Five fresh podcasts
Podcasting is booming, with total listeners more than doubling from 11 per cent to 23 per cent in Canada between 2012 and 2015, according to Media Technology Monitor.
Once you’re caught up on the blockbusters such as This American Life, Serial and Revisionist History, press subscribe on these five fresh podcast titles.
1. If you love Serial, try . . . Missing & Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams? Twenty-seven years after Alberta Williams was found dead along B.C.’s notorious Highway of Tears, her unsolved murder has become a national obsession.
Journalist Connie Walker’s investigative podcast has frequently topped iTunes’ Canadian podcast rankings since it debuted on Oct. 25.
cbc.ca/missingandmurdered/podcast
2. If you love Dan Savage’s Savage Lovecast, try . . . Anna Faris is Unqualified Who better to help solve your romantic quandaries than Mrs. Chris Pratt? Mom star Anna Faris recruits celebrity co-hosts including Tatiana Maslany, Chris Evans with Jenny Slate and Courtney Love to field callers’ dating dilemmas.
soundcloud.com/annfarisisunqualified
3. If you love WireTap, try . . . Heavyweight Jonathan Goldstein’s sad-sack persona and stream of annoying guests on his highly original (and recently ended) CBC Radio program WireTap was not the sort of thing that appealed to all listeners.
His newest venture, Heavyweight, is almost — dare we say it? — normal. Goldstein takes his guests — including, in the first episode, his dad — back to their life’s biggest regret and tries to help them get past it.
It is, by turns, hilarious and heartbreaking.
gimletmedia.com/show/heavyweight
4. If you love audiobooks, try . . . Homecoming This scripted podcast from Gimlet Media doesn’t launch until Nov. 16, but with the voice talents of Oscar Isaac, Catherine Keener, David Schwimmer and Amy Sedaris, plus a mysterious teaser that introduced a waitress with ties to a shady organization called the Homecoming Initiative, we’re all ears.
gimletmedia.com/show/homecoming
5. If you love Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Star Talk Radio, try . . . We Have Concerns Science doesn’t scream hilarity, but Anthony Carboni and Jeff Cannata’s banter on topics such as lab-gestated mice, monkeys that can consider one another’s point of view and the mathematically shortest distance between 25,000 bars will make your left brain bwahaha.
wehaveconcerns.com