My father loves talk radio. On long road trips we listened to a lot of NPR, and when we were out of range of that he’d switch to the eccentric local preachers who had their own radio shows on backwoods stations all across the southeast, and who’d ramble on about how Mikhail Gorbachev’s birthmark, if viewed from the right angle, would form a clear 666, and I swear I’m not making that up. Broadcasters with weird conspiracy theories are not a new phenomenon, only the way some of them have managed to go global, but that’s another story. And since this was before I got my first Walkman, or, even after I got one, after the batteries had run dry, I’d sit in the backseat and beg for some music other than the admittedly catchy theme song for All Things Considered. So of course now that I’m an adult and can choose what I want to listen to, especially on my afternoon commute, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I listen to people talking, in case I need to underscore the irony for you, which I probably don’t but for some reason I can’t seem to shut up.
The importance of this really hit me about a month ago when I downloaded an update for the Apple podcasts app which had been working fine for years. The update came out in September so I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner, or why I did it at all since people discovered almost immediately it was awful and, on my phone at least, crashed frequently because in the computer world if it ain’t broken some developer will have to tinker with it until it is.
Anyway I switched to another non-Apple podcast app and just because here are some of my favorite podcasts that frequently make me wish my commute were longer and glad my phone at least has a pretty long battery life:
Snap Judgment is mostly true stories with each show taking a theme. Some episodes offer multiple stories from different people, but a few are devoted to a single speaker. Host Glynn Washington also seems to have a bottomless series of his own life stories that he uses to introduce each show. And I’m pretty excited that a live event is coming to Nashville, to the Ryman Auditorium of all places.
Says You! is an NPR show that’s also available as a downloadable podcast. Says You! is a series of word games and puzzles. Recorded live its two three-person panels of supposedly educated and well-informed people who nevertheless don’t know what a bream is. It was sad when the show lost its original host and creator Richard Sher, but the current host Gregg Porter has filled in nicely.
The Dork Forest is comedian Jackie Kashian’s long-running podcast in which she has guests on to talk about what they dork out about although the conversations tend to get off into the weeds. The other day I was listening to the Labyrinth episode with comedian Virginia Jones while walking to my stop and I swear I thought I was going to miss my bus because I was laughing so hard I had to sit down.
The TED Radio Hour features snippets of three TED talks. Speakers are also interviewed by host Guy Raz and I always get a kick out of how they tie sometimes seemingly disparate topics together.
Lightspeed is a podcast of science fiction stories read aloud and even though they’re contemporary they take me back to my youth of devouring science fiction stories. It’s interesting to compare how authors, styles, and themes have changed since Mikhail Gorbachev was a world leader.
The Hilarious World Of Depression is usually hilarious and sometimes depressing as host John Moe talks mostly to comedians, although sometimes other sorts of performers, about their battles with mental illness. Also, completely unrelated, I have a humor anthology called More Mirth Of A Nation with a piece by John Moe in it, and I tweeted to him, “I’m sure you hear this all the time but” and that I loved his piece in that book,” and while it’s true I love his piece, “Terrible Names for Hair Salons”, I assume no one else has ever mentioned it to him. And he tweeted back that it was his first published piece, he was really glad I like it, and no one else has ever mentioned it to him, and now I feel incredibly embarrassed and if I ever meet him in person I’ll feel stupid and awkward and he will have completely forgotten it and I’ll feel compelled to explain it and start the cycle over.
In Our Time is a BBC podcast in which host Melvyn Bragg talks to three experts in a field about topics ranging from feathered dinosaurs to Picasso’s Guernica and I can feel my IQ tick up a few points just listening to it. Bragg is a longtime broadcaster who, every time he comes on the radio, always starts with, “Hello,” maybe because he wants every listener to feel they’re being addressed individually. A recent episode was about Moby Dick and it was kind of weird listening to three British scholars talk about Melville’s work as an example of The Great American Novel.
A Creative Mind Fiction Podcast is another podcast of fiction with authors Alice Nelson and Carrie Zylka doing most of the writing and other heavy lifting and a recent featured story, Hello. This Is Siri, by Nelson, really stuck with me for reasons that should be obvious once you listen to it.
Anyway those are just a few from my weird and eclectic listening list. What are some of yours?
https://thisistrue.com/uncommon-sense-podcast/
Wow–I remember signing up for the This Is True e-mail back when it started. I had no idea it was going and that it just branched out into a podcast. Thank you for that.
Hi, I’m Alice Nelson and I wanted to thank you for mentioning our podcast A Creative Mind Fiction Podcast in your blog. We really appreciate it, and are very happy that you like our stories.
Take care.
Hi, thank you so much for dropping by and for writing and sharing such great stories. I hope I’ve added a few new listeners.
Love the photo. That store cracks me up because for at least eight years they’ve had a metal sign that spells out “Wierd” for sale. Weird.
I of course got hooked on Serial and S Town. I prefer music for driving, and tonight, as I head to Atlanta, that’s what I’ll have.
Thank you so much for pointing out that the Cool Stuff Weird Things store has a misspelled “Weird” on one of its signs. Somehow I never noticed that, and I go by there regularly. I love the Headquarters coffee shop even though it’s the size of a large walk-in closet. Or maybe because of that.
I haven’t made the leap to podcasts yet but I still love to listen to people talking on the radio and elsewhere. Thanks for the good talk, Chris.
Thank you for contributing to the conversation here. And you may notice that many of the podcasts I enjoy are from NPR. I don’t listen to the regular radio as much as I used to, but I’m glad NPR continues to produce great talk radio.