Happy holidays everyone. Featuring "Microcosms of Music" by me, Patrick Simpson, produced in May 2016. Music was Erik Satie's "Je te veux." Podcast recommendations:
Radiolab (radiolab.org)
This American Life (thisamericanlife.org)
Welcome to Night Vale (welcometonightvale.com)
Song Exploder (songexploder.net)
Criminal (thisiscriminal.com)
Love + Radio (loveandradio.org)
99% Invisible (99percentinvisible.org)
Planet Money (npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money)
Revisionist History (revisionisthistory.com)
HowSound (transom.org/topics/howsound) Other podcasts I didn't mention but still love: Serial. Duh. Radiotopia has so many more great podcasts beyond the ones I mentioned. To name a few more: The Heart, the memory palace, Radio Diaries, Strangers, The Allusionist, The Truth, and The Bugle. NPR also has several more podcasts I enjoy other than Planet Money—specifically Embedded (which hasn't been updated in a while, I'm waiting!), Code Switch, and of course, the NPR Politics Podcast. Lauren Ober on The Big Listen deserves a shout-out for introducing me to so many great podcasts beyond the small circle of networks I usually listen to—my two favorites right now are Serendipity and Flash Forward. Alice Isn't Dead, Within the Wires, and The Orbiting Human Circus (of the Air) are all surreal serialized audio fiction podcasts produced under the Night Vale umbrella. I love them all. Radiolab produced a podcast about the Supreme Court last summer called More Perfect, which was amazing. Those guys are radio gods. There are several podcasts about sound that I love: The World According to Sound, Sound Matters, Twenty Thousand Hertz, and Reasonably Sound. They're vastly different in style, but they all share the unique ability to change how you listen to the world. On the Media is one of the best news commentary podcasts out there. Bob and Brooke have been doing this for decades, and it shows. Reveal is doing some of the most important work in radio, and I'm proud to support them. The stories are so well researched and reported, and every one of them will move you and change how you look at the world. And finally, the Gimlet podcasts are the new kids on the block, and they're knocking it out of the park. I love Reply All, and lately I've also been enjoying some of the newer ones like Science Vs and Undone. Thanks for a great first season everyone. Melomania will return in the new year.
