What a year, eh? In podcasts, as everywhere else lately, volatility abounds—yet beauty and wonder abound, too. Ongoing budget cuts (and debatable decision-making) meant that we lost more terrific shows in the past year—how I’ve missed you, “Heavyweight”!—but some have been given new life elsewhere, including “Death, Sex & Money,” now at Slate, and “In the Dark,” one of my all-time favorites, now here at The New Yorker. Venerable print publications, in fact, produced some of the year’s best limited-series podcasts, as did independent creators, some supported by collectives and networks like the invaluable Radiotopia. Meanwhile, the show that arguably started it all—“This American Life,” still hosted by the indefatigable Ira Glass, remains as great as ever. Listen, if you dare, to the June episode “Come Retribution,” about you know who and you know what, coming soon to a democracy near you.
Speaking of retribution, “Elon’s Spies,” from the British company Tortoise Media, delivers in a mere three episodes a wealth of detailed investigation about our proposed co-czar of government efficiency, all of it involving Elon Musk’s use of private investigators to help him harass his perceived enemies. The host, Alexi Mostrous, illuminates the “pedo guy” saga, in which Musk publicly insulted a diver who rescued a youth soccer team from an underwater cave, and who’d scoffed at Musk’s rescue plan, involving a tiny submarine; an apparent public-humiliation gambit targeting Musk’s former girlfriend Amber Heard; and even more stalkerish intimidation of a Tesla-plant whistle-blower. The sound design indulges in some corniness—the powerful man-child’s spiteful machinations don’t need underscoring with agitated piano—but mostly avoids it. A bonus episode, released after the election, contemplates the future.
In his Peabody Award-winning “Uncivil” podcast, from 2017, Chenjerai Kumanyika, a journalism professor now at N.Y.U., brought to life, with his co-creator Jack Hitt, extraordinary lesser-known stories from the Civil War and before, such as Ona Judge’s escape from enslavement at George Washington’s house and Harriet Tubman’s Combahee River raid. “Empire City,” about the origins of the New York City Police Department, takes a similarly eye-opening historical tack and adds some of Kumanyika’s own story. The first episode begins with his young daughter saying that the police “keep us safe”; proceeds to Kumanyika watching 1964 N.Y.P.D. surveillance video of his father, the late civil-rights organizer Makaza Kumanyika, who led a peaceful protest against police brutality; and then backs up to tell the story of the Kidnapping Club, a group of antebellum New York police constables who pursued and abducted Black locals and sold them into slavery in the South. The time jumps can lead us to expect a more comprehensive history than the series aims to provide, but Kumanyika, a consummate researcher and warmly personable host, nimbly brings it all together.
The Economist continued its streak of impressive limited-series podcasts with this year’s “The Modi Raj,” about Narendra Modi, which, like its 2022 series “The Prince,” about Xi Jinping, paints a vivid portrait of a world power through a meticulously reported biography of its strongman leader. The Economist business writer Avantika Chilkoti, a savvy and amiable host, starts by travelling to Vadnagar, Gujarat, where Modi famously began life as a chai wallah’s son. As a boy, we learn, Modi wasn’t a listener, enjoyed giving out orders, did some acting (“If you did not give him the lead role, he would not be part of it”), and, at age eight, became involved with the Hindu-nationalist group the R.S.S. Tracing Modi’s rise, via the R.S.S., to prominence in the right-wing B.J.P. Party and ultimately the Prime Ministership, Chilkoti talks to everyone from Modi’s longtime tailor (“He notices if buttonholes are hand-sewn”) to survivors of the deadly 2002 Gujarat riots (in which Modi and the R.S.S. may have been complicit) to a political consultant who recalls beaming Modi’s hologram to rural campaign rallies in 2014. “The chatter in the village is that there is a leader who is going to appear in thin air,” the consultant tells Chilkoti—and the hologram made Modi seem “omnipresent and capable of doing the unthinkable.” The story’s details are edifyingly specific, its themes grimly universal.
The Nashville-based journalist Meribah Knight, maker of the excellent series “The Promise” and “The Kids of Rutherford County,” this year brought us inside the volatile Tennessee state house of 2023, which made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Knight embedded herself with three Covenant Moms—conservative Christian mothers of students at the Covenant School, where a mass shooting had recently killed six people—as they attempted to influence their own party to pass gun-control measures and then experienced one rude awakening after another. Deep-red Tennessee has a Republican supermajority in the legislature, and we listen as legislators expel their Democratic peers for protesting; invent and enforce new rules against free expression for people in the gallery, including the moms; and welcome a visitor from a right-wing Hungarian think tank that often supports Viktor Orbán. Throughout, the sounds of everyone’s voices, constituents and politicians alike, convey as much as their words do, and the intimacy enhances the maddening implications.
Dan Taberski (“Running from Cops,” “Surviving Y2K,” “9/12”) returned this year with “Hysterical,” about a sudden and mysterious outbreak of a Tourette’s-like condition in upstate New York, mostly among high-school girls, in 2011. The premise might make us wary—notes of the Salem Witch Trials, talk of hysteria—but, as ever, Taberski and his team know what they’re doing. “Hysterical” relates its strange story with sensitivity, humor, and fascinating characters, and its essential questions—What is this? Why is it happening? How can we stop it?—broaden and deepen as the series proceeds. Each new theory that Taberski investigates, from the personal to the environmental, seems to nearly crack the case, but surprises create cliffhangers throughout. We learn about similarly mysterious mind-body afflictions, from Havana Syndrome to fentanyl-contact paranoia, and by the end we’ve been unnerved, enlightened, and reassured. Taberski is a sharp and friendly narrator, unafraid to joke with us, skilled at drawing out interviewees and putting them at ease, and adept at zooming in and out as the story requires. Like all of his work, it connects the personal and the philosophical and makes it look easy.
This year, the reliably topnotch podcaster Leon Neyfakh (“Slow Burn,” “Fiasco”) collaborated on the new show “Backfired” with an equally strong co-host, Arielle Pardes, releasing two first-rate series—both, essentially, about drugs. Neyfakh, whose previous work has contextualized political and cultural phenomena (Iran-Contra, Watergate, Michael Jackson), applies that approach to the history of American attention spans and the uppers that deal with them. Here and in “Backfired: The Vaping Wars,” we learn about the makers of the drugs as well as their users, and the complex interplay—of mental health, anxiety, calm, focus, and, essentially, the human condition—that can make understanding and treating our problems so difficult. Neyfakh delves into more personal territory than he has in the past—turns out he’s a big vaper, and a longtime dabbler in the stimulant arts—which enhances the series’ perspective and power.
Benjamen Walker, whose venerable podcast “The Theory of Everything” embodies the spirit of its fiercely independent, creator-driven network, Radiotopia, released a magnum opus this year—a group biography, as he calls it, of the great mid-century writers Richard Wright, Kenneth Tynan, and Dwight Macdonald, with a generous dose of James Baldwin for good measure. All of them were supported at times by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a transatlantic postwar organization secretly funded by the C.I.A., dedicated to promoting democracy and disparaging Communism—in short, spreading propaganda—through its support of highbrow art and intellectual journals. That, in itself, is amazing. But so is getting to know these writers and their work, seeming at once lifetimes away from our world and shockingly prescient, as we contemplate big questions about art, money, racism, the postwar cultural landscape, Orwell, communism, McCarthyism, and much more, with a frisson of conspiracy theory shivering beneath it all. What did the writers know, and when did they know it? And what does it all mean? Walker delves into this whirl of ideas and intrigue with zeal; he spent four years researching, and tracking down wonderfully obscure archival audio and writing, and it sounds at every moment like he’s thrilled to blow your mind. He just might if you can keep up with his. A companion series, “Propaganda Notes & Sources,” feverishly details his research.
Drawing on hundreds of hours of secretly recorded F.B.I. audio, “Chameleon: The Michigan Plot,” hosted by the investigative reporters Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison, delves into the world of right-wing anti-government anxiety, paranoia, and misinformation; it also delivers a novel’s worth of vivid characters, so tragicomic they feel like satire. It centers on the right-wing Michigan militia accused of planning to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, a ragtag collective of true believers unwittingly plotting alongside government informants who helped train and organize them. Bensinger and Garrison tell the story with patience and care, blending narration, interviews, and absolutely bonkers F.B.I. audio, which is scary and funny, with the quality of high-grade eavesdropping. The results poignantly reveal the intersection of the personal (loneliness, isolation, male bonding), the political, and the hyped-up misinformation landscape (TikTok news, Facebook militias) that we might now call the manosphere. From the opening scene, when we hear audio of an informant driving his giddy supposed friends to meet their sting-operation doom, “The Michigan Plot,” by bringing us into the group, captures the strange bittersweet irony of how the desire for community, and even for connection, can sometimes lead to the destruction of both.
“The Belgrano Diary,” a London Review of Books series hosted by the appealingly Scottish-accented writer Andrew O’Hagan, sustains an irresistible mood as it relays a horrific story—that of Britain’s 1982 sinking of the General Belgrano, the second-largest ship in Argentina’s Navy, in the early days of the Falklands War, and the political opportunism that surrounded the attack. (Borges described the war, O’Hagan says, as “two bald men fighting over a comb.”) The operation, which killed three hundred and twenty-three men, sparked patriotic fervor (“GOTCHA,” Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid The Sun declared) and made Margaret Thatcher a hero overnight. But the diary of Narendra Sethia, a British supply officer on the attacking submarine, sharply contradicted the government’s account and justifications; when its contents were made public, Parliament rang with war-crimes accusations. O’Hagan reinvestigates the story, tracking down seemingly every important surviving character in it, including Sethia, now living with rescue dogs on a secluded hilltop in the Caribbean. The series is full of riveting audio: O’Hagan’s thoughtful and intrepid interviews, maddening archival clips (“Rejoice!” Thatcher says), diary excerpts, and tasteful, evocative sound design (waves lapping, pen scratching across paper, hypnotic original music by Joel Cox). A masterly sequence of the attack, in which a traumatized Sethia compares the sound of the ship breaking up to the shattering of an eighteenth-century ballroom chandelier (“tinkling, tinkling, tinkling, tinkling”), is emblematic of the series’ unforgettable blend of elegance and savagery.
I don’t know what it says about me, or about this year, that my favorite podcast was about hundreds of dead bodies found in the woods, but “Noble,” unlike its subject matter, was a wonderful surprise. Hosted and reported by the Atlanta-based journalist Shaun Raviv, it’s a gripping, thoughtful, perfectly balanced meditation on death and our relationship to its practicalities, via the stunning story of the 2002 discovery of three hundred and thirty-nine bodies scattered across the grounds of a rural Georgia crematorium. The series begins with a description of the cremation process (“It takes twenty-eight gallons of fuel, and a spark, to burn a human body”), continues to a former gas man recalling an unsettling sight on a delivery (“Just the foot?” “Just the foot”), and proceeds to a well-written and thoroughly reported saga about a community trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. Campside Media, founded in 2019, has made some of the most sophisticated podcasts to come out in recent years, and like those—“Suspect” and “The Michigan Plot”—“Noble” tells a riveting, troubling story ethically and with respect for the people at its heart. As it contemplates the side of death we really don’t want to know about (“We treat dead bodies like they’re precious, sacred even, but we’re also revolted by them—the way they smell, the way they look,” Raviv says), “Noble” illuminates much about the essence of human connection. ♦
