Hitting the road this summer? 8 podcasts to try
I believe I cannot fly.
Not yet. After three and a half months of trying to maintain a 6-foot bubble around myself in public I’m not ready to sit with a host of strangers inside a metal tube for a few hours, even if they are wearing masks.
Your risk tolerance and need for speed may vary, and I respect that. I’m getting there. But if you’re still where I am, driving is the way to go. I’ve taken two road trips in the last month and both have felt very safe as far as sanitation and distancing are concerned. Face coverings. Hand sanitizers. Paper towels to touch handles.
And if you’re driving, listening to podcasts is the way to pass the time.
As a longtime evangelist for podcasts — on-demand radio shows you can stream through a smartphone — I every so often present a list of new suggestions from my feed for the podcurious who have discovered the classics, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning “This American Life,” Slate’s “Political Gabfest,” “Hardcore History,” “The Moth” and so on, and are eager for more.
Here, in alphabetical order are eight I recommend from my current rotation. All of them are available free on iTunes and many other podcast platforms:
‘The Anthropocene Reviewed’
The audacious premise of this monthly program is that host John Green, the noted young adult author (“The Fault in Our Stars”), reviews and rates on a five-star scale random aspects of our current geologic age — the one in which humans have dominated the planet. On the May 30 episode, for example, he tackled scratch-and-sniff stickers and the Indianapolis 500. His analyses contain compelling history lessons occasionally wrapped around personal anecdotes. I give his show four stars.
‘The Argument’ Each week, an ideologically diverse group of New York Times columnists gets together to talk politics. Actual arguments rarely break out, but the informal give-and-take is reliably informative.
‘Conan O’Brien Needs a
Friend’ The animating notion here is that TBS late-night talk host O’Brien is so desperate for real friends that he invites his showbiz pals into the studio for long-form interviews hoping to make a personal connection. I’m not generally a huge fan of interview podcasts, but O’Brien is a brilliant interlocutor, and he attracts such A-list guests as Tina Fey, Keegan-Michael Key, John Oliver, John Mulaney and Amy Schumer. The conversations are bracketed by towel-snapping, morning zoo-like banter with his production team.
‘FiveThirtyEight Politics’ The polling nerds at Nate Silver’s news shop — often including Silver himself — dive into the latest opinion survey numbers to offer analysis and prognostication.
‘The Gist With Mike Pesca’
Since 2014, former NPR correspondent Pesca has been hosting this daily, fast-paced half-hour-ish program that covers politics, culture, sports, science and whatever else strikes him as newsworthy. His often iconoclastic commentaries begin and end every show, and during the era of President Donald Trump this podcast has gone, for me, from oughta-listen to must-listen
‘Hacks on Tap’ Last summer, Democratic political consultant David Axelrod and Republican political consultant Mike Murphy teamed up to start offering a weekly hour of behind-thescenes analysis of news from the campaign trail and beyond. Their interplay is collegial — it helps that they both hold Trump in contempt — and generally amusing.
‘Reply All’ This is easily the quirkiest show on my list. Every few weeks, hosts P.J. Vogt and Alex Goldman plumb some aspect of modern life that’s at least tangentially related to internet culture. Sometimes it involves explaining in detail a very obscure tweet. Other times it involves solving tech riddles and problems submitted by listeners.
‘Slow Burn’ The fourth season of this in-depth modern history podcast tells the story of the rise and fade-out of David Duke, the somewhat telegenic neo-Nazi Klansman whose 1989 election to the state legislature in Louisiana may have been more portentous in retrospect than we realized, in the telling of host Josh Levin. Previous seasons have explored the Watergate scandal, the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the murders of rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. A very similar deep-dive, limited-run podcast I recommend is “Bagman,” Rachel Maddow’s retelling of the downfall of Vice President Spiro Agnew.
There are, of course, others. I’m exposed to more than most since my wife is a podcast consultant for Audible (none of these are Audible offerings), and among the others you might want to check if these don’t satisfy are “Cocaine and Rhinestones,” “Dolly Parton’s America,” “In the Dark,” “Punch Up the Jam,” “Throughline,” “Heavyweight,” “Ear Hustle” and, I would be remiss not to mention, “The Mincing Rascals,” the WGN-plus news-chat podcast on which I’m a regular panelist.
Happy motoring!
‘Your move, Mayor Lightfoot’
That was my son’s reaction to the news Thursday that New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio has ordered the words “Black Lives Matter” to be painted in huge yellow letters on the section of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue that runs by Trump Tower. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser had those words painted onto 16th Street near the White House recently, in letters large enough to be seen from space.
Similar protest “murals” have gone up in Charlotte, North Carolina; Seattle; Austin, Texas; Topeka, Kansas; Dallas; San Francisco; Sacramento, California; Los Angeles; and, well … why not Chicago? Wacker Drive in front of Trump International Hotel & Tower here offers an inviting canvas for volunteers with permission or for city workers on the job to tweak the president, who has been openly hostile to our city and has raged on Twitter about the Black Lives Matter movement.
So how about it, Mayor Lori Lightfoot?
Eugenia Orr, from her honor’s press team, responded noncommittally to my query Friday: “The Mayor’s office is currently evaluating ways to commemorate but also tell the real truth about our city and nation’s past while honoring the people and groups making history today.”
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s reader poll to select the funniest tweet was “Six word horror story: ‘I thought I was on mute’ ” by @ChrisGatesFace.
The poll appears at chicago tribune.com/zorn where you can read all the finalists. For an early alert when each new poll is posted, sign up for the Change of Subject email newsletter at chicagotribune.com/ newsletters.