5 for 2015: Five Podcasts You Should Be Listening To
5 FOR 2015:Five Podcasts You Should Be Listening To In 2015
I’ve been doing a lot driving lately, all of it elliptical. I’m touching base between two homes; I’m orbiting a center I cannot see. The highways I’m driving are flat and white, and as always I experience them as sites of futuristic loneliness, even if there’s nothing futuristic about a highway in America anymore. Highway-driving blurs the line between metaphor and hallucination.
For voices and information on long drives, commercial truck drivers mount CB radios. I have started listening to podcasts.
BuzzFeed’s Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton drink bourbon, tell jokes and talk to other women of color. I am impressed by people who are funny without ever being mean, which is what Heben and Tracy are.
Writers Emily Gould and Angela Ledgerwood talk to other writers, but their conversations are about books as objects and ends unto themselves. Their conversations do for books what something like Grub Street Diet does for food: they situate sustenance within the context of a life.
Also a show about writers, hosted by a writer. Brad Listi is harmless/charmless as an interlocutor, but he has talked to so many writers I love: Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson, Roxane Gay, Leslie Jamison, Hilton Als, Kate Zambreno.
I have a monstrous crush on Adult editor-in-chief Sarah Nicole Prickett, who co-hosts this show with painter Sam McKinniss. I listen to decide whether I want to sleep with Sarah Nicole or steal her life, but you can also tune in to hear them talk about Whitney Houston, Parker Ito, seasonal shopping lists and how age functions in the art world.
My understanding of podcasts isn’t grounded in, like, fact, but I do remember seeing them on the periphery of iTunes years ago. I don’t know what they were like then, but I know I was not interested. What has become interesting about podcasts is that they can literally give voice to your favorite avatars. I’ve loved Ayesha Siddiqi as a handle (@pushinghoops) and as the editor-in-chief of The New Inquiry; I really love getting to hear her speak. In the second episode (there are only two so far), she talks to Australian comic Aamer Rahman about finding humor under white supremacy.
