I use this blog to write about the shows and ideas in podcasting that I have to get down right away, that aren't exactly right to pitch to another publication, that are most emotionally resonant and immediate to me. This isn't the week for a white lady writer to talk too much, but I wanted... Continue Reading →
When our isolation started in mid-march, I couldn’t listen to podcasts at all. I was decentered and the days were too surreal. I played Fiona Apple and Waxahatchee and all my dad’s old favorite songs and my own old favorite teenage emo songs on repeat when I ran two and a half miles on my new running route, zig-zagging across the streets to avoid being near anyone, trying to find a way to escape my worried, racing mind. The pockets of time where I used to listen to podcasts, alone in my house doing chores, in the car on the way to pick up kids or do errands, running on my old busier, crowded trail, had all been suddenly shut down. I had no interest in listening to any voice recorded before March 12. That was another epoch, another era, a foreign country where I didn’t understand the language anymore.
January 1 always feels like...a lot. Today, my husband is working an afternoon and evening shift, my kids are sick, and my house is a serious explosion of tiny toys, cardboard, crumbs, and sweated-in holiday clothes piled in corners. You need distraction from this mess! You need to be immersed in drama, dive deep into... Continue Reading →
A few weeks ago, we sat outside on a hill above the Iowa River and watched Elizabeth Warren give her stump speech, talking about how a two-cent tax on the richest Americans can transform opportunities for the rest of us. She told the parts of her story I’d heard a hundred times on how her... Continue Reading →
It was -45 degrees here last week, then it snowed, so school for my two preschoolers is a mythical notion that maybe used to happen but also maybe I made it all up and they’re never going back! We are hibernating creatures, we are hunkered down, we are maybe all just a little crazy, and... Continue Reading →
If there's a common thread in all my favorite podcasts of 2018, it was seeing another side of something I thought I knew. And if there's one question I have a hard time answering for myself, even with a trip down a good old Google rabbit hole, it's, "Where should I start with this new-to-me podcast?"... Continue Reading →
It’s almost Christmas, which is the perfect excuse to drop some very obvious hints about what podcast-related swag YOU might want, or to casually ask your podcast-obsessed loved ones which shows they like so you can pick out a shirt with an inside joke you don’t understand (but that they will love, I promise!!!). Why... Continue Reading →
A good storyteller can use almost anything as an entry point into showing us how people change, how culture shifts, and how we understand or misunderstand each other. Almost all of my favorite podcasts do this in one way or another. But That’s Another Story asks what books changed people’s lives to begin the conversation,... Continue Reading →
My husband got a new computer that turned out to be a lemon, and somehow after sending it back to get fixed five times and enduring seven hundred hours on the phone with the nice folks at Apple, managed to convince them to give him a new one and a few hundred bucks in credit... Continue Reading →
The Dear Sugars podcast has only been on since 2014, but their advice feels like it’s been a constant for me much longer. When it debuted, I was a brand new mom to an infant, living two thousand miles away from my family, and looking for wisdom and assurance about surviving life’s most seismic... Continue Reading →
