The View from a Drawbridge

One of the many things Dear Husband and I have in common is our love of podcasts. When we go on long road trips, it’s fun to listen to fascinating stories and discuss them. These programs have broadened our horizons.

I wanted to share with you some of the very interesting podcasts that we’ve found out there, so I asked Dear Husband to help write this post. He most definitely stepped up to the plate! (Thanks, DH!)

He gets to listen to podcasts more than I do, as he’s a successful realtor, and he therefore spends quite a lot of time in his car, going from house to house. (By the way, if you want to buy or sell a home in the Seattle area, or even if you need a referral to a reputable realtor anywhere in the country, reach out. I’ll put you in contact with him.)

Before we go on, a couple of notes: I’ve provided links to each podcast, but please understand that there are plenty of podcast apps out there. We often use Spotify. Other popular ones are Audible, Apple, and iHeartRadio. That’s just scratching the surface. So the link I provide isn’t the sole source for any of these podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts, as the saying goes, is fine.

The other thing is that the descriptions provided below have often been pulled directly from the originators. I don’t suspect they’ll mind, as it is, after all, free advertising of a sort. But because of this, the writing style for this post may seem patchy.

Without further ado, I’ll throw this over to Dear Husband. (If you see comments in italics, though, that’s me butting in. Because I can’t help butting in.)

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I’ve always enjoyed the radio, both for the Rock n’ Roll and for listening to sensible people discussing current issues on both local and national levels, but when the internet and smart phones introduced streaming opportunities, and Dear Wife introduced me to storytelling, I became a podcast fanatic.

As newlyweds, just five weeks after marriage, we met Glynn Washington, host of Snap Judgment. My listening world was changed forever, and, like life with my bride, changed for the better. (Awww! Thanks! And I blogged about that meeting with Glynn here.)

Snap Judgment may have been the gateway to my addiction, but now it’s just one of the many programs that I spend time listening to. And with a Bluetooth connection to my ear buds (aka hearing aids) I can work on projects around the house and yard while listening to engaging information. The smartphone connection to my car and to mobile speakers also lets me take the podcasts with me wherever I go.

Dear Husband’s Favorite Podcasts

• The Snap Judgment radio show and podcast mixes real stories with killer beats to produce cinematic, dramatic radio. Snap’s musical brand of storytelling dares listeners to see the world through the eyes of another.
• The Moth Radio Hour is a storytelling phenomenon that includes a radio show and a podcast. The radio show is a weekly series that features true stories told live on stage without scripts, notes, props, or accompaniment. Holy smokes! What incredible stories of strength, courage and heartache.
• Hidden Brain explores the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior and the questions that lie at the heart of our complex and changing world.
• Radiolab asks deep questions and uses investigative journalism to get the answers. Any given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world.
• Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! is a comedy news quiz show on NPR. The show is hosted by Peter Sagal and features a rotating panel of comedians, writers, listener contestants, and celebrity guests. Sagal quizzes the panelists and listeners to determine just how closely they paid attention to the week’s news. (I find it both enlightening and funny.)
• Timber Wars is a ten-episode series by Oregan Public Broadcasting that examines the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest, going back over a half century. The stories of conservation efforts, for both trees and wildlife, versus the timber industry, have a great influence on our region today. And the story is more interesting than you would assume.
• Ghost Herd is another look at a Pacific Northwest industry: cattle. This six-episode story is a joint production of KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio and Northwest Public Broadcasting. Ghost Herd is a story of family and fraud, but also a story about the value of dirt and the shifting powers in the American West.
• Revisionist History is a recent discovery of mine and I’ve enjoyed listening to many seasons of this podcast. Every episode re-examines something from the past — an event, a person, an idea, even a song — and asks whether we got it right the first time.
• One of my favorite Revisionist History stories started as an episode, which grew into three, and then became a book on its own. The Bomber Mafia tells the story of how the USA looked for weaponry to win the second World War. Of course, we know about the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb, but this looks at other attempts to discover better options for the war effort. The story discusses things we take for granted today, and how they were discovered (including the jet stream) and what those discoveries resulted in. Some of these are such incredible stories I had to save the podcast to listen to again.
• Another fantastic Revisionist History episode is named When Will Met Grace. This is about the TV show Will and Grace and how effective it was at improving public opinion regarding the portion of the population that is LGBTQ+.
• StoryCorps. A candid, unscripted conversation between two people about what’s really important in life: love, loss, family, friendship. I know this one is near and dear to Barb’s heart for reasons she will explain. (This podcast changed my life. I wrote about it here, and you can see the animated video they made from my interview here.)
• My Unsung Hero. This is an offshoot of Hidden Brain. Each episode is about everyday acts of kindness and courage that transformed someone’s life. These are brief stories, from two to six minutes long.
• How to Keep Time explores our relationship with time and how to reclaim it.
• Bad Women. This program is hosted by a historian who looks at the five victims of Jack the Ripper and reveals the appalling treatment they faced as women in the 1880s. The host asks why these women were cast as prostitutes and not as the women they were, and why the focus has only been on their killer.
• This American Life tells true stories that unfold like little movies for radio. Personal stories with funny moments, big feelings, and surprising plot twists.

Dear Husband’s Wish List

These are podcasts I want to explore, but haven’t yet, at least not in depth.

• Heavyweight. Created and hosted by American-Canadian humorist Jonathan Goldstein. He helps people try to resolve a moment from their past that they wish they could change.
• People I (mostly) admire. Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt tracks down other high achievers for surprising, revealing conversations about their lives and obsessions.
• 99% Invisible is a sound-rich, narrative podcast hosted by Roman Mars about all the thought that goes into the things we don’t think about — the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world.

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It’s me again. I love every one of the podcasts Dear Husband recommended above, but I wanted to add a few more.

My Favorite Podcasts

• Welcome to Night Vale. I love this podcast so much that I’ve written about it multiple times, most recently when we attended a live performance. It’s a twice-monthly podcast in the style of community updates for the small desert town of Night Vale, featuring local weather, news, announcements from the Sheriff’s Secret Police, mysterious lights in the night sky, dark hooded figures with unknowable powers, and cultural events. Turn on your radio and hide.
• The Other Latif is a six episode series that is the true story of Radiolab reporter Latif Nasser, who always believed his name was uniquely his own. Then he makes a shocking discovery that he shares his name with another man: Detainee 244 at Guantanamo Bay.
• Throughline. The past is never past. Every headline has a history. Join us every week as we go back in time to understand the present. These are stories you can feel and sounds you can see from the moments that shaped our world.
• BirdNote: You can read my blog post about it here. I wish my local NPR station carried BirdNote. These delightful little 2 minute episodes celebrate the amazing lives of birds by telling you things about them that you never even thought about.
• The Wild  comes from my local NPR station, KUOW. It’s about the wonder and resilience of nature, taking listeners on a journey from the pacific northwest to complex ecosystems around the world. More than just science, THE WILD is about hope and why people work so hard to protect what’s still wild. A story I told was on an episode of this show… for about 45 seconds. I didn’t even know it had made it on air until a friend told me. Naturally, I wrote about that, too.
• You Know Me Now. The first time I heard about this podcast, before I had even listened to it, I was compelled to write about it. It features in-depth life stories of those marginalized in our society as well as those reaching out in service.
• Shaping Sapiens.  Every once in a while, you come across a person who has a story that is so extraordinary, it feels like they’ve lived a life destined to become an Academy Award-winning movie.  My friend Amelia Isabel Torres interviews such people. The last episode you’ll find is from 2019, but this podcast is still well worth listening to. It’s amazing, and I’m not just saying that because her first episode was an interview with me. I blogged about it here. I hope my friend Amelia will add more episodes to this podcast someday.
• Spooked. This is an offshoot of Snap Judgment, and it features true-life supernatural stories, told first-hand by people who can barely believe they happened themselves.

My Wish List

• Don’t Ask Tig. Tig Notaro is one of my favorite comedians. I find her down-to-earth, relatable, and I love her unique perspectives. I’ve only had the chance to listen to one episode, but it felt like listening to a friend.
• Weight For It. It unpacks the nuanced thoughts of fat folks, and of all folks who think about their weight all the time. Through narrative storytelling, host Ronald Young Jr. hopes to have the conversations that we tend to avoid when it comes to our bodies. Again, I’ve only heard one episode, but found it to be poignant and, unfortunately, it hit very close to home.
• Text Me Back! This one comes from my local NPR station, KUOW. It’s about best friendship and making your favorite people laugh, even when this dumpster fire of a world gets you down. Bestselling writer Lindy West and democracy policy expert Meagan Hatcher-Mays are two Award-Winning Best Friends from high school. Each week, they hilariously digest what’s going on in the news, their lives and their text threads with their singular combination of political smarts, embarrassing sincerity, and a truly concerning level of investment in pop culture. Based on the one episode I’ve heard so far, this one is targeting a much younger demographic than mine, but when they get rolling, they do make me laugh.
• The Atlas Obscura Podcast. I love the website, which describes the quirkiest places on the planet, so I’m sure I’ll love this, too.

I’m also interested in anything on Autism. There are many lists of podcasts on this subject. Here’s one from Goodpods, one from Discover Pods, and one from Player FM.

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The podiverse is so filled with stars these days that you can pretty much pick any subject under the sun and find dozens of programs to choose from. What an amazing world we live in. I hope we’ve introduced you to some addictive and edifying entertainment, Dear Reader.

So, what are some of your favorite podcasts? Let us know in the comments below, and I’ll brace myself to add more to my wish list.

Hey! Look what I wrote! http://amzn.to/2mlPVh5