All through 2024, podcast creators requested us to suppose twice about our preconceptions: They adopted tales that had been alleged to be over, engaged with individuals who are inclined to get dismissed, and toyed with rising applied sciences that make some folks worry for humanity’s future. They explored metropolis sewers, an historic baseball stadium, momentary fame, on a regular basis family objects. This listing represents the 20 greatest podcasts I heard this 12 months, with a lean towards both new reveals, or reveals which have a renewed focus. Nearly all of them, even probably the most entertaining and quirky ones, recommended an underlying preoccupation with the facility of narrative to form our sense of actuality. (As with yearly, The Atlantic’s podcasts are exempt from consideration.) These collection added depth and vitality to the audio panorama—additionally they packed an emotional wallop, inviting listeners to view the world with extra scrutiny and empathy alike.
The comic Jamie Loftus’s earlier podcasts have ranged wildly in material—Mensa conferences, Floridian spiritualists, the comic-strip character Cathy—however benefited equally from her consideration to element. Along with her latest collection, Loftus trains her eye on the web’s “important characters”: individuals who turned short-lived viral sensations. She contextualizes their notoriety inside the broader cultural second that allowed for it, then invitations these figures, who included Ken Bone, William Hung, and “Left Shark,” onto the present to replicate on their brushes with this very specific model of fame. By talking straight with people who had been as soon as generally known as web punch strains, Loftus gives listeners a nuanced understanding of their experiences. Sixteenth Minute is a humorous, fascinating collection that begins by education us on memes and finally ends up displaying a deeply felt empathy.
Begin with “Cover Your Youngsters, Cover Your Spouse Pt. 1.”
Because the co-hosts of Backed Up, the Cincinnati Public Radio reporters Becca Costello and Ella Rowen started by investigating an area story—why is sewage seeping into Cincinnati residents’ basements when it rains?—and ended up making a podcast with wider attraction. This collection demonstrates how nationwide entry to practical plumbing infrastructure is difficult by paperwork and local weather change. Costello and Rowen method the undertaking with humorous gusto as they bring about listeners alongside on a whirlwind six-part journey by way of metropolis sewers and the native authorities. Their efforts contain pop-culture references, useful plumbing metaphors, and a playful bid to find the “actual villain” behind the sewage disaster. However the enjoyable by no means undermines their extra critical intention of detangling the fashionable marvel of the metropolitan water system, a utility that residents would possibly cease to consider solely when it fails.
Begin with “Episode 1: Sewers Gonna Sue.”
The collection’s drawn-out identify—Lastly! A Present About Girls That Isn’t Only a Thinly Veiled Aspirational Nightmare—brings to thoughts fashionable society’s frequent celebration of generic, superficial girlbossery. Jane Marie and Joanna Solotaroff are the stewards of this manufacturing, however they’re not its hosts, per se; every episode is an audio diary of a unique girl’s day. Listeners hear from a former missionary turned middle-school instructor, a brand new mom reflecting on rising up with abusive mother and father, the proprietor of a plus-size boutique serving to shoppers store, and lots of extra. Marie and Solotaroff’s full lack of narrative framing feels contemporary: Hosts not often lower in to arrange the who-what-where or to propel the story ahead. As a substitute, the narrator recounts her day because it unfolds, and in unvarnished element.
Begin with “Lastly! A Present A few 20-One thing Chess Grasp.”
The 2014 chemical-weapon assault on the Hyatt Regency in Rosemont, Illinois, had what some might think about an unconventional goal—the attendees of Midwest FurFest, a conference of self-identifying “furries” who recreationally costume in anthropomorphic animal costumes. The media roundly mocked the incident, which left 19 folks hospitalized, an angle reflecting prejudicial views of the event-goers’ way of life. However the journalist Nicky Woolf and his group of reporters provide this true-crime story the intense consideration it deserves: They lay out the details of the 10-year-old chilly case, clarify the failures of the preliminary police investigation, and search readability on the main points of the day by way of conversations with convention-goers. Within the course of, Fur & Loathing additionally illuminates a subculture that’s typically derided however that gives pleasure and success for its members.
Begin with “Damaged Glass.”
The Italian American author Jo Piazza created this companion podcast for her novel of the identical identify, investigating the real-life thriller that impressed the ebook. She had at all times been advised that her great-great-grandmother Lorenza died below peculiar circumstances greater than 100 years in the past. However in Piazza’s telephone calls with aunts, uncles, and cousins, everybody remembers the story just a little in a different way. The preferred concept is that Lorenza was killed by the Mafia, and Piazza regales listeners together with her journey to seek out the reality within the Sicilian countryside. A part of the appeal of The Sicilian Inheritance is its portrait of the chaos of residing in an enormous, passionate household, one which’s stuffed with multicourse lunches and gossipy second cousins. A household’s legends lend shade and dimension to its historical past, and Piazza’s gives loads of each.
Begin with “Lorenza.”
Lengthy Shadow: In Weapons We Belief
Lengthy Shadow’s earlier seasons investigated the circumstances surrounding September 11 and the rise of the American far proper. Season 3, In Weapons We Belief, explores how weapons got here to be such a central a part of our nationwide tradition. The host and journalist Garrett Graff, himself a gun proprietor, contextualizes the previous quarter century of mass shootings by laying out the political and legislative maneuvers which have eroded gun-control legal guidelines over the earlier 50 years. These typically esoteric actions had palpable results: The so-called gun-show loophole, for instance, allowed the non-public sale of firearms with no background examine—which enabled the Columbine Excessive Faculty shooters to not directly receive their weapons. Listeners who’re all too acquainted with Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde would possibly nonetheless discover illuminating Lengthy Shadow’s examination of the political backdrop to those tragedies.
Begin with “A Uniquely American Drawback.”
This podcast’s easy premise—the host, Tom Rosenthal, approaches somebody he’s by no means met in a London park and invitations them for a chat—creates a stunning stage of intimacy. Inside minutes, listeners hear a person clarify what it was wish to lose his father, or a lady reveal how she feels stifled by her household regardless that they stay a number of international locations away. The important thing to the present’s attraction is Rosenthal’s interviewing model, which retains him current within the dialog moderately than gesturing towards its eventual viewers; in different phrases, his curiosity seems real moderately than performative. Strangers on a Bench demonstrates how prepared persons are to attach with these round them if given the opening, and the way we would attain outward to seek out these conversations for ourselves.
Begin with “Episode 1: A Combat.”
This collection goals to research “the tales we had been advised had been over,” and its inaugural subject, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, is a becoming selection. The host, Dan Leone, begins by touring the Gulf Coast by boat with Louisiana residents as they bear in mind the 11 employees killed within the preliminary oil-platform explosion; the scene units up the present’s emphasis on the catastrophe’s human influence. Leone recounts the assorted selections—or lack thereof—made by BP that led to cleanup employees’ later allegations of extreme respiratory sickness, amongst different devastating aftereffects. Interviews with chemists about BP’s gross mismanagement of the spill are stunning and edifying to listen to, however Ripple’s most compelling function is the way it balances the catastrophe’s scientific and emotional facets: It spends ample time, for instance, on wide-ranging well being points that some uncovered employees and locals have confronted for almost 15 years.
Begin with “1. Firm Canal.”
Within the premiere installment of NPR’s Inheriting, the host, Emily Kwong, makes a daring promise: “On this present, we’re going to interrupt aside the AAPI monolith.” Kwong units about this mission by providing Asian American and Pacific Islander households in the USA alternatives to replicate on how residing by way of specific moments in historical past—such because the Japanese incarceration throughout World Battle II, the Cambodian genocide, and the Vietnam Battle—can depart lasting generational results. Each Kwong and the themes themselves conduct the interviews, as family members speak in confidence to each other about working a enterprise amidst the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion or residing below the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Kwong additionally gives recommendations to listeners excited about beginning these conversations with their very own relations.
Begin with “Carol & the Los Angeles Rebellion: Half 1.”
This restricted collection celebrates what’s thought of Stevie Marvel’s traditional interval (1972–76), when he launched his most famed work. Hosted by the cultural critic Wesley Morris, the collection layers musical evaluation of Marvel’s songs and insightful interviews with business colleagues and acolytes. Morris, following a dialog with the music critic Robert Christgau, dissects how up to date (and largely white) critics glossed over the fusion of pop and gospel that made Marvel’s artwork so revelatory. Musicians akin to Janelle Monáe and Smokey Robinson, together with the previous president and first woman Barack and Michelle Obama, share tales about how Marvel has impressed them. (The Obamas’ firm, Increased Floor, co-produced the collection.) A bonus episode even options an interview with the artist himself. However the present feels full with out it, following Morris’s personal thorough, hours-long analysis of Marvel’s musical output.
Begin with “Music of My Thoughts | 1972.”
Sarah Koenig and the Serial group might by no means replicate the exact alchemy that made its inaugural season a phenomenon 10 years in the past. To their credit score, they aren’t attempting to. Somewhat than scout out equally disputed homicide circumstances to research, Koenig and this season’s co-host, Dana Chivvis, have as a substitute chosen to experiment with type and scale. Serial: Guantánamo (the collection’ fourth installment) makes use of a large lens to discover the historical past of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, from 2002 to the current day. The hosts monitor down greater than 100 folks, together with each detainees and guards; their accounts of the scandals, interrogations, and protests inside the jail present riveting audio, the sort made doable by ready on a narrative till it’s in a position to be advised in full. The narrative additional advantages from Serial’s signature aptitude, as Koenig contains her personal uncertainty about and emotional reactions to what we’re all studying.
Begin with “Ep. 1: Poor Child Raul.”
This independently produced podcast covers a variety of matters geared toward internet-addled listeners, such because the rise of the “influencer voice” and the emotional expertise of abandoning a social-media platform. However its atmospheric sound design differentiates it from comparable tech-focused reveals. The host, Mike Rugnetta, is an expert audio designer who desires to strip typical podcast expectations—pithy observations set over marimba music, say—right down to the shape’s technical studs. A section about why teenagers are obsessive about the favored on-line recreation Roblox, for instance, is bookended by a subject recording of somebody “touching grass”—that’s, experiencing the analog world. By no means Submit additionally works as an intriguing train in free-associative storytelling: Audio from the Minnesota State Truthful horse barn follows a section concerning the historical past of the “Laser Eyes” meme, leaving listeners to interpret the connection between the 2.
Begin with “To BRB or To not BRB.”
Empire Metropolis: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD
Empire Metropolis reckons with the fashionable state of policing by way of the lens of the New York Metropolis Police Division. The NYU journalism professor Chenjerai Kumanyika hosts this nine-episode collection, which presents almost 200 years of historical past—courting again to the mid-Nineteenth century, when an assemblage of constables, watchmen, and kidnappers laid the groundwork for the NYPD—as an immersive listening expertise. The podcast conjures the sounds of town throughout and after the Civil Battle, as Kumanyika describes how the division started to undertake the construction and aesthetics of a standing military. Weaving in tales of his personal entanglements with law enforcement officials, and his younger daughter’s budding understanding of legislation enforcement’s position of their every day life, the host argues that if the NYPD too typically fails to guard the susceptible, it’s as a result of that wasn’t what the pressure was fashioned to do; its preliminary objective, he contends, was to uphold rich and influential residents’ definition of “legislation and order.”
Begin with “They Hold Individuals Protected.”
The tech journalist Evan Ratliff confronts society’s anxieties about synthetic intelligence head-on with this limited-run collection, by which he makes use of language-learning fashions akin to ChatGPT to copy his personal voice. Ratliff units up the affectless “clone”—cultivated from his publicly obtainable private information and vocal clips—to subject incoming telephone calls from telemarketers, household, and mates alike; the result is a collection of uncanny conversations that reveal the stunning capabilities (and limitations) of this fast-developing know-how. Significantly riveting moments embody Ratliff’s daughter chatting with the voice clone, and the AI Ratliff in search of counsel for the actual Ratliff’s non-public issues in a session with an AI therapist. These experiments use each humor and actual perception to examine how we might manipulate the know-how we worry might take over our lives.
Begin with “Episode 1: High quality Assurance.”
Baseball devotees and non-fans alike have one thing to achieve from listening to this collection, concerning the historic Rickwood Discipline in Birmingham, Alabama. Co-produced by Baton Rouge’s and New Orleans’s NPR associates and hosted by the comic Roy Wooden Jr., the podcast particulars the 114-year-old baseball stadium’s tenure as the house of the Negro Leagues’ Birmingham Black Barons. Bolstered by each new interviews—with retired teammates and present native baseball coaches—and archival broadcast clips, it efficiently portrays Rickwood as a microcosm of the racism, resistance, and revolution that had been taking place off the sphere. Wooden himself grew up enjoying baseball within the metropolis together with at Rickwood Discipline, and his private connection to the fabric enlivens the present’s recounting—one which, in a uncommon transfer, is outlined not simply by the primary gamers, but in addition by the communities surrounding them.
Begin with “The Holy Grail of Baseball.”
Within the Darkish returned after a six-year break with each a brand new manufacturing firm—The New Yorker, which acquired the present in 2023—and a drastically expanded scope. The journalist Madeleine Baran and her fellow investigators spent greater than 4 years researching what turned Season 3: the continent- and calendar-year-spanning story of the 2005 Haditha bloodbath, by which members of the U.S. Marine Corps allegedly killed 24 Iraqi civilians. Though eight Marines had been charged for his or her alleged position within the killings, just one was convicted of a criminal offense. Eyewitnesses in Haditha present gripping accounts of what they skilled, whereas the hosts try to make clear inconsistencies in numerous army personnel’s accounts; we even hear one among them chase the producer Natalie Jablonski off his entrance porch with profanity and threats. In probing this decades-old occasion, Within the Darkish makes a robust case for pursuing a narrative so far as you possibly can.
Begin with “Episode 1: The Inexperienced Grass.”
Second Sunday’s first season premiered late final 12 months and was an intriguing proof of idea; 2024’s extra expansive, affecting follow-up is a testomony to the worth of giving a collection time to hit its stride. The co-hosts Darren Calhoun and Esther Ikoro invite visitors—specializing in queer Black folks—to look at their connection to their non secular beliefs, whether or not they be tenuous, tempestuous, or deeply rooted in household custom. The themes element how, within the strategy of exploring their multifaceted identities, they’ve typically redefined what God means to them. Every dialog comes throughout as a form of sermon, setting interviewees’ responses in opposition to wealthy musical backdrops. No matter whether or not they have a private relationship with religion, listeners might empathize with the will to hunt, as one visitor places it, “spirituality that’s unbound by folks’s bullshit.”
Begin with “Mark Miller Performs With the Spirit.”
The author Rose Eveleth has spent greater than a decade researching this well timed entry of NPR’s Embedded, whose launch coincided with the 2024 Olympic Video games. Eveleth interviews athletes such because the sprinters Christine Mboma and Maximila Imali about discovering their naturally excessive testosterone ranges—and thus “true” intercourse—scrutinized by governing our bodies akin to World Athletics. Their tales present a private contact and assist illustrate the extra harrowing facets of their experiences, akin to the truth that they’ve needed to think about taking body-altering medication to keep up their aggressive eligibility. Past stressing the complexities of our biology, Examined questions the notion of “equity” in sports activities: Why are some pure genetic variations thought of extra acceptable than others, and who will get to set the phrases? Intercourse testing is an instance of “how we attempt to impose order on a messy, complicated world,” Eveleth says, and these six episodes spotlight the injury that may be wrought by that impulse.
Begin with “Examined: The Selection.”
The Curious Historical past of Your Dwelling
This podcast explores the creation of genius family innovations that individuals have lengthy taken without any consideration, akin to clocks, bathrooms, and wallpaper. Its host, the historian Ruth Goodman, has an infectious curiosity in home historical past, a spotlight that’s possible extra related to the listener than, say, the Napoleonic Wars. Goodman’s animated narration is paired with evocative music and soundscapes that enliven descriptions of modest homesteads; with these prospers, data as seemingly banal because the evolution of dishwashing turns into mesmerizing. Listeners would possibly come to query the way in which they wash dishes as soon as they study that wooden ash was as soon as most popular over cleaning soap, and that the previous can even have some distinct benefits over the latter. Although it’s removed from the primary “quirky historical past” podcast, this collection’ self-contained idea permits the listener to view the mundanities of every day life with newfound curiosity.
Begin with “Wallpaper.”
The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast
Listening to 4 comedians get technical about their work is equal elements hilarious and enlightening, particularly after they’re all Saturday Night time Stay alums. The Lonely Island—a.ok.a. Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone—chat with the host of Late Night time, Seth Meyers, concerning the trio’s best-known contribution to the long-running sketch present: their “digital shorts.” These embody such memorable shorts as “Lazy Sunday” (a self-serious rap about The Chronicles of Narnia), “Dick in a Field” (an R&B tune concerning the good Christmas reward, that includes Justin Timberlake), and the more moderen “Sushi Glory Gap” (whose title is self-explanatory). The group discusses every video’s improvement and reception, whereas speculating as to why viewers related a lot with, say, Natalie Portman rapping obscenities. As a former head author on SNL, Meyers deftly guides the dialog towards craft, whereas Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone replicate on their work’s legacy with humility.
Begin with “The Lonely Island Beginnings.”