The Pod Piper

THE LIST 1.  Still Processing  -  "We Have a Right To Be Mad" Public anger is pretty contentious. It can be a mark of someone who is unhinged, breaking this unspoken tacitly understood societal norm, disrupting the stasis of quiet suffering behind placid expressions. Nevertheless, getting mad is part of being human, and healthy expression of this emotion might bring us all to a better place. This framing lens for a discussion of d'jour cultural topics (ranging from the Larry Nassar trial to the Grammy committee snobbing Ed Sheeran) has the power to engender frustration. But is also entertaining, as the Still Processing co-hosts unspool so many salacious threads of inquiry. 2.  Radiolab  -  "The Voice in Your Head - A Tribute to Joe Frank" If you're like me, you've never heard of Joe Frank. Or, at least you hadn't heard of Frank before his passing and subsequent media deification that took hold in the last week. The brief excerpts intro

THE LIST 1.  This American Life  -  "Chip In My Brain" Coming off a year of truly excellent but rather adrift politically tinged material, This American Life seemed to be moving away from their narrative center. I fell in love with this purveyor of quirky storytelling that managed to endow the humans at the heart of each story with a larger-than-life quality. This episode gets back to that sense of wonder, while also mixing in a darkness that seemed to pervade a lot of the reportage from 2017. 2.  Planet Money  -  "The Gun Man" Guns are dangerous, but so is free speech. That is a crude way of boiling down the mentality of Cody Wilson, the subject of this bold exploration into the collision of emerging technology and the distinctly American affinity for firearms. 3.  Criminal -  "The Choir" This story about abusing power and taking advantage of people who feel void of agency is incredibly timely for two reasons: 1) The deluge of sexual as

It's here! It's here! The 2017 Pod Piper Podcast Performance Package is here! Make haste to the subsections! Big picture After notching 724 episodes in my 2016 podcast-listening history, I knew managing such blistering numbers in 2017 would be no easy task. Thanks to half a year of underemployment and half a year of full-time job searching, it proved to be absolutely no problem. Last year I made mention of the shows that were too short or too frequently released (or both!) for me to adequately rank on an episode-by-episode basis. In 2017, I listened to 880 such episodes. Here's the list: 3 Martini Lunch, All Songs Considered, Buenos Días América, Coffee Break Español, Duolingo Spanish, Español Automático, Euroleague Adventures, Marketplace, NHK Japan en Español, Nómadas, NPR Politics Podcast, PTI, Radio Ambulante, Showtime (Spanish), The Daily, The Dave Ramsey Show, The Gist, The Indicator, The Writer's Almanac, Up First, Zona Pop All of these shows are worthwhil