The Atlantic did a year end list of the 50 best podcasts of 2017 so I figured I'd share the Top 10 with the comments from the Atlantic to see if any of you folks agree, disagree or even listen to any of them.
1. The Daily
2. S-Town
3. Heavyweight
4. Embedded
5. Mogul: The Life and Death of Chris Lighty
6. Where Should We Begin
7. Reveal
8. There Goes The Neighborhood
9. Fresh Air
10. Radiolab Presents: More Perfect
The rest of the list is HERE
1. The Daily
What listeners have come to expect from The Daily is, perhaps, unreasonable. But the New York Times reporter and host Michael Barbaro did this to himself. Launched in February, it took about two months for the show to find its rhythm: about 20 minutes a day, five days a week, one major story, and a round-up of headlines at the finish. The story might include recordings from ongoing Times investigations (Bill O’Reilly firing back at Times reporters on tape, Trump disavowing Jeff Sessions), interviews with journalists about their work (Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey on Harvey Weinstein, Rukmini Callimachi on ISIS, Matt Apuzzo and Maggie Haberman on James Comey), and episodic narratives from long-form articles (most recently, how American airstrikes targeting ISIS have killed civilians). At a time when suspicions about the media are flying and credibility is key, Barbaro lets the audience hear how the Times’s stories are put together. And he also gets to be himself: As he talks to his colleagues, he deploys encouraging hmms and ahhhs, admits when he needs clarification, cracks jokes, shows emotion, and even references his personal life. Barbaro is America’s podcasting sweetheart and The Daily, the most impressive work of the year.
Gateway Episode:The Year in Sound
2. S-Town
“Shittown,” or “S-Town,” is John B. McLemore’s name for the slice of Alabama he calls home. He reached out to This American Life producer Brian Reed about a murder that nobody was doing time for and that residents openly discussed. It disgusted McLemore—along with almost everything else about his town—and he wanted Reed to get to the bottom of it. Eventually Reed takes the bait and embarks on years of reporting that quickly solves the mystery of this one-horse-town murder but mostly discovers McLemore the man, who sports a rich Southern accent, who has hobbies that include horology and hedge-maze design, and who walks the line between genius and unhinged. In this stunning work, Reed manages to grow podcasting as a form, too. Years ago, Serial broke the mold by incorporating TV-show elements into its structure, and now Reed shapes his work with techniques from the novel, rendering fascinating plot, characters, and setting, as well as tight literary prose through beautiful exposition. The first words will leave you breathless and, perhaps, sad that in S-Town, there will come an end.
Gateway Episode: "Chapter I"
3. Heavyweight
Heavyweight is a podcast all about emotional time travel, and the attempt to pull something stuck in the past into the present. It possesses unquantifiable magic created by the host Jonathan Goldstein. He manages to bring charm and humor to unexpected moments: while helping a woman find out why she was kicked out of her sorority years ago, or locating the person who wrote the letters that fill a suitcase someone has inexplicably been carrying around for years, or assisting a man in finding the driver who hit him so that he can say thank you. Heavyweight isn’t required listening like some of the shows on this list. It doesn’t make you better informed—but it might make you better. The second season crystallizes Goldstein’s tendency toward the intersection of nostalgia and discord. The jury’s still out on whether hoarding one’s feelings like Goldstein and his guests do is a disease, a cure, or an excellent escape.
Gateway Episode: "#9: Milt"
4. Embedded
This year’s season of Embedded, a show dedicated to long-form documentaries that aim for deep, insider coverage, launched with a series about police shootings in the spring and then pivoted to five installments about President Trump in the fall. The stories about law enforcement are unflinching, drawing you right into the fog of war between cops and civilians, and race is never far from the conversation. Later, swinging in a different direction, Embedded dives into the earlier lives of the president and then-members of his administration. The explorations of Steve Bannon’s ideology and Jared Kushner’s backstory—his father was prosecuted by then–U.S. attorney Chris Christie—make for excellent case studies of powerful men that, up until the 2016 election, were phantoms.
Gateway Episode: “Trump Stories: The Golf Course”
5. Mogul: The Life and Death of Chris Lighty
Chris Lighty was a big-shot executive in hip-hop. He was there from the beginning. He managed 50 Cent when no one would, he represented Missy Elliott, LL Cool J, and Mobb Deep, and at age 44, he died by suicide at his Bronx residence. The circumstances surrounding his death confounded people, including the show’s host Reggie Ossé (who himself died December 20 of complications from colon cancer at the age of 53). Mogul is an exploration of hip-hop and Lighty’s life, as well as Ossé’s personal journey into the subjects of mental illness and domestic violence. Ossé’s connection to the setting—he was an industry lawyer to artists such as Jay-Z, Sean Combs, and DMX, and knew Lighty—offers an insider’s look into a beloved world at a golden time. Top it off with sterling sound engineering, interviews with Lighty’s children and friends, and even archival tape of Lighty, and the result is a show that offers an education for the uninitiated, a yearbook for the hip-hop heads, and an intensive account of a life that ended much too soon.
Gateway Episode: “Part One: That Beat, That Beat Right There”
6. Where Should We Begin
The psychotherapist and author Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin? premiered with a married couple talking through decades of cheating; many listeners became immediately enraptured as Perel channeled priceless therapy into their ears, free of charge. The show focuses on couples working through sex and fidelity issues, but it’s rarely titillating and not at all about eavesdropping. Instead, Perel identifies the walls we build out of self-defense—obstacles to breaking a dry spell or past traumas making a woman recoil—and with laser precision, directs her patients to recognizing why. Perel deploys methodologies especially good for audio: role playing, fantasy, direct conversation. But it’s the way she gently nudges people toward one another that leaves listeners feeling less alone. Where Should We Begin? is the Rosetta Stone of feelings. Through it, it seems possible that we can all become fluent in the language of relationships.
Gateway Episode: “Episode 1: I’ve Had Better”
7. Reveal
Any way you slice it, Reveal’s self-given premise—“investigative journalism and groundbreaking storytelling to spark action, improve lives, and protect our democracy”—while accurate and noble, sounds at least a little bit like homework. But the experience of each episode is more akin to a spoonful of sugar, even when it’s telling a story about Richard Spencer’s cotton farms or a man’s final days as a heroin addict. Reveal is housed at the Center for Investigative Reporting, which has earned Emmys, a Peabody, a MacArthur, and nominations for the Pulitzer Prize. The best way to come to it is by subscribing, diving in wherever you see fit, and then never missing an episode.
Gateway Episode: “All Work. No Pay. Life at a Rehab Work Camp.”
8. There Goes The Neighborhood
Some people will tell you that Los Angeles is the “It” city and that it’s surpassed New York as the cultural capital of the United States. If rocketing rents and real-estate speculation are any indication of cachet, LA certainly has a lot of it. There Goes the Neighborhood, in its second excellent season, shacks up on the West Coast only to find the same rogues’ gallery of unscrupulous investors, greedy landlords, and overpriced apartments it found in Brooklyn last year. But even though they make great villains—the smarmy building owner from the second episode, “I Didn’t Want to Evict You,” will insist that gentrification is a real community service—the beating hearts of this series are the tenants who love their neighborhood. People, such as the tenant’s right activist Uver Santa Cruz, band together with their neighbors to fight evictions in court. This podcast isn’t all black and white; rather, it spends a lot of time in the gray area between the entrepreneurs who want to flip a house or open a coffee shop and the people who just want to call LA home.
Gateway Episode: “All These People Moving In, New Buildings, New Apartments”
9. Fresh Air
Radio fans who haven’t explored the audio stylings of Terry Gross haven’t lived. She was a part of the canon for years before iPods were even a twinkle in Apple’s eye, not counting the time she logged honing her craft before the word podcast entered the lexicon. She’s been steadfast and true; Gross meticulously plans for each interview, while having the skill to craft one on the fly when need be. But this year, listeners started to hear a different side of her. She gave interviews, both in print and on air, which has never much been her inclination. And though her conversations are always civil, her approach seemed invigorated post-election. And finally, though her taste is as exacting as ever, if it’s possible, she’s managed to cast a wider net on both pop culture and niche subjects in 2017.
Gateway Episode: “Feminist Writer Lindy West”
10. Radiolab Presents: More Perfect
Lucky for us, just last year the creators of Radiolab, known for their gorgeous production, served up More Perfect, a show that examines benchmark Supreme Court cases with lasting impact on today’s headlines. For example, “Sex Appeal,” co-starring Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a young ACLU lawyer, details how the Supreme Court handles gender-inequality cases. As you listen to the second season, a pattern emerges from the other topics it covers: race, police brutality, gerrymandering, guns, unlimited campaign contributions, and more. The show is not just a crash course in jurisprudence; it also blueprints how every new case is measured against the last landmark decision (e.g., how the courts judge “reasonable” police behavior when cops use deadly force). After the 2016 election, much was said about how U.S. voters live in bubbles. The Supreme Court may be the tiniest bubble of them all, but its decisions affect every last American.
Gateway Episode: “Mr. Graham and the Reasonable Man”
The rest of the list is HERE
