy trio Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer), whose digital shorts helped usher SNL into the internet age — and, in some ways, shaped the internet’s humor as well. Perhaps you can still hum some of the Lonely Island’s most enduring contributions: “Lazy Sunday,” “I’m on a Boat,” “Dick in a Box,” “Motherlover,” or “Great Day.” In some senses, the podcast can be viewed as a microhistory, much in the same way that Fly on the Wall With David Spade and Dana Carvey serves the same function for SNL and comedy culture around the late ’80s and early ’90s. Here, the period in question is the specific moment in time right before American culture began its descent into social-media hell. I don’t mean to oversell the historiographical value of this thing, but I also don’t don’t mean to do so. Nothing has brought me back to the fanciful days of the first Obama term as much as this podcast.
➽ Read more of Nick Quah on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast.
Speaking of milestones, this year marks the tenth anniversary of You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth’s reliably excellent independent podcast that powers her scholarship in Hollywood history. To recognize the occasion, Longworth has released a remastered version of her very first episode, “The Hard Hollywood Life of Kim Novak,” which was initially distributed behind the show’s Patreon wall and later, as of early April, released through public feeds. The remaster is a lovely bit of media preservation: You can hear a window into podcasting circa 2014, which was still accommodating to independent narrative productions like this; the very early goings of Longworth’s particular aesthetic, which she would continue to refine; and the foundations of a more interesting way to think about Hollywood’s past that YMRT champions to this day. Be sure to check out this great piece of podcast history. More long-running pods should do remasters.
Nowadays, Tonya Mosley is routinely broadcasted to public radio stations around the country in her official capacity as the co-host of “Fresh Air” alongside Terry Gross, but she’s still keeping a healthy portfolio of creative ventures on the side. Among them: She Has a Name, which sees Mosley tackling a matter of personal history. The narrative picks up with the veteran radio broadcaster learning about the existence of a sister, named Anita, whom she never knew about during her Detroit childhood. The person bringing this information is Anita’s son, Antonio Wiley, who establishes contact with his newfound aunt after learning of a DNA test that determined the unidentified remains of a young woman who died 30 years earlier to be, in fact, his long-lost mother. United by this startling discovery, the two decide to team up to recover Anita’s story, which refracts into a parallel history of a city ravaged by the ’80s drug epidemic. What results is a fascinating and heartfelt work of memory and memorializing.
Six years after its most recent outing, and nearly a decade after its explosive introduction, Serial returns with a fourth season that feels simultaneously incongruous with its legacy and perfectly in sync with what it’s always done — which is to do whatever its creators want. This time, Sarah Koenig partners up with Dana Chivvis to construct an inside-out look at Guantánamo Bay, still in operation despite years of presidential promises to close the facility. Like the previous season, this iteration eschews a serialized narrative structure in favor of short stories that draw direct testimony from a variety of individuals who experienced the place firsthand: detainees, guards, wardens, and so on. The composite picture that emerges offers yet another reflection of the boondoggle that is American justice. The United States might’ve pulled out of Afghanistan a few years ago, but the forever war persists.
As much as the official shorthand name listed above is already a great title for a podcast, the complete version is even better: Finally! A Show About Women That Isn’t Just a Thinly Veiled Aspirational Nightmare. The production pretty much delivers on the promise: Each episode follows a different woman walking through a day in their life, which usually becomes a space where they describe and discuss their worldview on their own terms. The opening missives have included a Pike’s Fish Market worker who happens to be a folk singer, an Instagram-prominent octogenarian calendar girl, and, of course, a celebrity — in this case, the Grammy-nominated Valerie June. Created by Jane Marie, who makes The Dream, and Joanna Solotaroff, a seasoned producer who’s worked at Team Coco and on 2 Dope Queens, the series further strengthens its diaristic approach by cutting out the framing device of a host entirely. In doing this, Finally! A Show explicitly doubles down on its self-declared mission statement, which is to focus simply on the texture of the subjects’ lives — and quietly celebrating the very simple fact of their existence.
On paper, the Beyond Repair possesses all the trimmings of a solid, if not generic, entry in the true-crime genre. A grim family affair sits at the center of its concerns: a 58-year-old woman, Marlyne Johnson, was found bludgeoned to death in her Brush Prairie, Washington, home in 2002. Her daughter-in-law, Sophia Johnson, was briefly convicted for the killing on the potentially perjurious word of her brother, Sean Correia, who claimed to witness the murder, but the Washington court of appeals reversed the conviction a few years later after finding fault in the proceedings. The second trial cleared her name, though only on paper; Sophia Johnson was deported to her native Guyana, and she continues to be the focus of all suspicion in the cold case despite her protestations. This could’ve been fodder for any number of true-crime shows, but this podcast stands apart from the pack. The reporter Amory Sivertson steps into the story almost two decades later, having found the case through happenstance, and, unlike other genre entries, she reckons plainly and honestly with the fog of mystery surrounding Sophia Johnson and her family. There’s a real commitment to the first-person point of view in this piece, though it never loses a clear enforcement of journalistic integrity. How do you convey the sheer uncertainty felt by the investigator without oversensationalizing the case? Sivertson and her team walk that fine line, and the way they balance the tightrope is fascinating.
Christian Duguay’s comedy pod, which follows the dopey fictional misadventures of a freelance insurance adjuster named Doug Duguay as he uses his arcane skills to snoop around his neighborhood, continues to release new episodes on an aggressively sporadic non-schedule. Consider, for instance, how its second season “premiered” at the beginning of 2022, only to publish two episodes months apart before picking back up this January. But even that is part of the pungent charm of this bizarro indie production, which makes an art out of idiosyncrasy. Valley Heat is a strange and effortlessly hilarious creation that reminds me of the kind of oddball shows you’d find on Adult Swim or, more to the point, cable-access television. Don’t miss it.
Some day, I’ll sit down and polish off The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s celebrated book about Robert Moses and his controversial machinations that built the modern New York City urban landscape. Or so I tell myself. Despite restarting the 1,300-plus-page tome multiple times over the years, I know the feat probably won’t happen unless I somehow find several months free of personal and professional responsibility. Thank goodness, then, for Roman Mars and 99% Invisible, which has come waltzing in with a special series on the book that provides hapless audiences like myself another way to get intimate with the text. It’s a book club for a certain Venn-diagram overlap that unites urban planning, architecture, podcast, public policy, and politics nerds with each installment covering several chapters of the biography while digging into the major threads and ideas embedded in Caro’s journalism. A parade of guest stars pop in to accompany Mars in each episode, including Caro himself, who appears in the first episode to bless the proceedings. I’ve been personally off the 99% Invisible train for a bit, and this has been a nice way to get back into the long-standing pod.
In my estimation, the best scandal stories are the ones that make me obsess over something I previously couldn’t give two hoots about, and based on that rubric alone, Ghost in the Machine is an exemplary yarn. Set in the high-stakes world of professional cycling, and led by journalist Chris Marshall-Bell, this series revisits a big ol’ brouhaha that happened in 2016 when a rising Belgian star, Femke van den Driessche, was allegedly caught with a bike containing a motor hidden in its frame. The practice is called, incredibly, “mechanical doping,” and while allegations of this type of cheating have been kicking around since 2010, the van den Driessche incident marked the first time evidence of “technological fraud” was found during a race. A downward spiral ensued: The sport’s authorities levied penalties, van den Driessche claimed that the bike didn’t belong to her and was mistakenly brought into the pit, her career was ultimately ruined. But what actually happened here? And how widespread is the practice, really? Since dropping five episodes earlier this year, the podcast has been on a break after shifting gears and becoming a “live investigation” — indicating that there’s loads more on this story to come.
The odd Okja aside (which he co-wrote), Jon Ronson has spent the better part of his career cranking out nonfiction stories — ranging from The Psychopath Test to The Men Who Stare at Goats to So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed — on what, in hindsight, could be described as the rapid decline of our shared reality. In Things Fell Apart, which he produces for BBC Radio 4, Ronson focuses on stories of the COVID present, and they collectively make up an expansive study on how we arrived at our current warped society. After a strong first outing last year, the follow-up season, released in January, sees Ronson further rooted in his wheelhouse with an array of episodes that are often as equally provocative as they are unsettling. How does a best-selling book about trauma figure into the explosion of culture-war conflicts happening in colleges and workplaces? How did the mysterious death of Black sex workers in Florida in the ’80s connect to the killing of George Floyd and the movement against police brutality it sparked? Less an anthology of “hidden histories” and more an exercise in drawing attention to things that’ve been stewing out in the open for a long while, Things Fell Apart can be viewed as an excellent primer to today’s mass American psychosis.
The comedian Katt Williams went on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast at the very top of the year and proceeded to set fire to the universe. Months later, the ash is still smoldering. For years, creators have grappled with questions about what it means for podcasting’s identity as a long-form audio format to be structurally inhibited from easily reaping the benefits of internet virality. The answer seems to have arrived in the form of shifting formats altogether; these days, podcasting is leaning deeper into video, and specifically YouTube. With that trend, a new species of podcaster is on the rise — and with it, new ways for the medium to inject itself into the broader culture. In hindsight, Williams’s appearance on Club Shay Shay feels like a genuine turning point in that transition.
➽ Read a recap of the outrageous highlights from Katt Williams’s appearance on Club Shay Shay.
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Nicholas Quah
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