Our Favorite Podcasts
If you’ve never heard of them before, podcasts are episodic audio recordings, much like radio programs or audiobooks. In celebration of International Podcast Day, we’ve gathered together a list of our favorite podcasts for your enjoyment!
September 28, 2020
Wednesday, September 30, is International Podcast Day!
If you’ve never heard of them before, podcasts are episodic audio recordings, much like radio programs or audiobooks. Podcasts usually feature one or more recurring hosts discussing all sorts of topics, including true crime, inspirational stories, investigative journalism, comedy, and science. Some podcasts offer fictional stories read by a narrator or a cast of actors, much like radio dramas.
In celebration of Podcast Day, we’ve gathered together a list of our favorite podcasts for your enjoyment!
In this list: Humor, Science and Culture, Stories, True Crime.
Humor
Ask Me Another
NPR
Packed with trivia, comedy and celebrity guests, Ask Me Another is like an amusement park for your brain. Host Ophira Eisenberg and musician Jonathan Coulton take brilliant contestants on a roller coaster that’ll make you laugh and scream (out the answers)—and barely anyone throws up in a trash can.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Comedy Central
Listen to highlights and extended interviews in the “Ears Edition” of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
Office Ladies
Earwolf
The Office co-stars and best friends, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey, are doing the ultimate The Office re-watch podcast for you. Each week Jenna and Angela will break down an episode of The Office and give exclusive behind the scene stories that only two people who were there, can tell you.
Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!
NPR
NPR’s weekly hour-long quiz program. Each week on the radio you can test your knowledge against some of the best and brightest in the news and entertainment world while figuring out what’s real news and what’s made up.
Science and Culture
99% Invisible
Radiotopia
Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we’ve just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture.
A Way With Words
A Way with Words
A Way with Words is a fun and funny radio show and podcast about language. Co-hosts Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett talk with callers from around the world about linguistics, slang, new words, jokes, riddles, word games, grammar, old sayings, word origins, regional dialects, family expressions, books, literature, folklore, and speaking and writing well.
Clear and Vivid with Alan Alda
Alan Alda
Learn to connect better with others in every area of your life. Immerse yourself in spirited conversations with people who know how hard it is, and yet how good it feels, to really connect with other people – whether it’s one person, an audience or a whole country. You’ll know many of the people in these conversations – they are luminaries in our culture. Some you may not know. But what links them all is their powerful ability to relate and communicate. It’s something we need now more than ever.
Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness
Earwolf
A weekly exploration of all the things Jonathan Van Ness (Queer Eye, Gay of Thrones) is curious about. Come on a journey with Jonathan and experts in their respective fields as they get curious about anything and everything under the sun.
My Favorite Album
Jeremy Dylan
Each week filmmaker Jeremy Dylan chats with a musician/songwriter about their favorite album of all time – the songs, the history and how it has influenced their own music.
Proof
America’s Test Kitchen
We tell the weird and surprising and funny backstories around food and drink. The tales we haven’t all heard yet, the ones that have been lost, the under-told. This is not a recipe show. And this is not a show about celebrity chefs or what they like to eat. Proof goes beyond recipes and cooking to investigate the foods we love (tiki drinks) and don’t love (the grain bowl); ask the big questions (where do food cravings come from?); and uncover the hidden backstories that feed your food-obsessed brain.
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting
From prisons to protests, immigration to the environment, Peabody Award-winning Reveal goes deep into the pressing issues of our times. The Atlantic says “the experience of each episode is 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.”
Short Wave
NPR
New discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines — all in about 10 minutes, every weekday. It’s science for everyone, using a lot of creativity and a little humor.
Sound Opinions
WBEZ Chicago
Take two nationally respected rock critics, the latest music news, personal commentary, and exclusive interviews and performances, add a huge pile of records old and new, and the result is Sound Opinions – the world’s only rock and roll talk show.
Stories
The Moth
The Moth
Since its launch in 1997, The Moth has presented thousands of true stories, told live and without notes, to standing-room-only crowds worldwide. Moth storytellers stand alone, under a spotlight, with only a microphone and a roomful of strangers. The storyteller and the audience embark on a high-wire act of shared experience which is both terrifying and exhilarating. Since 2008, The Moth podcast has featured many of our favorite stories told live on Moth stages around the country.
Snap Judgement
WNYC, NPR
Snap Judgment (Storytelling, with a BEAT) mixes real stories with killer beats to produce cinematic, dramatic, kick-ass radio. Snap’s raw, musical brand of storytelling dares listeners to see the world through the eyes of another.
True Crime
Dig
Louisville Public Media, NPR
In the first season of Dig, a new podcast from the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, we bring you the results of a yearlong look at how rape cases are investigated in Louisville. What we’ve learned: here, the police defer to prosecutors on rape cases — and prosecutors reject the vast majority of cases presented to them. Due to this unusual relationship, most people accused of rape here will never face consequences. Most won’t be arrested or convicted. And the case will be closed anyway.
Serial
WBEZ Chicago, Serial Productions
Serial is a podcast from the creators of This American Life, hosted by Sarah Koenig. Serial unfolds one story – a true story – over the course of a whole season. The show follows the plot and characters wherever they lead, through many surprising twists and turns. Sarah won’t know what happens at the end of the story until she gets there, not long before you get there with her.
S-Town
WBEZ Chicago, Serial Productions
S-Town is a new podcast from Serial and This American Life, hosted by Brian Reed, about a man named John who despises his Alabama town and decides to do something about it. He asks Brian to investigate the son of a wealthy family who’s allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder. But when someone else ends up dead, the search for the truth leads to a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure, and an unearthing of the mysteries of one man’s life.
White Lies
NPR
In 1965, Rev. James Reeb was murdered in Selma, Alabama. Three men were tried and acquitted, but no one was ever held to account. Fifty years later, two journalists from Alabama return to the city where it happened, expose the lies that kept the murder from being solved and uncover a story about guilt and memory that says as much about America today as it does about the past.