The best podcasts you should listen to this week
By Jaclyn Schiff and Simon Owens
Do you love listening to podcasts but are overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices out there? Have you subscribed to way more podcasts than you could ever listen to and don’t want to miss the best episodes? AudioTeller is a weekly newsletter that tells you the can’t-miss episodes you absolutely need to download. To have this newsletter delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Welcome! In this week’s issue you’ll learn how the construction of Baltimore’s Camden Yards changed the sport of baseball, hear about a Shark Tank copycat that’s better than Shark Tank, and discover how a kid born in the Bronx changed hip hop forever. Stay tuned…
From Jaclyn Schiff, AudioTeller co-editor:
Inside a couple’s journey with infertility [link]
Podcast: IVFML — Episode: We’re Trying
In this first episode of the HuffPost podcast series, listeners are introduced to HuffPost health editor Anna Almendrala and her husband, the television writer Simon Ganz, and their struggle to have a baby. The couple use their own story to explore all aspects of infertility — giving context and voice to an issue that many face, but don’t publicly discuss. Fun, emotional, and well-paced with good facts and information along the way, I found I was quickly drawn into Anna and Simon’s story. They discuss some of the bad advice they’ve received along the way from friends and family and discuss what you should say when you learn that friends are struggling to conceive.
From Sriram Gopal, a DC-based writer and musician:
How the construction of Camden Yards changed the sport of baseball [link]
Podcast: 99% Invisible — Episode: In The Same Ballpark
99% Invisible, the podcast that focuses on design, tackled one of my favorite subjects on its latest episode: Baseball, and specifically the Baltimore Orioles. George Will, the Washington Post columnist and baseball uber-fan, has written that the three most important events in baseball since the end of World War II are Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, the advent of free agency, and the construction of Oriole Park at Camden Yards. OPACY has been the Orioles’ home since 1992, and moved baseball forward by looking back. From the ‘60s through the ‘80s, new stadiums were soulless, multi-purpose monstrosities that took much of the joy out of watching a baseball game. Roman Mars and his team interview design experts, baseball historians, and members of the Oriole front office to tell the story behind how a laser focus on building “an old-fashioned ballpark with modern amenities” changed the sport. Every single stadium built since Camden Yards’ construction has followed the model of putting an asymmetrical field into a park that is located in an urban setting. The episode also tackles the downsides, in that Camden Yards started the trend of publicly financed ballparks, and also has become the basis for a new architectural dogma that may be inhibiting stadium design from moving into the future.
Putting Trump’s tweets to good use [link]
Podcast: What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law — Episode: The Appointments Clause and Removal Power
The Trump administration is moving media in all sorts of different directions. Last year, the science-based podcast Radiolab introduced More Perfect, a series dedicated to exploring Supreme Court doctrine. Roman Mars, of 99% Invisible, was similarly driven to launch What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law. The show’s premise is that it uses Donald Trump’s Twitter feed to examine issues of constitutional law. This latest episode draws from tweets made in the wake of former FBI director James Comey’s firing to examine the president’s appointment and removal powers. As with Mars’ other podcast, each episode of Trump Con Law is short and easily digestible, making it a convenient primer on the U.S. Constitution.
From Lakshmi Sridharan, a physician in New York City:
The slow introduction of free enterprise in Cuba [link]
Podcast: BBC’s The Documentary — Episode: Human Cubans
Knowing I would be away in internet-barren Cuba for a few days, I downloaded as many podcasts as I could find before taking off from New York’s JFK airport. In “Human Cubans,” an episode of BBC’s podcast The Documentary, BBC perfectly captured the landscape and the people of Cuba. For Cubans, their deep love of country is no contradiction to their slow removal of rose-colored glasses through which they have seen communism. Signs of free enterprise are still well-controlled by the government and by the near complete lack of internet access. BBC delves into how these seeming contradictions to an outsider are perfectly melded and sensical in the day-to-day lives of Cubans. This is a time in which Cuba is inching open its door to the world despite America shuttering the windows once again. Listening to “Human Cubans” as I walked through Havana felt as though I were stepping into the past, but with a curious hope towards the future.
From Tristan Vick, an accountant from Texas:
A tech industry titan on what it takes to move a gigantic company to the cloud [link]
Podcast: Recode Decode — Episode: How to shift a big tech company to the cloud (Mark Hurd, co-CEO, Oracle)
When it comes to growing a business and implementing technology to supplement that growth, the most frequently mentioned methods are to capitalize on the data generated by a company and move the business applications to the cloud. Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, is implementing one of the largest scale shifts to a cloud-based business as well as assisting customers of all sizes with a similar shift.
Kara Swisher is known for her ability to get tech titans to spill the beans on their true thoughts of Silicon Valley — its innovations, and, frequently under the Trump administration, its politics. Hurd doesn’t back down from the challenge and provides some genuine insights into the decision-making calculus facing companies grappling with a shift in data and data management. He rattles down the list of cloud-providers and the pros/cons for each, as well as his own honest assessment of his company, Oracle, and its shift into cloud-based applications.
For anyone interested in how businesses will go about deploying their products in the next two to five years, this is a fascinating listen. This interview won’t get into Hurd’s past business experience. He started as a junior salesman with a software company in 1980 and 25 years later became the CEO of the company. For someone as journeyed as Hurd, this interview is focused almost entirely on the present and future with insights only someone with his experience could offer.
From Adam Peri, a marketing consultant in Chicago:
A tone-deaf discussion of race and Katy Perry [link]
Podcast: Still Processing — Episode: We Said, He Said, She Said
The New York Times’ Still Processing is advertised as a “culture” podcast. Judging by the topics and their descriptions, I assumed that meant pop-culture. A few minutes in I realized this assessment was dead-wrong. The pop-culture topics of Still Processing are merely veneers for hosts Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham to share rather offensive racial opinions. Their thoughts may seem odious, at least to me, but they’re very much worth listening to and exploring.
It seems that for some time the opinions of far-left intellectuals like Wortham and Morris have been grinding along the offside of the hard-right in a palpable play-out of a Hegelian Dialectic that is writing history before our eyes. I’ll get to specific examples in a minute, but first a disclaimer: Just like Still Processing doesn’t warrant return racism — trolling, boycotts or actual violence — many on the left should be cognizant of how racially insensitive they are.
I was almost moved to write about this issue last week after listening to NPR’s Code Switch, which dealt with the rise of Electronic Dance Music (EDM). In the process of telling the very appropriate story of white appropriation of an originally “black” art-form, Code Switch took the liberty to efface the contribution of every white musician to the history of Jazz. Although the story of Jazz was only slightly congruent to EDM, in his own very articulate way, host Gene Demby eschewed the efforts of white jazz icons like Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker, Ben Bernie, Glen Miller, Benny Goodman, etc. This included a salient omission of Miles Davis’ infamous 60 Minutes interview in which he claimed white people are just a step behind the rhythm.
This week, Still Processing canvasses a new album by Katy Perry and the Bill Cosby trial. Among their tone deaf commentary is Wortham’s complaint that Katy Perry used murder innuendos (which are reserved for black musicians) in her lyrics. After 30+ years of Gangsta Rap “murda” lyrics, I think the genre might be more aptly named The Banality of Evil. The two hosts go on to discuss Perry’s apology for wearing braids in her hair and Miley Cyrus having the audacity to twerk. While their message is wrapped in a well-worded and rather cheerful package, it is overtly racist. While it should never be used as fodder for even more odious outlets like Breitbart, Fox News, or whatever the right-wing channel du jour is, it is emblematic of a dipolar dialectic that is anything but productive dialogue. It is simply answering racism with racism. Rather than expediency and fairness in mind, the two sides of this dialectic seem to prefer trading their heaviest blows in a sad, but likely battle of attrition.
From Rachael Zur, a shoe designer in Brooklyn:
A comedy podcast tackles the U.K. election [link]
Podcast: The Bugle — A Truly British Democracy
It was “a confusing slab of democracy”: A refreshing reprieve from American politics. In this episode of The Bugle, one can revel in the British democratic process filtered through humorous and wily perspectives. Last week’s UK election is, according to Aparna Nancherla, “a good metaphor of life that you just lose to various degrees. There’s no real winner.” Deciphering the assorted candidates, explaining why Elmo showed up in the crowd of Theresa May clips, and how an anthropomorphic fish finger received 309 votes?! One result of the election seems certain, the transition towards Brexit is less clear now than it was before. The witty political banter meanders from satire to informative dialogue. This podcast is much like an entertaining British comedy where I am straining to hear all the quips that I miss.
From Simon Owens, AudioTeller co-editor:
Shark Tank without the vaudeville drama [link]
Podcast: The Pitch — Episode: Babyscripts
I’m not going to be the first or the last person to point out that the podcast The Pitch is very similar to Shark Tank, but while the structure is very much the same — an entrepreneur appears in front of a panel of venture capitalists who pepper them with questions about their product — I found the podcast refreshing for its lack of theatrics. Shark Tank can get a little wearisome with its manufactured conflicts, edited-in reaction shots, and chest-puffing machismo. The VCs featured in The Pitch, on the other hand, are calm and professional. Sure, they want to be entertaining, but, at the end of the day, they’re there to make a deal.
This was apparently an already-existing podcast that was then picked up by Gimlet Media for its second season. In the first episode of the new season, an entrepreneur named Juan-Pablo Segura pitches a product he thinks will revolutionize prenatal medical care. Given my lack of experience with this type of care, it was fascinating to hear how this particular sector of the healthcare industry works and to contemplate whether something as simple as a blood pressure cuff attached to an app could actually disrupt it.
How a kid born in the Bronx grew up and transformed hip hop [link]
Podcast: Mogul
I’m not an avid music listener, and I’m certainly not knowledgeable of the hip hop genre, but I am a media nerd, so I’m still probably the perfect audience for Mogul: The Life and Death of Chris Lighty, a new podcast from Gimlet Media. It tells the life story of Lighty, a music manager who represented the likes of Ja Rule, Missy Elliott, LL Cool J, Nas, and 50 Cent. In 2012, Lighty committed suicide while still at the height of his career, and given his outsized influence within the genre, this podcast isn’t just a biography of Lighty — it’s a biography of hip hop itself.
Thanks for reading (and hopefully listening to our recommendations). Think we missed a great episode? Email us at audioteller@gmail.com. Want to have this list delivered to your inbox every week? Go here.
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