Critics weigh in on the best and most surprising podcasts of 2023

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Lisa Desjardins: They are wonderful in traffic jams and on runs. But for anyone on a holiday trip and enthralling podcasts can be an excellent travel companion. As 2023 comes to a close, we take a look at or better yet a listen to some of the most engaging, enlightening and entertaining podcasts of the past year.

Nicholas Quah is a podcast critic for Vulture and Sarah Larson is a staff writer for The New Yorker and pens, the column Podcast Department.

All right, Nick, let’s start right away with one of your favorites podcast called The Retrievals from Cereal Productions. This is about a fertility clinic at Yale, where it turns out women who went into for procedures being told they were receiving pain medication, we’re not getting it at all. Instead it was being stolen by a nurse. Let’s listen to a clip from that.

Woman: The women are seeking fertility treatment for a variety of reasons. They’ve had a couple miscarriages and they’re pushing 40. They don’t have fallopian tubes, or they need sperm. All of them wind up at the fertility clinic at Yale University. They meet their doctors get the info, start giving themselves the shots. And eventually they get to the day they’ve been waiting for the day of the first egg retrieval.

Lisa Desjardins: Nick, there’s a lot of nonfiction stories out there, what stood out about this podcast/

Nicholas Quah, Vulture: What stood out to me is the choices that had made which tended to be a lot more quiet a lot more 30,000 foot views. Susan Burton, who leads to the show kind of brings us to more thornier layers of the story. In particular, she sort of examines the tension of how the sort of structural dismissal of women’s pain kind of knows no class, no institutional affiliation.

Many of the women who are affected are affiliated with Yale University. Some of them are academics, some of them study pain for a living, you know, it’s a very kind of complex story in the sense of it gets to some really, really tricky territory, like the tension between a woman’s motherhood and your bodily autonomy.

Lisa Desjardins: So I want to ask about one of your favorites. This is a podcast called Articles of Interest, which bills itself as being about what we wear, but it’s really about so much more, including society. I want to play a clip from an episode that focuses on a fabric pattern, a pattern that many know as Paisley.

Woman: The reason why Paisley is called Paisley. The reason why Prince’s estate is called Paisley Park. The reason why John Lennon painted Paisley’s all over his Rolls Royce appends everything I thought I knew about how knockoffs work and the role of the Indian diaspora in American history.

Lisa Desjardins: I for one didn’t know that about John Lennon, what do you love about this podcast?

Sarah Larson, The New Yorker: Sounds like quite a car. The thing I always love about this podcast, which is perennially great is that Avery Troubleman, the creator who pretty much does everything on the podcast brings us into a world of talking about clothing and the history of fashion and design and style topics.

I frankly, don’t think of myself as really being interested in and shows their connections to history and colonialism and all these rich stories. I’m always surprised, I’m always delighted, and it’s substantive without feeling like a bummer.

Lisa Desjardins: You both know that podcasts have clearly exploded in the last decade. And one reason is a particular genre, true crime, often sort of real death stories, murder, all of that. But Nick, one of your favorite podcasts that’s relatively new here is one called ghost story that kind of adds new layers to that genre. Tell us about this one.

Nicholas Quah: This is kind of a tricky one to describe, because I’ve taken it describing it as a conceptual introduction and a sense of, it’s a murder mystery that’s stuffed into a family story, that’s stuffed into a ghost story. It’s hosted by a British journalist named Tristan Redmond. And, you know, he kind of stumbled onto the story through a series of coincidences in a house that he grew up in London, there was a little, you know, there was some creepy things happening in the bedroom that he occupied at a top floor. And many, many years later, he would sort of hear other stories about stuff happening in his house. And then he would discover that his wife’s great grandmother was killed in a house right next to that building.

And so from one rabbit hole to another leads him to this long, like, discovery and journey around his wife’s like, family, essentially, it’s a really lovely, really surprising piece. That’s, that’s as far away from the liquidity of true crime as you can get.

Lisa Desjardins: Fantastic. I will say, as we are talking about this right now, obviously, we live in very serious times. So Sarah, this is a good time for a serious podcast, like Normal Gossip, which is one of the ones that you highlighted in your story on the New Yorker, and is not serious at all, but help explain this phenomenon. And is this podcast and is actual gossip about real people.

Sarah Larson: It’s pretty brilliant. It gives you all the pleasure of gossip without the guilt of gossip, basically. So it takes anonymous stories with identifying details changed. And it’s just basically about people making crazy decisions and doing interesting things. It’s not salacious, it’s not mean. It’s just basically like listening to a good friend tell a wild story and observe and applying about human behavior without feeling bad about yourself.

Lisa Desjardins: Which is probably exactly what we all need right now. Last question quickly before we go, can you see your name a podcast that you did not expect to life but really won you over in the last year?

Sarah Larson: That would definitely be Think Twice Michael Jackson Leon Neyfakh and his co-host Jay Smooth. I was really apprehensive about a Michael Jackson podcast and kind of dreading it and then when I listened to it, it was beautifully done, incredibly nuanced and interesting. It wasn’t trying to prove him guilty or not guilty. It was just taking the whole story of his whole life presented alongside the context. It’s just wonderfully evoked and turned out to be really enjoyable.

Lisa Desjardins: Nick.

Nicholas Quah: I’m wondering if I could say it as public television, but there’s a show that I was not expecting to like called a Murder on Sex Island. It’s basically an audio book written by a comedian. Her name is Jo Firestone.

A couple of months ago, I think she just sort of sat down and said, I wanted to learn how to write a murder mystery, and she wrote a murder mystery, and she decided to distribute it as a podcast. It follows a private eye, who is conscripted to investigate a murder on a reality show while being on a reality show. It’s one of my favorite things that I heard this year. It’s such a joy.

Lisa Desjardins: All right, I have a lot of listening to do. Thanks to both of you, Nick and Sarah, we appreciate it.

Nicholas Quah: Thank you.

Sarah Larson: Thank you.