According to my favorite podcast app, Pocket Casts, I listened to 74 days, 19 hours, and 36 minutes of podcasts in 2024. (If that sounds like a lot, it’s lower than last year; I blame my 10-month-old for cutting into my listening time.) I’ve also spent the year writing about the best things I’ve listened to for my newsletter, Podcast the Newsletter, and the shows below are the ones I kept coming back to week after week.
I know there are a lot of end-of-the-year podcast lists flying around right now, but even the best of them are lacking what I think are great shows that haven’t gotten the attention they deserve. I hope you enjoy my picks—some that have been touted elsewhere, and a few that may be new to you—and let me know what I missed. I need to get my numbers back up for next year, so I’ll need some new shows to get me there.
Because the Boss Belongs to Us
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Jesse Lawson and Holly Casio have a hypothesis: Bruce Springsteen deserves the queer icon stamp of approval. To prove it, they spend every episode of Because the Boss Belongs to Us going down a list they made, asking: is Bruce camp? Does he have a narrative of struggle? Do his songs evoke feelings of deep sadness, loneliness, euphoria, or something else that queer people experience? Can you dance, cry, and have sex to Bruce? Listening to it, I feel like I’m sitting on the floor in Holly’s room alongside her pile of zines, watching her and Jesse make this show by hand.
Cement City
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Journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas moved into a tiny town in Pennsylvania called Denora just to learn what it’s like to live there, and left with more than 850 hours of tape. She turned all of that documentation into the podcast Cement City. (Denora! Population: 4,650. Denora has no banks, no grocery stores, and no gas stations, but there is a Smog Museum, and a mayor named Piglet.) The whole show is building up toward Denora’s general election and a Christmas celebration, and along the way Laskas makes us feel like we’re living there, too. As a whole, the show is an incredible piece of reporting, and I could not tear myself away.
The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi
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The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi introduces you to Anthony, a man from one of New York City’s crime families who claims to have played a part in murdering the pope in 1978. He’s so full of yarns, it’s impossible to believe all of them, and that’s the whole point of this podcast: Marc Smerling (co-creator of HBO series The Jinx) is following along with Anthony’s stories and fact-checking them, which is hard, because Anthony is such an unforgettable subject and fantastic storyteller, it can be difficult to separate truth from fiction. I actually don’t care if the stories are true or false, as Anthony is fascinating and the podcast is wonderfully made.
Tiny Dinos
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On Tiny Dinos, improvisors Connor Ratliff and James III pose as scientists and best friends who have revived dinosaurs in miniature form—but they’re trying to keep it a secret. The real jokes start pouring in when their famous, funny improv friends (like Lauren Lapkus) stop by. This show is ridiculous and cute and weird, and a great venue for comedians to get really silly. Connor and James’s chemistry is the best. I want to live inside their Tiny Dinos house.
The Telepathy Tapes
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The Telepathy Tapes is one of the most mind-twisty things I’ve listened to in awhile. At its heart is a theory—that non-verbal people with autism are telepathic and have otherworldly perceptions—that is both unbelievable and, when you really think about it, completely plausible, and if it’s true, it changes everything science has told us about not just the capabilities of neurodivergent people, but also interconnectedness, and communication. It starts with host Ky Dickens toting her tape recorder to homes of autistic children all across the world (accompanied by a neuroscientist) for intimate conversations with their families, who share some incredible things. If you are to believe them (and why shouldn’t you? How arrogant to think that we have this all figured out, that the quietest ones in the room don’t have something to say) it may lead you to question everything you think you know about how reality works—and about how society treats people with autism.
Empire City
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Chenjerai Kumanyika is the host of Empire City, a show that delves into the NYPD’s complicated history, all the way back to the beginning—and not to sound all tag line-y, but it’s the history the cops don’t want us to know. Chenjerai is an amazing storyteller, he transports you back through time. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t put a lot of faith into policing, Empire City will confirm that you probably shouldn’t. This is a history podcast infused with so much life.
Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
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I would follow Jamie Loftus to the end of the earth, but there’s no need when she’s piping a great weekly show into my phone. Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) tracks down former internet “main characters”—people who have, whether they wanted to or not, gone viral for any number of reasons—to find out what happens once the fifteen minutes of online fame are over. Some of these stories are ridiculous (for example, she talked to the guy who ate 40 rotisserie chickens), and some take dark turns (the story of the famous blue and white or black and gold dress), but Jamie interviews everyone involved with empathy, trying to get their side of the story and understand what it felt like to be at the center of the internet, if only for a day. Loftus also flexes her journalistic muscles, searching for the contextual elements that could explain why these stories entered the zeitgeist.
In the Dark
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Season three of In the Dark, produced by The New Yorker, is one of the greatest long form investigative projects I’ve ever encountered. Madeleine Baran is reporting on the 2005 Haditha massacre, during which 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. Marines, leaning on jaw-dropping audio recordings and with access to classified documents and photos that reconstruct what happened and belie nearly everything the military previously disclosed. More than just explaining this terrible morning and the anguish of the families left behind or finally identifying people responsible for these war crimes, it explores the ways war can dehumanize others. It’s a sobering, compelling, difficult listen.
Rebel Spirit
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For her podcast Rebel Spirit, comedian/writer/actress Akilah Hughes went back with her microphone to her small hometown of Florence, Kentucky to try to get the community to change the high school mascot from the Boone County Rebels to…a southern cooking staple, the humble biscuit. It sounds silly, but hers is a serious mission, and the podcast is great piece of journalism that explores how deeply entrenched racism is into our culture. Listeners live the story alongside Akilah, who builds out her narrative with original recordings and interviews with people like the artist behind “Gritty,” the Philadelphia Flyers’ viral mascot. Rebel Spirit is a story bigger than just the Boone County Rebels, it’s a story about how much work it can take to move beyond the past, and to try to be a little better.
The Good Whale
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The Good Whale is a podcast about Keiko, the famous whale who played Willy in the movie Free Willy. Keiko became the center of a controversy when the public, who loved Free Willy and the fact that Willy was freed, realized that Keiko was not free. Millions of dollars went into reintroducing Keiko back into the wild, and recounting his journey to freedom makes for an incredible story. This show has beautiful production values, methodically taking us through the whole affair, and even indulging in flights of artistic fancy. Consider episode five, which covers the time after Keiko had first been released, when scientists did not know where he was. Instead of just skipping over this uncertain period, the show asked creatives who have written musicals to use what little information does exist about where Keiko started and where he ended up to pen songs that imagine what might have happened to him in that time between. It’s one of the most creative shows I’ve encountered this year.
