Favorite Podcasts

Here's a list of my favorite podcasts right now. I've been in a "minimize the news cycle" phase, and these choices reflect that. Also, I quite like the Overcast app on iOS as my podcast subscription / listening app. It feels simpler and cleaner than using Spotify or the Apple podcast app, and I always like supporting indie developers.

• Gastropod: A podcast about food through the lens of science and history. The co-hosts are nerdy, thoughtful, and funny. The topics are super wide ranging, from talking about specific, less well-known (at least where I am) ingredients like ube to cuisines like Mexican food (and how it's changed over time) to commodities like bananas, and all the history and science and culture that shaped these things. There's a new episode every two weeks, they're longer form (close to an hour) episodes, and there's a huge backlog to explore! Who doesn't love food?

• Throughline: An NPR podcast about history, with a slant towards tying the past to the present. The sound design is amazing, as they often recreate sonic scapes of different times and places and get voice actors for key figures. They find great people to interview as sources, and in my opinion do a really good job of holding as neutral a lens as they can. Also generally a longer form show, they focus a fair bit on the U.S., and a welcome breath of investigative fresh air that isn't explicitly about the news cycle. Also I love when the co-hosts say their names in perfect, beautiful Arabic.

• Planet Money: I think this one is pretty popular as is, but it is an economics podcast from NPR. It is ZANY, they are not afraid to be silly and get real creative with topics and story telling methods in an effort to make an arguably dryer and harder-to-get-through subject (economics) a wildly entertaining listen. They will often cover something that is related to what's going on lately in the world, but my favorite episodes and projects are when they just dive into something specific, like when they went through the process of putting something in space, or right now how they're making a board game and showing the entire process to the listener.