This year, podcasts continued to boom as an industry and thrive as an art form—and to push journalism into unexpected places. “The Daily” has humanized the news and helped keep us sane; further along the news-entertainment spectrum, oral-history and biographical podcasts have emerged, and true-crime podcasts have continued to flourish. The results have been both spectacular and unnerving. Two of the most powerful podcasts I heard this year, “Missing Richard Simmons,” which is not on this list, and “S-Town,” which is, reached new heights of biographical intimacy and insight—and, in very different ways, exposed their subjects a bit too nakedly. “Missing Richard Simmons” treated Simmons with respect that other presentations of him, including his own, haven’t always provided, but it also invaded the privacy of its elusive subject—and entertained wild, reckless theories about Simmons’s longtime live-in housekeeper. The podcasts that I loved the most this year didn’t give me a should-this-be-happening? vibe. Podcasting is a form built, in part, on the best of what public radio can do, and much of my favorite work honors the traditional public-radio values of enlightening us, focussing on voices that we need to hear, and helping audio newcomers tell their own stories. (Listen to the work honored by the Third Coast International Festival this year, including “Majd’s Diary: Two Years in the Life of a Saudi Girl” and “Emancipation: A Young Man Leaves Foster Care on His Own Terms.”)
Before my list, a caveat: these are my favorite podcasts that I’ve written about in 2017, in alphabetical order. I began writing a dedicated podcasting column in August, so it’s skewed toward podcasts that came out recently. Some of the shows here are intimate and personal; some are revealing and funny; some are educational; all helped me cope with life in 2017. It’s not a top-ten list of best podcasts over all, which would require, in this time of bounty and greatness, a level of listening fortitude and critical hubris that I can only aspire to.
“The Daily,” the Times’ weekday news podcast, hosted by Michael Barbaro, deftly combines narrative and news in a way that helps prevent us from becoming numb. It also reassures us intellectually. As Rebecca Mead put it in an August Cultural Comment, “ ‘So, Rukmini, where exactly is Mosul?’ is the kind of thing that Barbaro would not be afraid to ask, and his listeners are grateful for it.” At the Third Coast International Audio Festival last month, Barbaro, even among his peers, was beheld with a kind of giddiness; a few days later, Vox announced that it was starting a daily news podcast hosted by another Third Coast attendee, Sean Rameswaram. The feeling seems to be that we need as much “Daily”-style wisdom as we can get.
The podcast that excited me the most this year was “Ear Hustle,” a collaboration between two inmates at San Quentin State Prison, Earlonne Woods and Antwan Williams, and a volunteer, Nigel Poor, which focusses on domestic life in prison. (It’s distributed by Radiotopia, which sponsored a competition in 2016 that “Ear Hustle” won.) Poor, a visual artist who had taught a photography class at San Quentin, wanted to collaborate on an audio project with prisoners in which they would all learn together. The joy of discovery is evident, as is the creators’ good taste; they consciously avoid clichés such as straightforward tales of redemption. Williams, who is serving fifteen years for armed robbery, does the sound design in San Quentin’s media lab. Poor co-hosts the show with Woods, who is serving thirty-one years to life for attempted second-degree robbery, and who is responsible for much of “Ear Hustle” ’s greatness. His humor and his gentle observations—“He look like he’s from the earth,” he says of an inmate who keeps pets in prison, “and, if he could, he’d probably just be wearing a leaf”—and his easy rapport with Poor and his fellow-inmates help establish a tone that make listening to “Ear Hustle” special. In prison slang, “ear hustling” is eavesdropping, and I’m grateful to hear what Woods and the other residents of San Quentin have to say.
“Heavyweight,” created and hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, thrilled me. Goldstein, the longtime “This American Life” producer and decade-plus host of “Wiretap,” on the CBC, is a wonderfully distinctive presence, whose manner has the kind of self-aware comic audacity that says you’re in good hands—even if those hands are dropping the mike, as he does in one episode. (Self-mockery is one of his gifts.) On the podcast, Goldstein reunites people who have had a falling out, investigates old grievances, and helps people confront upsetting things about their past, in a way that’s genuinely moving and lightly comedic. He’s also such a good writer that I find myself hitting the back button so I can hear certain lines again and marvel at them. Throughout, Goldstein weaves in stories and characters from his own life, which provide a through line that’s both satisfying and touching.
I’ve always enjoyed “In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg,” the BBC Radio 4 ideas-chat program, which is available, with a bonus bit, as a podcast. But on vacation this summer, wanting simultaneously to get away from it all and engage with it all, I ventured into a realm of intense “In Our Time” fandom from which I will likely never return. In each episode, Bragg, a life Labour peer in the House of Lords and a longtime culture-show host of British radio and television, efficiently dives into some complex, aggressively uncommercial topics—“Hello, ‘Four Quartets’ is T. S. Eliot’s last great poem”—and shepherds a group of academics through a brisk, substantive discussion. It avoids the Zeitgeist altogether, which is part of why I love it. The most recent episodes have discussed the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and, by popular request, “Moby-Dick.” (“Hello, ‘Moby-Dick,’ by Herman Melville, tells the story of Captain Ahab, whose leg was bitten off by a great white whale, and Ahab wants to hunt it down and kill it in revenge.”) At each episode’s end, edified and invigorated, having been brought out of yourself and into the realm of learning and curiosity, you return to the here and now in a better frame of mind.
Reggie Ossé, the host of the great “Combat Jack Show” and the co-founder of the Loud Speakers network, collaborated with Gimlet to produce his first narrative podcast, “Mogul,” about the legendary hip-hop executive Chris Lighty, who died, of apparent suicide, in 2012. Ossé, a skilled interviewer, coaxes great material out of Lighty’s friends and associates, and his voice is refreshingly his own; when he describes Warren G, for example, he says, “He was into funk bands like Parliament-Funkadelic. But he also fucked with cats like Pete Seeger and Michael McDonald.” Ossé encourages straight talk about depression and violence, and he believes strongly in promoting mental health and ending the stigma against therapy, especially among black Americans. “My life’s work is demystifying that,” Ossé told me. “We survived slavery and Jim Crow and housing discrimination and homeland terrorism. And a few of us have looked at therapy as a source of healing.”
The Supreme Court-focussed “Radiolab” spinoff “More Perfect,” now in its second season, takes the best parts of the “Radiolab” model—impressive reporting, endless curiosity, fascinating stories told well—and quietly curbs some of its flaws: performative naïveté, sound design so aggressive it makes you say uncle. The episode “American Pendulum I,” about Korematsu v. United States and Japanese-American internment, is a must-listen, as is “Sex Appeal,” about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s clever approach to bringing a sex-discrimination suit to the Court when she was an A.C.L.U. lawyer. It involves frat boys and beer—and men were the victims. (Both episodes were produced by Julia Longoria.) Season 2 includes pieces about Citizens United, Dred Scott, and the Second Amendment, and investigates what happens when the Court made a bad decision. “What do people do in that case?” its host, Jad Abumrad, said to me. “Where do they find justice?” In other words, it’s timely.
“Nocturne,” by the independent Bay Area producer Vanessa Lowe, is a podcast about the night. Episodes begin with the chirping of crickets, the hooting of an owl, and a bit of music by Lowe’s husband, Kent Sparling, that makes you want to wander out into a shadowy wood and explore. Lowe has described the show as “essay radio”; most episodes tell stories, but she plays with form throughout the series. Some episodes are impressionistic, like “A Catalogue of Nights,” featuring recordings of night sounds from across the world. Some feature intensive longer stories about dreamlike nighttime experiences—a baker discovers a coyote killing a deer; a trucker drives a big rig into a sinkhole—and some feature collections of shorter clips, on topics such as flying in dreams. The episode “Shortboard,” about Matthew Bryce, a Scottish surfer who survived thirty-two hours at sea, is quietly astonishing.
Eric Eddings and Brittany Luse, the former hosts of the show “For Colored Nerds,” co-created this narrative Gimlet podcast to “explore the stories about blackness that you don’t often hear.” It has included deep dives on the history of grape drink; a moving and lovely episode about Afrocentric education (imagine preschoolers coloring pictures of Malcolm X’s eyeglasses); funny-serious debates on pop-cultural topics such as Lawrence from “Insecure,” “The Bachelorette,” and Meghan Markle; and the singer and gay-rights hero Storme DeLarverie. It’s both timely and full of historical perspective, and Eddings and Luse—old friends who went to college together and started “For Colored Nerds” as a kind of friendship project after graduation—have a great rapport, both comfortable and intellectually rigorous.
“S-Town,” from “Serial” and “This American Life” and hosted by Brian Reed, brings us to rural Woodstock, Alabama, and introduces us to the unforgettable John B. McLemore, who tells us of his town’s “proleptic decay and decrepitude.” The narrative that unspools, with themes of rumor, bigotry, depression, suicide, inheritance, love, community, and trust, has aesthetic flourishes involving horology, a hedge maze, and Faulkner. The show often delivers on its novelistic aspirations; it is amazing, empathetic, and unsettling at once. But I cringed at its use of suicide as a plot point, no matter how sensitively handled, and I worried for the townspeople, who participated gamely but could not possibly have anticipated what it would be like to be the next “Serial.” (In its first month, “S-Town” was downloaded more than forty million times.) The show has further complicated the life of one of its subjects, Tyler Goodson, twenty-six, who, in October, pleaded guilty to burglary and trespassing, which he had discussed on the show. But McLemore is someone we’ll never forget—along with the painful, beautiful conditions of his life and his mind.
“Uncivil” gave me an immediate “Ooh!” feeling when I first heard it, and it still does. Together, the hosts, Chenjerai Kumanyika, who is black, and Jack Hitt, who is white, report lesser-known stories about the Civil War, exploring chapters of history we likely don’t know. The first episode, about the Combahee Raid—“the most ambitious covert operation of the Civil War”—involves a pine-log raft, an escape, Harriet Tubman, gunboats, and many surprises. But it isn’t all cloak-and-dagger stuff: they’re careful to present history accurately, and history isn’t always cinematic. “In real life, resistance isn’t always dramatic and spectacular,” Kumanyika told me. “Sometimes resistance is small. And sometimes resistance is about coalitions.”
The way we listen has been revolutionized by digital technology, which in turn has transformed our world, including podcasts. “Ways of Hearing,” hosted by Damon Krukowski and based on his excellent book “The New Analog,” is about listening. (It’s the first of a series of podcasts in the Radiotopia show “Showcase.”) Krukowski makes complex ideas delightfully accessible, and in audio form he’s able to include wonderful sounds: street noise, song bits, chitchat at a record shop. Krukowski, the drummer of the great band Galaxie 500, illustrates points in Episode 1 with gorgeous strains of “Tugboat.” Krukowski is a fantastic observer; I often think of the ideas he articulates in “Ways of Hearing,” and I feel like I perceive the world a little more acutely because of listening to it.
