The Pod Piper

SOMETHING NEW Moonrise , the new podcast from The Washington Post, boasts some of the most impressively topic-appropriate sound effects in any audio doc I’ve ever come across. There are so many great historic sound bites that set the mood for this dive into the backstory of the space race. The whole design is a little other-worldly with a strong science fiction vibe, and as someone who didn’t live through the space race I feel like the tenuous sense of complete doom conveys pretty well in the soundscapes. The show’s aesthetic reminds me a little bit of NPR’s Throughline,  evoking a cool vibe that dictates the way we are to feel about the subject. It seems a little insidery and almost conspiratorial, a general whiff of counterculture wafts throughout the series. That said, maybe it isn’t any wonder than the flow of the episodes is a little disjointed. The show has more than a few dry spots, and I found my attention wavering in the lack of a simple narrative thread to tie...

A brief note: I think this post marks the first time I've ever typed out "mansplaining." Google flagged it as misspelled, suggesting I might have meant "mainspring" or "plainsman." I tried hyphenating but that lead to "splaining" getting the red squiggly with the replacement options "man-spraining" (too violent), "man-explaining" (too what-your-great-aunt-probably-thinks-it-is" and "man-splatting" (too ambiguously gross). But you're here for podcast recs. Right. Carry on.... SOMETHING NEW I love music. Yet with my predilection for getting so lost in the podcast sauce, music listening opportunities are becoming fewer and farther in between. Frank Turner's Tales From No Man's Land is a new podcast that might just get me back into regular music listening. The concept album seeks to exhume the stories of forgotten women, many of whom have been lost entirely to the modern world, and the ac...

Welcome back from my unintentional summer break! Despite the absence, or maybe because of it, this is a bit shorter of an issue. But still a good one, I hope! SOMETHING NEW Extremities is a new show that recently completed its first season, which highlighted the tiny nation of the Pitcairn Islands. This is a travel documentary series with a niche - studying remote places on this planet where human life persists. The opening of the first episode careens through the unbelievably long itinerary required to travel from the United Kingdom to the tiny British territory in the South Pacific. The intro is somewhat inexplicably riveting (or maybe it’s just me?), and it perfectly sets the stage for the journey ahead. The narration deserves a lot of credit for the show’s hypnotic appeal. Somehow host Sam Denby has approached that line of dry recitation and nestled into a comfortable hum that perfectly accompanies the already intriguing fertile storytelling ground provided by the isl...