This year will mark the sixth year that audio has been part of the Tribeca festival, just over one-fifth of its total lifespan, and in one year alone, the audio slate has doubled. It’s a bit like when they New York City built curbed bike lanes….this avenue has grown into a boulevard.

For years I’ve been tracking the different shows that have been featured in Tribeca. This year alone I’ve showcased the Blood Memory, which won the laurels for nonfiction at Tribeca last year, and then there’s Creation Myth, which has also featured at Tribeca 2025 which has gone on to wide acclaim.

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Davy does it again…

Gardner has made another bunch of selections this year that I will keep on my radar…which I’ve learned needs to be kept as an open tab. Just this year a come-from-behind Peabody win was awarded to Divine Intervention, a 2022 Tribeca selection.

This year the Official Selections program will feature new work from Alison Flowers, Sayre Quevedo, Sarah Illiatovitch-Goldman, Theo Blacomb, and Jessie Graham, alongside new work from some familiar faces, John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika, who will premier their new season of Scene on Radio: The News.

Industry favourites here will also be there: CBC return with their new Personally series, Discount Dave (and the Fix), and the new CBC/Toronto Star investigation: The Most Wanted Olympian. ESPN will also bring their new season of 30 for 30, The Fastest Girl in Somalia.

The big news this year is that Tribeca has opened a new traffic lane, which is to offer a new section they’re calling The Showcase, for podcasts released in the last year. The timing for this June festival will help to elevate, or re-elevate their visibility. Gardner pushed for the festival to include already-published work after producers had been asking for years for ways to showcase work that’s already published. This year offers a great opportunity for smaller, more independent endeavours, like Signal Hill and Written in Air, to receive a wider audience reveal.

It’s also a place for unique shows that made it into this world but could sure use a little boost (like A Whole Other Country, The Vodou Project and Grim Death and Bill the Electrocuted Criminal)…and then a reminder to spend a bit more time with Proxy, Ear Hustle and even listen to something in Spanish with La Ruta del Exilio or El Capitán y el Brazalete de Esmeraldas.

The Live events will feature industry darling Audio Flux, along with fan-fave Sound Exploder, the evermore Radiolab, the iconoclast Cannonball with Wesley Morris, the return of Death Sex and Money and Kara Swisher…also don’t miss Fashion Neurosis, a groundbreaking video podcast (the good kind).

There’s just so much you’ll have to discover the list yourself. And if you’re lucky enough to find yourself in New York City from June 3-14, go get yr tix here.

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of a Zoom interview with Davy Gardner, Curator of Audio Storytelling for Tribeca.

Samantha Hodder: Heading into 25 years of Tribeca. Can you believe it?

Davy Gardner: We are. I can believe it because we’ve been working on the 25th anniversary for a year. I’m so excited…it’s going to be great.

SH: So you’ve made some big changes.

DG: Yes. It’s a huge growth year for podcasts at Tribeca. We are doubling the number of opportunities for independent creators, which is really exciting for me. We also made it inclusive to Spanish language podcasts this year for the first time ever, which is great. And we have the new category, The Showcase.

SH: Until this year, Tribeca has been a place where work that hasn’t yet made it into the marketplace gets a chance to shine. Now you have the [a new category]. Tell me why you did this,.

DG: For the last five years, producers have been begging to not have to premiere in order to submit. I resisted that because I wanted to show that podcast premieres work, and that they’re worth submitting to. And I think that people have seen that they work; our Official Selections program is one that I think will have the same, if not far more, discoverability potential for those new premieres.

The Showcase list is for works that have been made within the last 12 months. They’re still very new. And as you know, at every level of podcasting, discoverability remains a challenge. So I just think there was a space there that needed to be filled for certain independent creators. And why not provide it if we do have the infrastructure and had our biggest year yet!?

SH: Is it a one-off, or is this going to be folded into Tribeca going forward?

DG: We will fold it in going forward. The independent program for podcasts at Tribeca has been internally, and externally, recognized as something to be excited about and proud of. It’s going in a good direction.

We don’t just want the independent producers who show up at the festival to listen to each other’s work. We want those independent producers to be able to have huge audiences and really blow up their footprint in the way that Tribeca has for independent film in the past, independent TV, et cetera.

SH: Describe what the showcase will look like. Is it similar to what the selects look like? Paint a picture of what the room will be when you, when they’re shown to the audience.

DG: The room is a 250-seat theater. We have this new space in Spring Studios. We used to do them in a movie theater, and now we have this big, beautiful theater that is literally bigger, but it’s also an expansion of the whole official selection program.

They will be hosted by different leaders in the audio world. Each creator will be interviewed on stage and preview their work. Tribeca will be inviting, press and industry and people who might be interested in these previews.

It has the energy of upfronts, but it’s also very positive because people invite their friends, the creators invite their teams. They’re always good energy shows. Last year they sold out.

SH: I’ve felt a renewed optimism in this industry. We went through a dry spell, we went through a difficult time. And I feel now like we’re coming into an emergent time right that’s full of creativity.

DG: Yeah. A year or two ago, the community just got so upset. I understand why, but also in every media there are fluctuations, and I think podcasting is well on its way to a, a long and prosperous era in general.

SH: I was quite interested in your one-word descriptors that you use to describe the, the selections: Tempo, Texture, Timbre, Tone. Where did this idea came from?

DG: In the past we’ve done “Surprises and Reckonings.” That was fun in a more literal way. But I think giving a word like “texture” to a show, and then having, [Avery Trufelman’s Articles of Interest: Gear], you think about something. Or, having “Tempo” and Lauren Shippen’s, Two Thousand and Late, there’s a pacing to that show.

I don’t think that at those shows we’ll be discussing why they fit into the theme. It’s just sort of ways to categorize them. But hopefully it is also something that walking into the show, an audience member just go in with a little bit of a pre-thought of like, “What makes, what makes this musical?” “What’s the timbre to these podcasts?”

SH: Once again I notice you’re really making sure to help focus on and share light with some of the smaller, more independent people. I noticed Signal Hill is right in there. You’ve got Threshold Podcast. You’ve got Written in Air, which is, which is so cool that it found a way in. And then the more established podcasts, like Snap Judgment.

DG: While we are focused on the independent creator, I would say we’re most focused on the independent story. The atomic unit of Tribeca is story. Snap Judgment’s been around for a long time; A Tiny Plot has not. It’s still about discoverability,

The Showcase is an opportunity for discoverability; while the Official Selections have laurels, and that remains the focus of the overall independent program.

That’s the real answer to the whole Tribeca thing: The whole cohort, the fact that that it’s a grouping, is really the strength of the program.

SH: Years ago you started this WhatsApp group for people connected with Tribeca. And it’s really started to take on a life of its own. It’s gaining momentum now. Are you going to keep growing [this community]?

DG: Yes! Yeah. I think that what has happened in the last five years at Tribeca with podcasts has been, really exciting for an independent podcaster. [As a creator myself], I would love to apply to this program. Discoverability and getting your work out there and in front of people, having a moment to be recognized for it and celebrated for it…having it just be listened to.

I think for independent podcasts it can be depressing when you release something sort of into the void of the internet and you just don’t know.

If I can ease that load a little bit so that folks can pay more attention to, the creative and artistic process behind it, [that’s the goal]. So we’re not so dependent on shows that fit into the mold of advertising, or are a formula of shows that already exist.

A festival is what drives people to do things like Signal Hill, or something that might not be, you know, a great monetization opportunity necessarily, but has incredible value. And by having it at Tribeca, there might be more possibility to monetize it or support it, or at least just celebrate it.

SH: You’ve got a really interesting, lively mixture of live performances with, some heavyweights in there. Let’s, let’s hear a little bit about that.

DG: Yeah. There’s so many shows that I am really proud of and excited for, and it’s been a real collaborative year of working with these hosts, and thinking about how to translate their shows onto the stage in the most effective way possible.

Death Sex Death, Sex & Money and Fashion Neurosis. Also Kara Swisher with Marc Maron is just kind of a hilariously monumental moment for podcast nerds.

What else? There’s, there’s a lot.

Tribecafilm.com/audio.

Check them out. They’re individually ticketed events, so you can pick and choose. There’s also a lot of community events[surrounding all the programming.

Or just Google Tribeca Podcast tickets or something and you’ll find it.

SH: You’re doing awesome work over there, Davy. The industry totally appreciates you, and the community you’re cultivating, and the opportunities that you’re putting out there. And it continues to grow, which is so exciting to witness.

DG: You as well. Thank you for covering these shows. Thank you for interviewing these creators. That’s discoverability.

SH: It’s all part of the ecosystem, which we create.

This month four different series caught my attention. They all seemed to scratch at the same door: trauma. The Idiot, Who Blew Up the Guidestones, Foundling and Adults in the Room all left me wondering if there’s an acceptable threshold for trauma in shows. But more…it also got me wondering if trauma has become the story? Have we forgotten to look at the people behind these trauma plots? What happens when we look at them more closely?

Maybe this is why I’m thinking about this…

I recently finished the book Hymn to Life, the memoir from Gisèle Pelicot. Pelicot became an international symbol for strength and courage after her mass-rape trial in France that stunned the world. The book is many things (and also, a lack of things), but my uncritical takeaway is her incredible ability to be resilient in the face of the unfathomable trauma she endured. For me, reading this book was an act of solidarity. After she unwittingly offered herself over to the world as a symbol, I could at least buy her book in hardback, with the hope that she sees a few euros as a result and help her to get on with her complicated life (after the book tour is over, that is).

Her story is an outlier, an important fact to hold close. But the act of reading it coloured my thoughts, and also reminded me how much I appreciate a series where no one is raped or murdered…foremost because that’s almost always a woman. Secondarily, because this triangle arc of a story: birth-trauma-death, or live-sin-die, or birth-accident-death, is so typically the case with narrative podcasts.

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Who Blew Up The Guidestones is a Southern Gothic tale that centres around a small town in rural Georgia, where someone secretly commissioned scripture-like verses to be engraved on giant granite stones and then had them covertly installed in a cow pasture. The idea, I suppose, was to immortalize his ideas and inspire others to adhere to these maxims. As a side-hustle, they also became a lively local tourist attraction, with people flocking from far and wide, either to pay homage to them, or just to marvel at their audaciousness, like other giant monuments, the Wawa Goose, or the Paul Bunyan Statue.

If Goldilocks were making the assessment of how much trauma there was in this series, she might say “not enough;” but that’s exactly what I loved and appreciated about this series. No one is hurt, a mystery is solved, a truth gets uncovered…in that way it was perfect.

The inscriptions on the Guidestones begin gentle, a protect the Earth sort-of-vibe. And while the messages begin with lovely deep-ecology ideas, they transit so far to the left they go around the corner to become far-right ideologies. Take for example the eugenics-inspired idea to maintain a maximum human population at 500 million (which tacitly means holocaust, given that we are already well-past the stated population goal).

The subtext of the series, and focus of the investigative journalism, seeks to answer is to consider that given how far-ranging the messages on the Guidestones become, do they also advocate violence? Could their action of making these a public amenity be considered a hate-crime? And if we start there, does the act of uncovering the identity of the person who paid for these stones become more pressing? And then, to answer the question of the series, who blew them up…what was their motive? And is it also cause for concern?

Were they just ideas, expensively etched in stone…or are they the start of something much darker?

Many of the clues lead to answers by the end of the series, and they serve as a satisfying conclusion, albeit some of the answers were couched in thoroughly vetted phrases that must have gone through legal to avoid litigation.

This series exposes how dependent modern mythology is on conspiracy theories. Take the MAHA movement, whose critical mineral is hippie ideology; but when the details get examined they become something else altogether. This transit to an alt-right agenda is facilitated by conspiracy theories…the place where facts don’t have solid footing and details can shape shift to be what people say they are, facts and data are secondary.

The life cycle of the Guidestones are a case study of this concept.

WHERE THIS SERIES DIDN’T WORK: In the opening credits the host of the story, who is also the reporter and journalist, Tyler McBrien, says an on-air “thank you” to the AJC, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the news organization that published this series. It does seem notable that the AJC agreed to fund this show—their masthead lists only four podcasts in total, this one being the only one-off serialized narrative show. So, yes, I can appreciate that this was a stretch, and I hope their investment paid off (Tribeca spotlight forthcoming included). But to thank your publisher, in the opening minutes of a show, was a big turn off. In the final credits it would have made sense…but off the top it drained credibility and made it feel a bit desperate, like a teenager justifying a Visa charge for a fancy dress. I let this one go and overall happy that I stuck with this solidly-researched, compelling story.

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Foundling tells the story of the baby “Heather” abandoned at birth and then found in a remote laneway in Suffolk, UK, in 1987. This story framed the childhood of audio journalist Lucy Greenwell, so she convened her sisters to sit down and try to recall the facts of this local mystery, before Greenwell set off to find both the child and the mother.

“Foundlings” are abandoned babies that survive. More often these cases become criminal…newborns cannot survive more than a few hours after they are abandoned. “Heather” was born that day, and “found” by a local nanny of this rural area. The TV newscaster claimed it was miracle that she was discovered, almost immediately, in this out-of-the-way spot. The town filled with gossip, and many theories were whispered for years, especially regarding the local nannies—just like the one who discovered this baby. But no one came forward, and no one was charged. It became a cold case that went on the shelf with the other unsolved crimes.

If Goldilocks were evaluating this series, she might say: “Too hot!” There were many moments in this series that felt so raw and vulnerable they still had blood oozing from them. Greenwell found “Heather,” who was later renamed “Jess” by her adoptive family (and went on to live a happy and healthy life and now has kids of her own), right as Jess was re-traumatized with a new sense of abandonment. Greenwell does well to talk through this honestly, if awkwardly.

This event was so unusual for this small town that nearly 40 years later when Greenwell went back to try to find Jess again, there were still hushed whispers about who the birth mother was. Jess always knew she was adopted, and by the time she was 11-years-old, she had begun to learn the truth about her birth mother. This meant that Jess had already spent decades piecing her origin story before a journalist landed on her doorstep, fascinated with her origin story.

The pair of them, journalist and “Jess,” form an investigative team of sorts. Greenwell reports her investigative work, while “Jess” provides context and emotional realism. Both want a resolution to the story, but what makes it a bit “hot” is that their conclusions are a bit at odds. Jess wants reconciliation, or perhaps to send a message to her wider birth family; Greenwell wants to be a balanced journalist, which means that all parties need to have a chance to explain themselves. But that’s a tidy conclusion, some kind of happy reunion story that’s better suited for television drama. This is investigative journalism. And it’s hard to punch the ghosts without bruising your knuckles.

It becomes a twisty turny plot that’s able to both pull your heart strings and then snaps and frays them at the same time. This is not an easy story to manage. There were moments when I said to myself…how can she keep going on throughout this? The journalism was ethical and transparent in the very BBC-like way; but what I saw emerging here was something of a symbiotic relationship.

But here’s where I wondered if it was too hot. I’m not an adoptee myself; but given how raw and layered this story is, I wondered if listening to this as someone from an adoptive family, or as someone who was abandoned at birth, listening to this series might be incredibly triggering for them.

But this series did not offer any kind of trigger warning. No discussion at the top or the bottom of any episode that might steer someone shaken by the series about where to go for help. Then again, where would one go?

I thought this was curious so I started to dig into the policy framework at news organizations about when trigger warnings are put in front of listeners.

The most common one that you hear is for suicide and self-harm. Trigger warnings range from the generic: “Listen with care,” and then generally a local phone number is offered to receive more help if needed. These guidelines are clearly delineated by The Samaritans in the UK, and more broadly, the WHO has a resource for media professionals reporting on suicide which news organizations worldwide call on.

It’s not just virtue-signalling, there is ample evidence to support this in psychological research. There’s a body of research about how the “Werther Effect” can cause suicide and self-harm amongst vulnerable people after listening to media that portrays these events.

But what about this type of story? The kind that can reignite trauma after you hear it, should you be in that vulnerable population. In a way, Greenwell tries to head off these questions by questioning her own role in the story, about whether or not she’s helping or harming Jess by including her in an investigation into her life that found things that Jess may never have pieced together.

Is there a way to give fair warning for a story that might unravel an individual adoptee or foundling? Would it be reasonable to suggest that if you are that person, listening to a story told like this, one that is constructed for the listening pleasure of an audience with many emotional peaks and valleys, it could potentially undo them? Perhaps an honest follow up on how Jess is doing, now that this series is out in the world, is a reasonable ask.

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The Idiot, from the NYTimes/Serial, is written and hosted by a NYTimes Opinion columnist, M. Gessen. Honestly, they’re a great writer (and were just awarded a Pulitzer this year). But as a podcast host? I wasn’t immediately convinced. Their voice is so dry and flat-delivered that the sound design nestled around their voice is crucial towards giving it some texture and relief.

If Goldilocks were considering this show for its trauma plot, she might say: just right. There’s plenty of trauma to go around (in particular for the children involved who are skillfully only referred to with an initial), but it never gets carried away. The despicable murder plot was busted before it was realized, and there was just enough trauma to provide character, but not so much that lives were ruined.

The Idiot tells the almost-absurd story of Gessen’s first-cousin’s abduction of his own child, and then failed murder-for-hire plot against his wife, which, after an international manhunt, would land him in jail for a decade. And also how Gessen’s family was unknowingly complicit in the whole thing for a time.

The title, The Idiot, trades faces throughout the series. You will feel taken-along-by Gessen, whom you can see was actually taken, swindled, by the cousin, because they wanted to think the cousin is better than he appears, given that he’s a blood relative. It’s a storyline of a redemption arc that makes the conscious decision not to redeem the person, while also being transparent about how they were almost extended him redemption, which was brave to be honest about.

The NYTimes has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to good writers, hosts and producers. Despite the fact that many of the same folks who kicked off this entire industry (and genre of storytelling) hold offices in that institution, they aren’t greedy with the microphone. Ira Glass, Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig…all folks who have been there since the beginning, all get writing and editing credits (both on this work and many other series produced by this gang). And yet, they also seem to be continually supporting new voices to come out and host a show (M. Gessen being the recent example here…in the past it’s been Kim Barker, or Dyan Neary and others).

I can only imagine these otherwise print-writers go through extensive training and support to pull off these productions. It would be wrong to have some other high profile host narrate the personal family of another NYTimes journalist; I appreciate that the OG producers don’t require themselves to narrate every story, and that they are committed to widening the gene pool of this industry.

In the end, I give M. Gessen a solid 5/10 for the hosting job of The Idiot. The story itself is rather captivating, and five episodes was the outside edge of reasonable length, as it sputtered towards a conclusion you could see a mile out.

The script is steeped in Greek tragedy, the Antigone debate specifically: is blood stronger than the law? We watch Gessen stumble through their feelings about towards their cousin Ian, despite the horrendous things he attempted. Or should we feel compassion for this idiot, who failed at many things, including being a criminal. In the question of whether Ian is truly terrible, and blood-be-damned, Gessen comes out on the side of the public. Blood is not thick enough to choke off reason here.

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BUT WAIT….There’s a fourth series…what does Goldilocks say about this one?

Adults in the Room is a chilling series from the get go. Two high school friends come together to try to make sense of their horrendous senior year, when they were essentially blamed for the suicide of one of their teachers. This after they made the choice to report on an abuse allegation in the school newspaper. Years later they wondered if their lasting guilt was justified; what they discovered was something far worse.

Goldilocks has nothing to say about this series, because she’s the whistleblower. She’s the one in there ready to call them all out on it: too cold, too hot, just right. Goldilocks is there to heed the warning.

This series comes with a trigger warning—for the obvious things—sexual abuse, self-harm. But there’s another more general warning for this series that I might suggest: for all GenXers who went through high school in the 1990s, when this sort of brazen exploitation of minors took place inside schools and institutions in a way that was known or tacitly recognized. In some cases, it was celebrated in a roundabout way.

I wish I was gobsmacked with the facts of the case: that school administration knew and did nothing, that parents had complained and been shunted off to the side with reams of paper work, that other faculty were complicit. All the while these predatory teachers were shuffled around from district to district, barely sanctioned, let alone punished.

But the fact is, I’m a GenXer who also lived this, and while the facts of my high school rack up a bit differently than this one, in many ways they are no less tragic.

Meanwhile, during these decades that went unchecked for power and corruption, the patterns of abuse escalated, as is common in the psychological profile of an abuser. What begins small grows into acts more and more brazen. When the system does not call them out, the abuse continues. They adapt and learn how to get away with their crimes; the system teaches them to do this. If it wasn’t entirely celebrated, it was condoned through a few nods and wink-nudging, where someone undoubtedly said: “Don’t worry man, we’ve got your back.”

This era of high school would pave the road all the way to the #MeToo movement. And as we continue, it’s hard not to see echoes of Gisèle Pelicot and in a wider sense, Jeffrey Epstein.

The tone of the narrator is a bit clunky, leaning heavily on the public media slow-talking explanatory tone. Maybe we need to walk slowly through this material because it’s so nuts you can’t make this up. But the work that went into this, if we are fully paying attention to what it uncovers, is Pulitzer material.

NOTES, things and STUFF

• Short Cuts is coming baaaaaack! This is like a dream come true…oh wait, it is a dream come true. And the fact that three public broadcasters joined forces to make this happen?! Crazy good. Submit by July 1.

• Wow, Tribeca is 25 this year…and their programming is HOT. Details coming from the man himself, Davy Gardner. It’s exciting to see the programming expand for narrative podcasts

• HearSay returned this year from far away, it looked like a wonderful, eclectic, creative time. I’ve enjoyed listening to little bits, and also reading the Opening Provocation from Eric Nuzum: A homily for the audio industry

  The Audio Insurgent

  A homily on today’s audio industry

  Welcome to Dispatch #89 of The Audio Insurgent…

  Read more

  a month ago · Eric Nuzum

Sometime after this was released, we sat down to talk. As I was getting prepared for this interview, I looked around for other interviews that Nick van der Kolk had done with other folks. I was sure that my conversation with him would fit inside a wide cannon.

But that’s not what I found. For some odd reason, despite the fact that he was was part of the team who won the first top prize at Third Coast in 2011, for a podcast that’s been around since 2005, who has prolifically and continuously published, won a ton of awards…there are very few interviews with him.

In fact, it’s hard to find much of his voice…if you’re a L+R regular, you will know that even in his own podcast, his voice is sparse.

Inside this interview, he generously shares his vision for what a narrator is, and what it is not for him. He talks about what the craft is for him, what his vision is for non-narrated pieces, and whether or not he considers Blood Memory part of the “True Crime” genre of narrative podcasts.

Production Credits:

Produced by: Samantha Hodder

Edited, Mixed and Mastered: Imogen Sayers

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EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

[03:57] Samantha: And was it true crime when you started pitching it originally?

[6:00] Samantha: How did this start? How did you meet Michael, virtually or actually?

[7:50] Nick van der Kolk: a second intern who did the same thing, and he was the one who somehow was able to track him down, and I started this correspondence, I think, the following year, so in 20-2012. So 14 years is when I first reached out to, to Michael.
[12:59] Nick van der Kolk: … this is obviously not in the podcast ‘cause I didn’t record, but the, but the scene that really stands out in my memory is, is going to actually see him in the visitor center in Chino for the very first time, and that was my first time encountering the U.S. prison system at all.
[14:28] Samantha: And in all the years of Love and Radio, had you ever been to a prison before to meet anyone?
[15:59] Samantha: So about narration, I wanna hear your take on why, wha-what your approach is to narration or lack thereof it. What is it between you and narration?
[17:02] Nick van der Kolk: I just record, and I record, and I record. And, I mean, I’ve been doing this for a while…And, you know, generally in most Love and Radio episodes, it is kinda built into the interview process
[20:33] Samantha: So that structure, which you spend the next nine episodes unraveling, talk to me about how that concept came together.
[00:22:50] Nick van der Kolk: I want you to be sitting with whoever the subject is, and you’re kinda hearing this, this interloper coming in and posing these questions.
[23:52] Nick van der Kolk: I don't feel comfortable pretending like I'm in the room when I'm not. So if you hear me on the phone, I am talking to that person on the phone.
[26:21] Samantha: Was this, like, a thesis statement on the wall? "There will be no narration. I have to figure out how to do this without narration." Like, you didn't buckle in 10 episodes, and there could've been times for it.
[30:29] Nick van der Kolk: … I wanna give people all the tools for them to be able to draw their own conclusions.
[31:41] Nick van der Kolk: But I am always struck by in the aesthetics of a documentary, particularly one that is non-narrated, how much the editing choices and the idea of, like, someone being behind the camera is an aesthetic within those films. I find that you’re, at least when I watch them, I’m really aware of that spirit of that person also being in the room, even if you don’t hear them, that there are choices that are being made that are very clear.
[35:57] Samantha: I was curious about the fact-checking angle. This is sort of in place of narration in a way where, you know, you’re helping to, you’re helping the listener piece together a complicated narrative where I think it’s Robin’s voice, right?
[38:36] Samantha: You decided to release this independently, but, but why did you release it when you did? What was the strategy of that? What, how did you know the story was over, and why did you release it when you did?

The Secret World of Roald Dahl is an entire series set aside with the explicit task of discovering the story of the man. But it goes further. It then exposes the stories behind the man, and then the stories behind the man that hides behind those stories. The layers that this man — the half-Norwegian, half-Brit who married an American Hollywood actress and had five children — keep appearing. The story just gets bigger…the longer you dig, the deeper the hole.

One Man, Ten Episodes, No Easy Answers

The Secret World of Roald Dahl is a deep biographical dive into the life story and the life's work of the children's book author who needs no introduction — and yet, it turns out, no one really knows who this man is. It's written, hosted and narrated by Aaron Tracy, who is also a screenwriter, audio drama writer and producer, television writer, and teaches creative writing at Yale University where he's on faculty.

The trickiest thing about this series is also what makes it compelling: Tracy is clearly in love with his subject. Smitten, in fact. He wants to hold onto the genius behind the pen, and you feel this pull throughout.

The question by the end of this series, a full 10 episodes, is: did he go too far, or not far enough?

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In no way does Tracy gloss over the unseemly details

On the contrary, he dives deep into these swampy waters. He tells the story critically and calls upon distinguished critics: Roxane Gay, and Yair Rosenberg from The Atlantic. He also speaks with bestselling author Claire Dederer, who wrote Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma — her book that followed from her viral Paris Review essay asking: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen? Should we? Why do we love the work of monstrous men, and why can’t we let it go?

The way Tracy unfurls the story is prodigious. You’ll be on the edge of your seat as he plucks out successive Russian dolls from Dahl’s life story. Each new figure contains new details — clues, even — about who this man really was. His life was so complete, so complex, it takes the first five episodes to truly represent all the details. The sixth episode (The Pivot) is the point in Dahl’s life when he finally submits a manuscript for a children’s book. It’s also the point in the series when Tracy switches from chronicling to criticizing.

In episodes 7–10, Tracy digs into the controversy that is Dahl. He begins with an interview that Michael Coren did for the New Statesman in 1983. Coren was a young theatre critic at the time, trying to ask Dahl about a book review Dahl had recently written that centered around the difficult and hot-button topic of the day, the invasion of Lebanon by Israel. Sort of off-topic, Dahl said: “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” Coren calmly continued; his article would end up exposing the antisemitism of Dahl that would permanently change his legacy.

Unfortunately, this sort of remark was not a one-off. His biographer Jeremy Treglown recounts many of them; and his own daughter recalls Dahl getting drunk one night and complaining about the number of Jews at their social club.

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What Tracy Gets Right

Before we cast final judgment on Dahl, what Tracy most wants us to understand is that his success as a children’s book author didn’t come easy to him. Tracy wants us to understand how undeterred Dahl was by failure, how well he managed failure in the process of creating something great.

This is more than just a noble artist trope. Tracy wants us to deeply see just how much, and how fabulously, Dahl failed before he succeeded.

The fact that Dahl failed as much as he succeeded makes him approachable; equally humbling and inspiring. As Tracy processes each of the losses and failures, he dives deeper to try to determine Dahl's secret sauce.

Tracy sets out to solve this sphinx riddle, and he finds an answer: it was his writing process. Dahl was rigid, dogged — almost ascetic — in his approach to daily writing. This was the key to his success, beyond anything else.

The fact that he got up every day and sat down to write, behind a closed door, in a room of his own. This is what made him great (and Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, and Mary Shelley). This, Tracy ardently argues — totally apart from any of the stupid things Dahl said in his life — is what made him great. And this seems to be the thing that the writer Aaron Tracy loves most about this man; a clue to how to become a great writer lies in the details of how you conduct your day.

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Hollywood Has Always Had Dahl's Back

Tracy writes like a playwright, carefully unravelling the very flawed character that is Dahl. The cinematic quality. The scene construction. The way it attempts to resolve an intensely flawed artist — it’s difficult not to see Hollywood written all over it, and he has the screen cred to make this happen.

This series is produced by three entities: iHeart, Parallax Media (Tracy’s production company), and Imagine Entertainment, Ron Howard’s production company. There’s an oddly placed phrase that concludes each episode: “Copyright 2026 Imagine Entertainment, iHeartMedia and Parallax.” I’ve never heard a copyright statement in the credits of a podcast series. I’d expect it in the show notes, but spoken aloud it feels jarring. A copyright statement read aloud at the end of every episode isn’t an aesthetic choice. It plants a flag in the ground in a way that’s not common practice. Should this also be a signal about who owns this story, and what they intend to do with it?

There is and has always been a steady diet of people interested in Dahl. Many Hollywood heavyweights have made Dahl adaptations: Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, Robert Zemeckis, Quentin Tarantino. Tracy speaks with longtime NPR Fresh Air film critic David Bianculli about many of these.

The breadth and depth of Dahl’s influence does raise the question: is he just too big to be ignored and written off? How should the world continue to love this man and his genius, as they have so many other notable figures whose legacies are complicated by their worst selves — Richard Wagner’s antisemitism, Picasso’s misogyny, Kanye West’s despicableness?

What complicates this entire thing is that Netflix spent $1 billion to acquire the entire Roald Dahl Story Company — that’s everything. Dahl died on November 23, 1990. Thirty years later, his family issued a posthumous apology regarding his opinions and remarks. One comfortable year after that, Netflix announced their giant rights acquisition. Was this convenient timing, or a chance at redemption? And where does Imagine Entertainment factor into all of that? Are the apology and the acquisition part of the same transaction? One cleared the moral rights; the other cleared the legal ones.

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The Part That's Hardest to Forgive

It’s one thing for adults to sit with Wagner’s Ring Cycle and hold the split-screen image: musical importance on one side, antisemitism on the other. Adults can allow that. Adults can choose to ignore, or set things aside. They can continue to laugh at Trading Places, choosing to appreciate the brilliance of Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd while setting aside the racist overtones of the plot.

But we give this stuff to our children to read. Tracy returns to this again and again throughout the series, and it’s the right instinct: he would never hire a babysitter without making sure that person is one of the good ones. So why would we hand over a book to our children without fully vetting both the book and the person who wrote it?

Many academics and critics have examined Dahl’s works for hidden antisemitism — some found it, others disagree. Does his hatefulness spill onto the page without him realizing it? Adults can decide. Young formative readers are not yet equipped to make that call.

The Secret World of Roald Dahl is a serious, well-produced, thoroughly researched piece of audio that earns most of its ten hours. What it cannot quite bring itself to do is deliver a verdict on its own subject — whether the genius is worth the cost of the man. What it does do is give new relevance and seriousness to the critic’s trope of the Art vs The Artist. And good, at least, to be armed with the entire backstory to Dahl before the deluge of Dahl material forthcoming from the Netflix rights grab.

We cuddled up next to our children and helped them learn to read, through his words. This part is supposed to be the easy part.

Messages, notes, things and stuff…

1. Have you VOTED YET?

2. School is not quite out…time to go back to the library and learn your podcast marketing glossary of terms [A-M]

   Podcast Plunge | Podcast Recommendations & Media News

   Podcast Marketing Glossary [PART I: A-M]

   Whether you’re new to podcast marketing and audience growth or just need a refresher, this glossary is here to give you a foundation…

   Read more

   2 months ago · 9 likes · Arielle Nissenblatt🎧

   3. SUBMIT your stories here…Hub & Spoke Presents: Sounds Like America. Deadline April 30
   

   4. With a h/t to Audio Flux Substack…I discovered this which you should discover next….Aesthetica - a festival that is seeking short podcasts across all genres (provided they captivate, challenge and immerser listeners in a new perspective). Entry fee: £25 - £35…early deadline August 31, 2026

From the audience at Resonate Podcast Festival in 2024, I watched Helena de Groot pitch this project. Pitch Party invited projects to pitch to a live audience and three discerning judges who sat stage left. Three were chosen to pitch. One project would win a giant cheque, a development “first look” deal with VPM and some cool swag. The winner was announced by Lupita Nyong’o via live feed.

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Creation Myth won the pitch…but what de Groot won from this stage would turn out to be much bigger; CBC Senior Producer Veronica Simmonds was in the audience. Soon after the pitch, she approached de Groot about the idea of working with CBC on her project. Simmonds would go on to become the story editor and senior producer on this project…if you listen closely to the credits, it’s clear that she played a big role in how the production unfolded.

Stories can mean different things to different people

Creation Myth is a rare example of a story that can hit multiple demographic audiences at once. I wondered how this story would hit me. I’ve already gone through the decision-making matrix she lays out in this story—I’m a bit older. But I was intrigued to realize that this seemingly disqualifying fact only deepened my connection to this story.

What captured me about this series was how her personal storytelling is able to find the balance inside a subject that’s incredibly intimate—whether or not to have children—and blow that wide open in a way that so many people could relate.

What particularly stuck with me was the ‘open decision making’ approach she took to this discussion. My experience tells me that you can think about something one way, at a certain time of your life. But then things can change. What’s very clear and true at one point in your life can become less clear years later as life unfolds in new ways.

This show captivated me. Drew me in with its unapologetic transparency through the honest and raw reflections on life. I wondered, was I drawn into this because I could relate? Because I had (in much smaller part) considered this question and then able to act on it? My path ends in a different spot—I had the kids. Decision made.

Marketing and advertising execs might get this wrong: this story is not just for one age-range (those in their fertility window). This story took me back to my younger years, all those swirling thought patterns and confusing life choices that I’d already made. It allowed me to reflect on things in a whole new way that offered my memories some new honesty. It wasn’t an easy decision. There were many factors at play.

But what about folks who have spent years trying to conceive a child?

Could this show be triggering for them? Perhaps. I’d reasoned that it might also undo years of contemplation for some couples who have been wobbling on the Yes/No fence. For the couples who thought they had it all figured out…until this put them back to square one. Back to those really awful, emotionally draining conversations that don’t offer a clear ending.

Sure. Yes. Actually all of that. This show, with its rare candor, has all the megawatt power to thrust itself right into the center of these emotional, tricky, unending questions.

But is that a bad thing?

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It’s a messy, inconvenient truth

But if this story is able to come into the house of the listener and sit down at the kitchen table to be part of these massive, life-changing decisions…that’s actually the goal. That’s the tick in the box: Job Done.

Isn’t it the role of narrative podcasts to bring to light a story that’s happening out there somewhere in the world, and give it a voice? Isn’t it the job of narrative podcasts to help articulate the emotional terrain of life and offer a new layer of understanding?

The magic of this storytelling format is that it mows the whole lawn — end to end, right to the fence line — so listeners can see exactly what’s underneath.

This isn’t a story built for escape. It’s an intense examination of a universal question of life. Pretending that it’s otherwise is foolish.

All we need is one brave person who allows allows herself to be deeply honest — with herself and with the world around her — and then shares it. Much easier said than done.

Whichever route brings you to this story, it lays out a pathway that's compelling and free of judgement. For those who choose not to go that route (which could also apply to those who are unable to conceive and wonder what life might look like), she’s got you covered.

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Will this show create controversy?

Likely. In an age where publishing women's stories online is an open invitation to the haters — and the haters have never been more organized or emboldened — de Groot's courage deserves to be named. Following Trump's re-election in November 2024, researchers clocked an immediate and dramatic increase in misogynistic content on X . The UK government, watching the same trend, moved in 2024 to classify extreme misogyny as a form of terrorism.

As the Internet evolves, women who put their stories out there have increasingly become the target of harassment and abuse. A UNESCO/ICFJ study from 2020 of more than 850 women journalists found that nearly 75% had faced online violence — and one in four had received death threats. And that was before the pandemic. Before Roe vs Wade was repealed. Before the Internet became a much darker place.

This is even more true with a story that doesn’t fall in favour of the whole Alt Right agenda. That de Groot is willing to put this story out there anyway — knowing exactly what the haters can bring — I want to salute her. Bonne courage! Let the Internet fill up on this kind of story so much that the haters are outnumbered.

To be clear, this is an event where people gather to listen and celebrate audio. This is perhaps distinct from the concept of “live episode taping,” where audiences gather to witness an interview on stage, which often later ends up in the feed of the podcast on stage.

In The Dark was founded by Nina Garthwaite, who has been curating and co-curating listening events since 2010, mostly in London and around the UK. In 2022, after a Covid hiatus, Talia Augustidis successfully persuaded Garthwaite to let her fire up these events again.

Since then she has pushed out the boundary of what live events can be…and potentially helps to offer a roadmap for where this form of audience listening might go next.

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Earlier this year I sat down with Augustidis to talk about her ground-breaking show from Resonate, in Richmond, VA, last November.

What makes a great listening event?

What are some of the key details you should consider?

What makes them good…and what makes the suck?

What are our ideal listening environments?

How do you replicate an excellent audience experience?

We also talked about where this moment finds her, at a crossroads facing some new artistic and creative choices ahead.

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Some Highlights:

• Discussion about identity, change, and the idea of an “exit interview” [at 1:30]

• Learning curve from curating live listening events [at 4:13]

• How Talia senses audience engagement in live rooms [at 6:00]

• What reactions matter while listening to audio [at 9:20]

• The importance of physical space and intimacy in events. Ideal room [at 11:15]

• Different examples of experimental listening environments and embodied listening discussion starting [at 14:10]

• Differences between the US-based and London-based In The Dark events [at 23:54]

• Talia discusses her show from Resonate: Pangea [at 25:48]

• Talia reflects on being in a moment of transition [at 30:07]

• What’s next for Talia? [at 33:07]

There’s a scene in Episode 2 (which is publicly out now), where the host and lead producer Nick van der Kolk rolls down his car window to talk to a man, who we come to realize is the main protagonist. For L+R loyalists, you know how rare scene tape is. I keep hearing that sound—of the car window going down—and I realize that in my mind, I’ve been hiding out in the back of Nick’s truck as he drives around talking to the enigmatic, undeniably charismatic formerly incarcerated, former Aryan Brotherhood gang leader-turned-informant, Michael Thompson.

Maybe this fugue state is because I’m trying to think if anyone, ever, pulled off a non-narrated true crime. Who thought that we could get through through all that legal mumbo-jumbo without the likes of Sarah Koenig there to tell us how to think? Or maybe it’s about whether anyone has even bothered to try to tell a complicated, decade’s-long, story that involves a potential redemption arc, but then also doesn’t litigate the proceedings and help the listener to file their thoughts into a neat and tidy box?

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Over their past almost-twenty-years of producing, the team at Love+Radio— a ship helmed by Nick van der Kolk and has housed many talents folks throughout the last decade—has done similar stories; ones that shock and seduce and surprise you. But never on this scale. Blood Memory is 10 episodes long…just about 7.5 hours of captivating audio that reportedly spanned 10 years worth of reporting and production.

So where do you start with this?

Let’s start with what this series is not

This is a non-narrated piece. Nick van der Kolk has a lovely radio voice, someone whom I’m sure you would enjoy listening the 7+ hours that this story is, spread out over 10 episodes. But like everything in his extensive back catalogue, he narrated this series most sparingly. When his voice does appear, most often it’s through a produced sound that makes it appear as though it’s through a telephone, or if he’s in the room he’s on the XY mics at a distance. Probably he was on the telephone for some of this reporting; instead of removing that layer of disconnection between host and subject, he draws a bright red line under it.

This is not a series that will lead you to feel compelled to mentally exonerate a criminal. This is not a Set-The-Record-Straight for a wrongfully convicted man, although, depending on who you ask, he may have entered prison on a wrongful conviction at the age of 22-years-old. Love+Radio stays absolutely true to its roots and lets the people in the story speak for themselves. And as always, you get to decide if they are wrong or right, guilty or innocent.

This series is not trying to achieve some new moral high ground. It’s not a campaign to get you to think about crime and criminals differently. It’s not here to make you fall in love with the convicted criminal at hand, like so many true crime docs are ultimately trying to do. Because here’s the thing: Love+Radio is just as interested in your opinion of what think happened as they are of their own ideas.

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Careful listening is required

You are not going to be spoon-fed this narrative. There are modestly few signposts. There are almost no introductions (except for the voice stamp IDs offered at the very very very end of Episode 1- I suggest you stick around for that if you intend to keep listening). If you don’t already understand the narrative conventions that L+R use (chapter headings, ‘telephone voice,’ and the call-and-answer nature of a question), I wish you luck in solving this true crime caper. But honestly, holy crap, it still works. Even when you go through this slowly and meticulously, as I have this past week, all the pieces fall into line. There’s only one way to say it: it’s a true original. It is both masterful and genre-defining….but not one that will be easily repeated.

As I listened to this series, it felt like I could hear circular brush strokes. You know when you look at an image for long enough, you notice that under the thing you’re looking at, there are circles of pen and ink below? Put together these make up the texture of the image. Perhaps it’s the feathers of the birds. Or the texture of the fabric on the clothing. Or the way the bark clings to the trunk of the tree. All of these pen strokes are their own thing, buried below the surface. And that’s both different and the same as the image you’re looking at.

No one is there to tell you what to think. Or how to feel. Or whether this person or that person is full of shit. The entire story is both proven and disproven for you, in circular brush strokes. You may hear only part of it (which is the most likely scenario) and in that case, you will frame your verdict based on the advice that you recall, or remember, or connect to you. As for the other parts, and there are many, they may or may not serve as relevant bits of information. Depending on how closely you listen, these details are either colour, or shading, all layers to the story that you hear.

But really, no harm if you get lost. Although it is a legit true crime story and holds all the cards to fit into that pervasive genre, it’s not really a whodunit. In the end, it’s a story about good and evil. Whether both parts exist equally or fully in any one person. And then equally, it’s about whether that equation really matters at all.

And to answer those questions, you can dip your toe, or fully dive in.

If you want to fully dive in, find Love+Radio and their Patreon, to get some early listening.

AND ALSO…

Ideas, connections, pitches, inspo, don’t forget…

1 - CBC has an open call for pitches right now. The pitch period runs until April 1st and you can submit at cbc.ca/pitch.

ALSO, there’s an info session about the call for pitches.
When: Tuesday, Feb. 17th, 2026 from 11am ET to 12 pm ET
Where: Google Meet (https://meet.google.com/hdx-ynxc-ext)
Who: Arif Noorani (Director), Chris Oke (Executive Producer) and Andrew Friesen (Development Coordinator) at CBC Podcasts.

Click here to add this event to your calendar.

2- Radiophrenia Open Call for 2026 Broadcasts…two days left!
Submit your work on their website and find further details there:
Deadline for submissions: 14th February, 2026.

3 - The ECCO - call for entries for the prompt “Cleave”
Find out more HERE on their website

4 - Listening - Small Audio Art has a new round of short pieces to listen to with the theme “Kitchen Sink”

5 - Audio Flux is coming back soon…And they’ve got an Ask Us Anything virtual event, March 2nd at 4:30p ET, with John and Julie.

That moment, the You-Had-To-Be-There, is what people say to bridge the gap between awkwardness and reality. It’s the moment of realization where the story might have had more meaning, actually been hilarious, rather than failing to deliver emotion in any direction.

It’s also a quick way to illustrate the distance between experience and narration, or experience and storytelling.

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Stories often make more sense firsthand

If you were there to see the look on his face when he dropped five bottles of red wine off the conveyor belt at the Liquor Barn on Christmas Eve, coating everyone in the blast radius with splatters of red wine on their pant legs. If you were there to hear the intonation of his voice when he turned to the person behind him, who took the brunt of the liquid, and calmly said: “Sorry, I thought you said you wanted to try this wine…“

Sure, it’s funny to read. And even told as an anecdote it might get some laughs. But there’s no way to replace the actual events, had the moment been caught on tape.

Meaning doesn’t live in the sequence of events; it lives inside the texture of the moment—the timing, the awkwardness, the shared recognition. Storytelling is the ability to make those moments come back to life. Sometimes this can all be shared through anecdotes told by someone. But often, a story without that context collapses under its own weight. This is not a failure of facts. It’s a failure of presence.

Journalism Was Built on Distance

In the 1.0 world of journalism, the job of the reporter was to get the story and report it. The reporter, the journalist, was trained to be removed and impartial. The task is to find a story and report the facts…not get caught up in the emotions or the feelings or the delicate small truths of the day that go unsaid.

As narrative audio journalism emerged over the last 20 years, that gap began to shorten. Unlike traditional reporting—where distance signaled credibility—narrative audio often chooses to collapse the space between the person who experienced something and the person hearing about it. That voice in your ear doesn’t just describe what happened; often they were there, and this story offers a recreation the conditions of being there. It gives you a chance to come along for the ride, or to stay for a brief visit; when scene tape is available it offers an even more authentic experience (and most often these stories are more successful).

That shift—from reported distance to declared presence—has fundamentally reshaped how journalism is told, trusted, and understood.

Earlier journalism was designed to instill trust so that the story could remain ‘objective’ and produce all sides of the story, so that the reader/viewer could form their own conclusion.

Many other formats of media and storytelling have snapped to these trends: Blogs and Vlogs and the rise of social media; the always-on news channels that track every moment of a situation unfolding; the embedded news reporters at war; the tell-all style of magazine journalism; the ‘total recall’ narrative writing of Karl Ove Knausgaard memoirs…the list goes on.

But what is also true, is that there’s nothing like narrative audio to be able to put you there, in the moment. I could continue to argue that it’s even better than video because a listener must paint the image of the scene from their own imagination, which makes them more engaged in the story.

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I have a ocean-sized hole in my heart for climate journalism

It’s the kind of storytelling that’s hard to get noticed, hard to do well, and even harder to get readers to engage with. Over the years I’ve covered a number of series that follow this beat: Expectant, which blurs fact and fiction, Threshold, which brings you out into the natural world, Ripple, a multi-award winning environmental caper.

More recently, I interviewed Ian Urbina, from The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, who he told me made a conscious decision to place his content—which is clearly about the ocean climate told from all perspectives—in the human interest category, not “shoved off on the Climate Desk,“ because that’s how to get people to listen.

So when I heard that Adriana Cargill had a follow up series to the 2023 Bingey Listed Sandcastles Podcast, about how a group of surfers stepped up to help with the 2018 Woolsey fire, I was locked in. Season 2 is about the wildfires of Los Angeles county, released one year later to the day.

Season 2 picks up where Season 1 ended in many respects. It offered affirmations that those surfers had gotten organized as an official unit of volunteer fire fighters. And it’s a good thing they did, given what happened in LA in January 2025. We learned about the lengths that they had gone to in the intervening years, between 2018 and 2025, to advocate for community involvement, get more training and certifications, acquire actual protective gear, and then go out and knock on doors to help spread their information to the public.

Everything about this series shares the right kind, the good kind of information. It’s very well-reported and shared from the perspective of one of the surfers slash volunteer firefighter, Keegan Gibbs, who is one of those gritty OG Malibu types who grew up there and called it home before the coastline was dotted with celebrity mansions. If this series wasn’t based on such good storytelling, and really connects you to the the humans of the story—in particular the Fire Chief and Gibbs—you could mistake it for a public service announcement that harkens back to Smokey The Bear.

The series also does the important job to dismantle the trope that the shining first-responder-in-armour is going to be able to save you and your home. It reminds you that it’s actually impossible for Fire and Paramedics to safely manage an entire city. The message is clear and worlds to educate the public about how to address the dangers of wildfires for those people who live in fire-prone areas, which much of LA County is, and Malibu is most definitely. The series makes sure that listeners learn how they can take “home hardening” measures for their own properties.

Here’s what the series does not do: give you a sense of what it was like to live through this moment as an inhabitant of Los Angeles.

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The series opens with the notion, and the feeling, that you’re going on a ride-along with Keegan, the surfer-VFD protagonist of the series. It gives the sense that the reporter and producer of the series, Adriana Cargill, is in the car. But it’s a notion only, and that sense gives way to a montage of third-party accounts and found audio artifacts of what it was like in the moment, from CB radio conversations, to news reports to phone conversations. The tape is well-sourced and the reporting is solid. But it doesn’t give you that visceral sense of what it was like to be there.

Eventually, we hear Cargill interview the Fire Chief at their central command post when she reminds him that they had met during Season 1, which is about when we see Cargill come back into the story.

Like most of the world, I watched the Palisades fire unfold on a television and told through bite-sized social media bits. It was harrowing and shocking, a terrifying notion to consider living through what was essentially a hurricane and a wildfire at the same moment. As I listened, I kept waiting for her personal stance, her declaration of what her truth was during the fire. Instead, she offers a first-hand account from people who were there, but after the moment, as a reflection.

Cargill spoke of going back to the beach weeks later to finally go surfing again, now amongst the floating debris and water that smelled like battery acid—but there was no scene, no tape to show us the action. In this way, this was a classic tell, not show, where the narrator tells us how to see something , based on her own experiences, rather than showing us through an unfolding scene of live tape. Throughout much of the series, the fire was spoken of in the past, both in her memory and the characters of the story; that mix of memory and reporting makes it feel disant, and lacks emotion.

Cargill does build a scene, using live tape, around a community meeting which took place after the fire. The tension in the room is clear, the action of the scene felt present. It helped to illustrate the distance between what actually happened during the fires, and how people understood the events. It works to show how some people felt affected by the fire, out in public, and as a community, out in a world which is rapidly catching fire all around them.

While I’m busy cooking up some new content for this year, I wanted to share some gems from last year that you might have missed.

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Hailing from Ireland, but has called Australia home for decades, Siobhán McHugh has helped to shape this industry, in both subtle and also very direct and applied ways. She’s both an academic and a producer, and teacher and a critic…a writer and a narrator. Dive in to find out how she has woven these threads together throughout her life.

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There was something that really struck me about this series when I listened to it…it was so…familiar…but also very new at the same time. This was when I realized just how deep some influences run in this industry. And actually, maybe for the first time, I felt that this was cause for celebration, not a tear down of how someone was working to sound like someone else. It’s growth and achievement, in a new way.

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Most people never spend more time than they absolutely need to on water, on a boat. Maybe it’s a ferry ride from one place to another, or back when you went to summer camp, you learned how to tack and jibe a sailboat (before getting knocked out by a concussion when a gust of wind smacked the mast into the back your head). Most adults run from the idea…except Ian Urbina. During his 17 years as an investigative reporter with the NYTimes, he spent about 10 of them on various ships, in the actual middle of nowhere. He’s here to talk about Season 2 of The Outlaw Ocean, a fascinating, multiplatform, multiyear project that demands that we look at the ocean as a human story, and not a climate story.

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Perhaps we can write down 2025 as the year we turned the corner on change…in the audio industry anyway. So much can be said about this, and there are a million layers of nuance. But as the year was drawing to a close, I went to Resonate Podcast Festival, in Richmond Virginia, where I stumbled across an emotion that I wasn’t exactly expecting: Optimism. Here’s a spotlight on some of the folks who are helping to bring this emotion back into fashion.

Get ready to be transported to another time and a faraway place, here’s the perfect holiday listen.

Alaska Is The Center Of The Universe

Find it on Audible here.

[James Dommek Jr]: “I was born and raised in Kotzebue, a village of about 3,000 on the Chukchi Sea. I grew up playing basketball and trying to skateboard on the only little patch of pavement at the airport - my dad worked there, he’s a mechanic.

And my mom sewed traditional fur parkies…she’s an amazing skin sewer. She makes hats, fancy parkas, gloves, earrings.

I was raised around fur and tools. I was also raised around stories. Storytelling is in my blood. I’m the great grandson of Palagan, or Paul Munroe, a revered Iñupiat storyteller. My family and my people have been living in this part of the world for over 10,000 years.

And before books. Before TV, the Internet and the endless scroll on your phones, we had someone who would just tell you a story, for a long time.

Since then there’s been a lot of changes that happened really fast. Western contact, colonization and all that came with that. Climate change. But our stories are still here….”

And with that, Dommek Jr sets out on a journey across Alaska to find those stories that he’s lived with his whole life.

He travels from the Arctic Circle all the way down to the rainforests of the Southeastern panhandle.

He finds hunters, elders, spiritual people and the ones who are wary even to share their story. He rides on the back of snow machines, four-wheelers, boats, goes out hunting on the land. He finds people willing to talk in their trucks in their homes, or while they are hunting, and then sits down for a music jam.

Dommek Jr is magic behind a microphone. He gets them to talk…and share their own stories, ripped from myths, legends and mysteries not yet concluded.

The journey of this series is evident in the raw corners of the tape. It’s made to make you feel like you’re driving with him inside that rickety truck, down a bumpy Alaskan road.

This is not a project to discover the fossils of stories now gone. These stories are very much alive…they remain true to this day. They are there to remind us that these stories are very much still alive…the people who tell them and the lore they cover. Even if they are buried inside the memory or the secrets that don’t want to be shared. If these stories can survive millenia, so can we.

[James Dommek Jr]: I like to say that one of the ways we’ve always made sense of things around here is with our stories…and that’s what I’m hoping to do.

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James Dommek Jr, Author, Narrator
Issac Kestenbaum and Josephine Holtzman, Producers
Audible Originals
6 Episodes
6 Episodes, 3.1 hours

Find it on Audible here.

How about a critic? What happens when we publish a piece that shines a light on a series…only to learn that it’s not exactly what it appears to be? And that giving it more air in these pages felt like I was contributing to the wrong side of history.

Well, I can tell you. First comes shame, the admission you were wrong. And then embarrassment, to recognize that you’ve been hoodwinked, swindled and manipulated into believing something is real.

Last January, I was compelled to start the year on a note of optimism. The end of 2024 was bleak by many standards…so I went looking for material that would allow my first post of 2025 that could offer a different tone. I found some independently created series that were all doing something novel and I wrote a spotlight piece called “Three Series That Demand Your Attention (And Shape This Industry For The Better.” Two of the series included here do just that, Phonograph and Happy Forgetting. Go find them and put them on your lists….they do just that.

The third series, Telepathy Tapes, had shot to the top of the charts in November, and when she went on Joe Rogan’s Christmas Day special to talk about the series, it took his habitual top spot for about a week, and then remained Top 10 in many countries, for months. The thing is (sigh), I didn’t do a strong background check on this series. I went in cold for a listen and for a hot minute, I was sucked into the tagline of the show:

“For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and in their classrooms. And nobody has believed them. Nobody has listened to them. But on this podcast, we do.”

I was like: democracy is being dismantled and it feels like the is burning down (California actually was)…maybe it’s time to think about things a bit differently. In the parlance of influencers, I was ready for a new mindset.

The final stage is reckoning, when we face the shame, tackle it head on, apologize, and the respond to it. Here’s how I dealt with this moment, in print:

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What made this the worst/best moment of the year

First best: my incredible community of readers. Not ten minutes after my original post went out, by phone began to light up. Those that have my phone texted me…some hit reply from the post, others dug up my email or DMed me. They all wanted me to know—quickly—that series was not what it suggests it is, for many reasons.

That fact alone made turned this from worst to best in one go. When you publish online, it’s not always clear who’s reading it…or how it hits. The fact that people took the time to reach out to me personally meant a lot. It helped soften the sting of the moment.

But now what do I do with the original piece? The temptation was to remove it and pretend it didn’t exist. But that’s not very honest…it doesn’t tell the whole story. When I realized that I had been radicalized by this podcast, I had an important lesson to share. So I put an editor’s post-script on the original piece, and got to work.

I did a lot of research…I dove real deep. I talked to a bunch of people, including parents of autistic children that I personally know. I listened and I watched. Slowly I crafted the retraction piece—which I spent more time writing than regular posts by a wide margin.

I was terribly nervous to post this piece. You know those naked dreams where you watch yourself walking naked in public? But what happened surprised me.

Second best: this retraction piece became my most read piece, by a wide margin. This post has been viewed well over 5,000 times. I’ve had 37 shares on it to date and have netted 29 new subscribers, and two paid subscribers, and only one person unsubscribed.

For a small, very niche, newsletter, these are big numbers. It was 30 per cent more than the original post, and a third more than my other best performing posts.

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So why is this my Cringey List pic of the year?

Long after I wrote the piece, the show continued to chart. Their Instagram feed jubilantly announced they had funded both Season 2 and a feature documentary film…and then began to post videos on its story feed that were off. Dickens continued to paraded around her “stars” of the series, non-speaking autistic kids and families, who were now now getting a lot of attention. It was all…cringeworthy.

Then Telepathy Tapes was named Best Indie Series at the Webby Awards. It got a full spread in New York Magazine. Ashley Carmen wrote a piece in Bloomberg that intended to set off alarm bells about how even successful indie shows can’t turn a profit—a piece that I’m highly suspicious was fact-checked beyond her one source, the host of the show. As the year progressed, it landed Ky Dickens in some powerful, persuasive places, like a keynote at a Davos offshoot event called State of the World, 2025. It even showed up in one of the NYTimes end of year lists, 41 Things That Stuck With Us From 2025 (meant in the positive light).

With each new accolade, the realization that this show was not only fraudulent in many ways, but helping to perpetuate a dangerous myth made me feel more uncomfortable; in particular the claim that Facilitated Communication is a magical pill of communication (which was widely discredited in the 1990s).

The premise of Telepathy Tapes ia a MAHA-fueled construct that could have the effect of reducing the much-needed early interventions for science-backed therapies for young autistic children. Who needs to fund expensive therapies if they are actually communication via telepathy, from a magical realm? Sure, the attention might feel great for the hot minute that it’s there; but the after effects will remain much longer.

What makes me most uncomfortable about this is that something that purported to be support and ‘give voice’ to a population—a part of society that is chronically under-resourced, marginalized—is actually a cheap solution that first takes advantage of the families who support this claim, and then weaponizes it against them.

And yet, many parts of this industry, in particular the celebrity-fueld podcast-sphere, lapped up the attention this series got. Jay Shetty, Rich Roll, Elizabeth Gilbert….and a long parade of others that chimed in to support this ‘miracle’ indie podcast.

It’s not only cringey, it’s quite shameful. Please, if there is a podcast god out there, this will not be crowned during the first Podcast Golden Globes moment of 2026.

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The thing is…that list doesn’t get a chance to capture all of the greatness of the industry.

So I’ve taken the time to break out another list, with new criteria. Another trove of impressive, captivating, essential shows to queue up for this year.

And hey, while you’re here…please consider subscribing to Bingeworthy

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Best Overall Output By Volume and Quality

CBC has truly spread its deep-rooted audio wings, expanded its slate, locked down a great content, expanded its pool of talented hosts and producers and said LET’S GOOOOO!

They have impressive stand alone shows: Outlaw Ocean, Season 2 (which I covered here in words and here in video) and a new series from their stable of talented producers (like Falen Johnson with See You In Court). The Ceeb continues to examp new co-production partners: ABC + CBC for the series Forged, about a widespread art fraud ring of the Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau. They’ve beefed up their existing strands with The Con (Kaitlyn’s Baby). Their longrunning strand Uncover (which recently launched Season 35 with Allison After NXIVM), released four (4!) complete series this year, including Sea of Lies (which I named #3 on the Bingey List), The Banned Teacher, Calls From A Serial Killer and also the exceptional Dirtbag Climber (which I covered here). They released new strand Personally which first reorganized previous titles like Run, Hide, Repeat, Welcome To Paradise; and then in January they kicked off the year with a new commision Toy Solider, where Dan Golberg questions the incredible life story of a Holocaust survivor Alex Kurzem. Three more titles arrived this year: a re-release of Sorry about the Kid (from 2022), a co-release Radiotopia’s The Heart which returned to the seminal mini series NO: Again? Again, a re-release of the previously indie title Forever is a Long Time as a CBC title…and then last month they released Resurrection. I’m excited to see what is in the pipeline for 2026 (I’m expecting the Tribeca Select title Creation Myth, and others). There are so many titles I’m sure I’m forgetting many of them…and of course in additional to the incredible amount of longform journalism and investigative reporting that’s already part of the public broadcaster. No one else in the entire industry that is putting out this much narrative content. Period. I’ve done the math. It deserves a big spot light shine.

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Best Public Media Series:

It’s hard to overstate just how perilous work in public media has become in this last year. Massive budget cuts, entire teams and shows axed, whole-scale rebranding of what truth is, and then, how to report it. Working inside these conditions is challenging on every level, but then reaching for the headspace to create ground-breaking, sometimes emotionally taxing work. And yet, this is what these teams manage to do, with fewer resources, uncertain futures, and a changing view of what the truth holds. From a controversial program to rewild wolves inside Yellowstone National Park with Howl from Boise State Public Radio and The Idaho Capital Sun, to the oddball history of a renegade landowner in Texas with A Whole Other Country from Marfa Public Radio, to the unsung heroes who spend time on those dark corners of the internet so others do not have to with Arachnid from TVOntario, to the return of one of the OG narrative podcast series with Love Me from CBC. These series remind us of the place that public media has, both in our hearts and in our culture: to be the voice of the public.

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Best Mini Series

The mini-series is a great way to engage a topic without a massive time commitment, or giant production burdon. These two series quickly brought me into a world and allowed me to lose track of time while I was in there. The often-excellent Vox podcast Unexplainable released a four part series called The Sound Barrier which me think differently about everything to do with music, sound, silence and that super annoying ringing in my ears that’s always there when I notice it but try not to. Operation Night Cat, from New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR) was a reminder of just how slippery the line is between human and animal. If the way we treat animals offers a clue about how humans treat each other, this show proves the point. I continue to enjoy how NHPR takes me out into the field to discover life in New Hampshire. I’ve never been there, but NHPR makes me, an urban dweller from a different country, feel connected to the ‘Live Free or Die’ state. I think that’s their point.

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Best Ongoing Series

Avery Trufelman offers another history lesson through a sartorial lens with Articles of Interest. This year she released Season 7: Gear…since 2018 Trufelman has consistently created deeply-researched, beautifully produced, thoroughly considered seasons of content, all delivered with her deep sexy voice….big Joan Didion vibes here. Each season focuses on a different aspect of the fashion industry, and they are all ‘books’ in their own right. If you thought this was a fluffy fashion piece be ready to be surprised. I will never look at jackets (or field jackets or GoreTex) the same way again. Aside from the delightful cold opens, my favourite moment in Season 7: Gear was when Trufelman introduces herself “I’m a fashion journalist…no really I am.” Trufelman reminds us just how much fashion connects us to each other, to the past and drags us into the future.

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Best Industry Builder

As the audio industry changes, adapts, evolves and morphs in new ways, there are one million invisible levers that spin and hum, rotate and index, oscillate and turn. The raw material of the industry is the layer where creators themselves quietly work away (paid and unpaid) and then seek out ways to publish their works. In front of those layers of work is a top layer I’ll call Possibilities Layer: this is where all those creative producers can take their work for compensation, or recognition (or both). If this layer of Possibility is not expanding and adapting to current industry reality, or different trends, all that good work has nowhere to go, and the raw material languishes.

There are three exceptional podcasts right now that are expanding the Possibilities Layer. The Audio Flux Podcast, which comes after three years of motivating producers to create short audio works based on a given set of prompts and criteria. There have been six circuits in all, four of them with public. From this process a trove of exceptional short audio works have entered the world, and been exhibited at top tier festivals. The Audio Flux Podcast now brings these pieces together with a host (the hilarious Amy Pearl) to offer backstory, giggles and a short outro. Total effect? A regular offering of audio joy. Pitch Party is a joint initiative of Tink Media as Resonate Podcast Festival showcases exceptional narrative podcasts that are looking for a home. Pilots for shows that should be made, they just need a bit more help to find their matchmaker. Think of Pitch Party like a match maker…the Shadchante of the podcast world. Phonograph is an ‘audio-zine’ that celebrates specific shows or individual creators with a sound-rich deepdive into some aspect of a show, or person, or long-running strand. Phonograph demands that we see these different works as art and consider its craft, which is how you help to create an industry, one episode at a time.

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Best Indie Series

Signal Hill is a new audio magazine, published twice each year. It’s not coincidentally also the name of the place where the first transatlantic radio signal was received, in St. John’s Newfoundland, Canada, in 1901. There are at least 18 more locations called ‘Signal Hill’ in the world…this listener-funded, totally independent, audio endeavour takes inspiration from all of them. It’s both experimental and packed full of well-endowed craft. Who says a ‘magazine’ must involve paper?! It’s more about a fascinating and efficient combination of ideas, story, metaphor, concept and design. And we don’t need actual images for that…let these audio producers create that image for you alone.

You might have noticed that I’ve peppered this issue with more than the average subscription reminders.

If you’ve got the BEST offer yet…just until the end of this year, I’m offering 50% off annual plan with this offer:

Holiday Offer

If that’s totally out of your range, please like, share, repost…and subscribe:

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If you’re part of an institution and want to share this with co-workers, here’s a good one for more than 4 people:

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And then if for that special audio friend, what about a GIFT?

Thank you and HAPPY HOLIDAYS 🕎 🧑‍🎄 🦔 🍿

There are so many new and exciting upstarts, startups and cool new things happening that it’s almost hard to keep track. Aside from the bevvy of impressive newsletters that focus on this industry, we’ve got new and expanded forms of written content about the industry: Sound Fields, an expanded Good Tape…there’s even an Essential Listening Poll. There are even audio magazines now…welcome Signal Hill and Written in Air.

We’ve got new and growing collaborative efforts forming in Europe and beyond (XMTR, The Ecco), and an incredible number of venues for producers to shake things up and try something new. From Audio Flux, to Small Audio Art, to Sound Walk September, I keep tripping over new ways to expand my creative wings. To me this signals a new way forward for producers in this industry to sharpen their tools, remove some layers of corporate hubris and make audio for the love of it again. No one is going to get rich on 3-5 minutes of audio…but they are reshaping the industry, one minute at a time.

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Here’s the list…

10 - Where Is Daniel Morcombe?

It’s unusual for me to agree to commit multiple hours to the heinous crimes of pedophiles and child abductions. Finding these criminals and bringing them to justice is incredibly important work; but the content upsets me, and the plot twists lurk into my daily thoughts and raise my anxiety. However, once you once you meet the the Morcombes, Salt-of-the-Earth Aussies and parents of Daniel, you’ll want to keep hanging out with them…even though the content is sometimes difficult to hear. Once you get invested in this story, you’ll want to stick with them to learn about how they helped to bring about systemic change, on a wide scale. You’ll also feel their inner strength and tenacity for life through their words, which is massively inspiring, against the backdrop of a very dismal subject. Now, each year in Australia, the entire country celebrates Red Shirt Day, where people wear red to teach kids and also Recognise, React, and Report to unsafe situations for children. This kind of collective action was borne out of intense pain and trauma. Their hard-won efforts deserve your time.

The Binge Cases, Season 17
Matt Angel, Host, Producer
8 Episodes, 6 hours
LINK

9 - Left To Their Own Devices

I’m not sure this was meant to go into the Thriller genre, but that’s the effect it will have on parents. We all know that we carry the equivalent of a supercomputer slash atomic bomb in our back pocket…but the extent to what the dangers and concerns they have on our children remain largely speculative fiction for us—especially since we either bury our heads in work (and our own phones), or lose sight of our children behind a closed door. Ava Smithing, host and reporter of the series, wrote this series to explain how her 12-years-old self was both radicalized and abused by the plentiful ‘skinny-gram’ content of Instagram. She wants to use this series to raise awareness about how she sees tech companies as entirely complicit to both her eating disorder, and something the DSM-5 has yet to officially diagnose: Addiction to Technology.

Toronto Star, with Paradigm Media Group
Ava Smithing, Host, Reporter
10 Episodes, 5.3 hours
LINK

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8 - The History Podcast: Half-Life

When Joe Dunthorne found his Great-Grandfather’s massive tome of memoir, a brilliant chemical engineer, he thought he would discover the story of how his German-Jewish ancestors escaped Nazi Germany. Instead, on page 1692, he discovered a gutting revelation. Half-Life explains how one family history becomes a common history. The series opens with a unforgettable description of watching his grandmother “use radioactive toothpaste” that her husband made. From there it moves down the family tree in a delightfully self-deprecating and at times brutally honest portrayal of one family history, warts and Nazis and all. When his memoir finally nails down some truths, in the last 80 pages, this story gets more strange and bizarre before it goes straight again—if it ever does. Wander through an old chemical weapons factory. Watch at the skeletons fall out of this Jewish family closet. Travel back to Turkey. It’s at once both a public memorial that uncovers a very private reckoning.

BBC’s The History Podcast: Half Life, with Falling Tree Productions
Eleanor McDowall, Producer : Joe Dunthorne, Host
8 Episodes, 3.8hours
LINK

7 - Blood Relatives

A grisly crime is committed which at first seemed to be rather open-and-shut case…and also one of Britain’s most infamous crimes. Wealthy parents adopt children; children go off the rails; mental health struggles; question of succession; whole family ends up dead. Except one person…the son Jeremy Bamber, whom at first was portrayed the way the town saw him: as a nair-do-well bonvivant, gentleman farmer, who is quickly indicted for this crime. But then Heidi Blake, journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker, starts to dig into the files. What she finds is the most egregious case of police ineptitude—it’s truly mind-boggling. Crime scene evidence was needlessly tampered with…convenient details emerge to support a theory…extended family members that ‘discover’ a piece of evidence from the murder, which the police seem to take as detective work. Did In The Dark do it again? Did they solve a cold case of a man who has already spent decades behind bars? It might have had a chance for another Curtis Flowers moment…until a shocking thing happens which changes Bamber’s possibilities for appeals, forever. This page-turner of a series will lead you through the case with boggling detail.

The New Yorker: In The Dark
Heidi Blake, Reporter Host
6 Episodes, 4.7hours
LINK

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6 - When We All Get To Heaven

This series is something of a miracle. Slate’s long-running queer podcast Outward, founded by Christina Cauterucci, opened their feed to a 10-part documentary series, When We All Get To Heaven, about one of the first gay-positive churches in North America. The series is co-produced with Eureka Street Productions, and hosted by Lynne Gerber, an independent scholar, who discovered an trove of 1,200 cassette tapes that archived an entire decade of a sermons, meetings, interviews and song at the Metro Community Church of San Francisco. This series so concisely tells the story of a lost decade, with its grainy tape residue, that it feels like you’re back in the room. It’s full of music, sorrow, loss, reckoning, even a scandal. And then, more importantly, how they moved past this difficult decade—and it’s vivid. The AIDS epidemic ripped out the heart of this community; here’s the raw account of how they all got through it, or pushed past it. The archive brings out an incredibly rich archive of raw, evocative, honest tape, full of singing, music, barefaced honest sermons…this is church like you’ve never heard it before.

Outward, Slate’s LGBTQ podcast
Lynne Gerber, Host, Producer
10 Episodes, 8.5 hours
LINK

5 - Wisecrack

Soaking wet and cold, Jodi Tovay randomly sat down in a pub just as stand up comedian Edd Hedges began his set at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She hadn’t planned on being there, but it was the closest, driest room. The show began a cold open: a creepy, terrifying, desperate banging, like on a door….and then the introduction…welcome Edd Hedges to the stage! He’s here to tell the story of the most terrifying night of his life. Tovay sat in the audience, wrapped. Was that real, she wondered? Was it funny, she pondered? So she went back the next day to see the show again…and then she hits record on a Voice Memo…which is where this story really kicks off. Wisecrack defies genre definition as it code switches between stand-up comedy, true crime, hardboiled detective work and a good old fashioned journalist quest. It tests the boundaries of what storytelling can, or rather, should do, because it calls out comedy as tragedy, and then dissects the story to make sure that we fully understand why we laugh of the things that make us uncomfortable.

iHeart and Tenderfoot.tv
Jodi Tovay, Producer, Host
6 Episodes, 3.5 hours
LINK

4 - The Retrievals S2: The C-Sections

In this delicious mashup of the medical drama trope with the investigative reporter archetype, Susan Burton creates a series that unfurls through a captivating narrative, next-level writing and prodigious delivery in a tight 4-episode structure. Once I got beyond the poor title choice I fell for the central character, and the fact that the entire series is willing to focus on an issue that has few entry doors—Women’s Pain. On another level, this series is equally about consent, which is the unpleasant bedfellow of pain. Burton uses her intrepid reporter skills to uncover Susanna Stanford, the unicorn hiding in plain clothes—and she becomes the medical equivalent of Erin Brockovitch, which is another feminist literary trope I’m happy to see put to work. Stanford was a patient, and a lay person, who went from circulating a small survey to a Mom Net group, to published author of several academic articles. By the end, we witness Stanford changing the medical establishment and operating room systems, on a grand scale. All because this incredible woman had the tenacity and bravery to stay focused on the issue, which was her issue, of women’s pain during cesarean section delivery.

Serial Productions/NYTimes
Susan Burton, Reporter, Host
4 Episodes, 3.2 hours
LINK

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3 - Sea of Lies

How did Albert Walker become one of the most wanted men in the world? The story begins in a small town in Ontario called Orangeville, which has nothing to do with the fruit. Sea of Lies tells the story of an unlikely discovery: a dead body shows up in the fishing catch ten miles off shore, near Devon, England. His does have one identifiable feature: A Rolex watch, which plays a significant role in solving this crime. Host and producer Sam Mullins adroitly writes and narrates Sea of Lies with a rollicking humour, an eye for timing and delivery that make it all come together like a multicoloured polkadot outfit. It’s crime with a side of twisted humour, and just enough suspense to keep you coming back. From door-knocking in England, to the fish-packing plants of Devon, to wandering into small town Ontario, this series helps uncover an almost-perfect murder in perhaps the most unusual way. It’s a series about a grisly crime, told through more loopty-loops than a roller coaster at an amusement park.

CBC: Uncover
Sam Mullins, Writer, Host
Alex Gatenby, Producer, Reporter
7 Episodes, 7.2 hours
LINK

2 - Deep Water

Imagine finding yourself on assignment at a breathwork retreat, and then stumbling into an extreme sport that you didn’t know you were passionate about. This is what happened to travel writer Lydia Gard, who literally got hooked on Free Diving—that’s when people put on long fins, wetsuits and dive into the ocean for minutes at a time—even past 100 meters of depth—without oxygen or any breathing aids. Coaches train people to relax and be calm…it puts meditating on a whole new level. It’s a niche sport that didn’t attract much attention beyond a small crowd of enthusiasts. That is, until a new group of buff, chissled-chinned men clad in wetsuits began to show up to competitions—and importantly—started to publish videos of their dazzling results on Instagram. Their willingness to brush aside danger is catchy; their physical feats are otherworldly. Is this Free Diving’s contribution to the Manosphere? These same influencer-types now publish videos that go viral of lung punctures and underwater blackouts. Gard is annoyed that her once quiet sport was now being pushed to massive extremes….but she also had questions. Were they doping? Is the regulatory body looking at this issue? It’s both a chronicle of an extreme sport and how the Internet can change the trajectory of sport. But also a cautionary tale that there’s no amount of technology, or equipment or drugs that can take away the power of the ocean; 100 meters is still 100 meters, 11 bars of pressure, and a long way from air.

Tortoise Investigates and The Observer
Lydia Gard, Reporter, Host
6 Episodes, 3 hours
LINK

1 - Fela Kuti: Fear No Man

This is a sonic tour de force about the life and music of the Afrobeat pioneer, and Nigerian musical legend, Fela Kuti. This series took over three years, and a massive team, to make. It was created by Jad Abumrad, and in a way this show is a completion fusion of his three previous titles: Radiolab (for expansive content), More Perfect (bullseye political commentary) and Dolly Parton’s America (brilliant music coverage). It’s a podcast that will make you want to dance, sing, shout and then pump your fist in the air. For Nigerians, Fela Kuti is about as popular as Michael Jackson, as political as John Lennon and as talented as Prince…but yet most people in North America have never heard of him. Feast your ears on this series, open your mind to what music is capable of and get ready to create a playlist, because seven hours of Fela Kuti’s life story told through his music is not enough. If you’ve ever felt like one song could change the world, this series will really spell that out for you in detail. Music is a powerful joining of so many forces…and Fela Kuti was a master of them all. What a treat to find an Audible series that can be found on other platforms.

Audible with Higher Ground and Western Sound
Jad Abumrad, Producer, Host
10 Episodes, 7+ hours
LINK

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This year I’ve decided to single out some more notable series. It’s not easy to compare apples and oranges…so I’ve got some delicious sweet grapes for you here!

Get ready for More Best Bingey Essentials
Here are the categories:

Best Overall Output

Best New Indie Series

Best Industry Builders

Best Ongoing Series

Best Public Media Series

Best Mini-Series

and also…

The Cringey List

Stay tuned for these announcements, coming soon!

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The three of use were trying to articulate the undeniable energy around us. Mia was talking about a project she spearheaded over the last year called superfeed.fm, which is perhaps the future of RSS. Tamar shared that the Hub and Spoke Audio Collective felt like it was growing and busier than ever. And I felt that I was seeing the future in a new way.

Generally, I try not to speak in hyperbole; but sometimes it is the plain truth that I see.

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Optimism wasn’t the foregone conclusion to a capstone event in the podcasting industry for the year 2025. There’s a lot of shit going on in the world that’s very uncomfortable. The entire audio industry has massively shrunk. The remaining industry has required some big shifts. On a broad scale, there’s some intense soul-searching underway with the expectation of video, the disappearance of public media funding, the inevitability of AI, and the continued shift of audiences toward celebrity-driven, always-on chat-and-video shows. I’ll stop myself there.

What place does optimism have around here?

Have we hit rock bottom and there’s only one way to go? Have we run out of good ideas, so why not just feel positive instead? Is it the canary in the coal mine? Or is it our mind playing tricks on us, kind of like people in late stage hypothermia who peel off their clothes because they think they’re hot?

But yet, my pan around social media, newsletter-land; even Sound School Podcast agreed. This meetup felt good, and it left an optimistic, inspirational vibe.

So what is it about the no money-exchanged, no-monetary-model attached, not-IP-seeking network of Hub & Spoke that makes it now, perhaps again, feel like an integral part of the future of this industry?

So I gathered Tamar Avishai and Nick Andersen together to talk through some of these questions.

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The following is an lightly edited version of our interview.

Q.1. Tell me the origin story. Where did this all begin?

 Tamar Avishai: So 2017…Boston has this monthly potluck of audio makers. I don’t know if it still does…we were living there in peak-democratized-audio-time.

Nick Andersen: It’s our Google Group for podcasters, and it’s called Sonic Soirée…it actually started in the 1980s.  The tagline is a feast for your belly and your ear. You’re supposed to bring food to share, and if you have an audio piece you’re working on, bring that too.

  Tamar Avishai: I had launched my show The Lonely Palette in 2016, and I found myself in a very tiny Somerville, MA apartment next to who turned out to be Wade Roush. And he was like, so what are you doing? And I said, well, I just launched this independent podcast. And he said, oh, so did I…It’s called Soonish.

 And we started chatting and we realized that being independent felt at the time, like it was kind of synonymous with being an amateur. And we weren’t sure how to kind of lift ourselves out of feeling that way because we already felt that way and we wanted to do something that felt like we were kind of elevating ourselves, but also creating a community.

We were like, okay, let’s just be something. Let’s just do something together. Let’s have a name and a website and a little bit of branding and decide once we make it how we can feel like our own community was lifting each other up.”

Q2. What does the tagline “independence, not totally alone” mean?

Nick Anderson: “They’re all independently owned, the producers. Own their own stuff. They decide their own things. We have no editorial control over it, and that’s really been key to what we have built.

People making stuff together [or with their teams], but getting support when they need it. So we’ll spend edits to each other; but it’s really independence, not totally alone.

  Tamar Avishai: ”Which has also been an interesting challenge for us as the leaders of Hub & Spoke, because we’ve realized along the way that being a collective of independents is a contradiction in terms.  Because if everybody is independent, what is the collective connective tissue bringing us all together?  

We want to make sure that every show feels both completely, confident in their own, you know, fiscal ideological IP independence….and yet we’re also asking and expecting if you’re going to be part of this, you will promote other shows.

Q3. Do members sign a formal agreement?

Nick Anderson: “Yes. We have a Membership Agreement. When you sign up to join, when we extend an invitation, there’s an outline of expectations…an Agreement.”

  Tamar Avishai: “I think we’ve come to realize that that really is an art, not a science. You know, this is, this is very human storytelling and we kind of know based both on the show and the producer because it’s really important that producers that come into our collective.”

Q.4: What is the most recent show to join the collective?

 Nick Anderson: The Audio Flux Podcast! It’s super exciting and I think both deeply flattering and also very empowering to have Julie [Shapiro] and John [DeLore], with Amy Pearl hosting.

  Tamar Avishai: We were blown away.

[We asked them…]  Why? What do you think we are? Not that we didn’t know within ourselves, but we were really curious externally how we presented. And [Julie] talked about this community aspect …you know, when we started in 2017, the industry was a completely different place. And as we’ve been evolving, and the industry has been evolving, we’ve had to adjust to this kind of tectonic plate shift.

  In the Spotify/Gimlet days, we thought, well, there’s no point to us. We can’t get that money. We can’t give that to our shows. We’re not getting bought. So we hired a fundraiser….she worked her ass off. She could not find the money. Like there was no money to give to quirky, independent shows that had been going on for a long time. Even in 2018 and 2019.

 And then the industry shifted again and that inflation deflated. Leaving everybody in its wake and suddenly a place to kind of regroup.

I talked to so many people yesterday who were just despondent about the state of the industry, but still really excited about a passion project and feeling like they had nowhere to take it.

Q.5: What do you think is different now from 2017?

  Tamar Avishai: “ I think the money from 2018 and 2019 brought so many people into the industry who thought: this is my living and this is how much I deserve to be paid. But it takes a real commitment to the soul and the craft of this stuff to keep it going. And I think in this particular moment. We just have to figure out how to fund that creatively on our own.”

What we are offering is very high quality place to park your passion project.

 None of us have gotten rich off of our passion projects. None of us. I have never made a living off of The Lonely Palette. [But], I have been able to make a pretty decent living off of what the doors that the the Lonely Palate has opened for me in the industry. Talking to people about that…it’s like everybody seems to be like, yep. That’s, that’s just kind of the way of it right now.”

Q6. So what’s your take on the future?

  Tamar Avishai: “The work that got the people into the industry, who are going to stay in the industry, is not going anywhere. It’s the work that’s been around this entire time. What do you get out of the human voice telling their story? Before TV, before video podcasting, the nuances and humanity of the human voice are not going anywhere.

And we talk a lot right now about this fear of like AI slop. I think that’s a very charitable amnesia about all of the slop that’s come out over the last five years anyway. I’m sorry but it’s true. Big corporate companies have made so much clutter to keep people employed, to do something with that money, and it’s brought so much clutter into the pipeline.

Big corporate companies have made so much clutter to keep people employed, to do something with that money and it’s, it’s brought so much, yeah, just clutter into the pipeline. There’s been some great stuff, but also a lot of stuff that no one is ever going to listen to again.”

Nick Anderson: Being at a place like Resonate again this year, hearing these great works, hearing these incredible folks…it’s like…don’t diminish your passion and joy. If you’re going to make this stuff, because you want to, and figure out the funding later.

You make this stuff because you want to so do it. And helping people like our friends and, and colleagues in Hub & Spoke who will support you, and celebrate that joy with you.”

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10 Essential Facts About Hub & Spoke

1. Hub & Spoke began in 2017 in Boston.

2. Hub & Spoke = Collective; Radiotopia is a Network

3. The original founders were producers of three independent shows: The Lonely Palette (Tamar Avishai), Soonish (Wade Roush), and Ministry of Ideas (Zachary Davis).

4. From the beginning, Hub & Spoke was conceived as a community rather than a company—there was no initial funding and no outside money.

5. Each show maintains complete ownership and editorial control; Hub & Spoke operates without central editorial oversight.

6. Hub & Spoke uses a formal membership agreement outlining expectations around participation and cross-promotion.

7. Hub & Spoke is run by a volunteer-based Board.

8. Yes, they have a Manifesto, too.

9. Cross-promotions are supported through a shared “drawer of promos,” including host-read or pre-recorded spots that any show can use.

Hub and Spoke has a fiscal sponsor, which means that the different shows an receive tax-deductible donations from their community of fans.

Yes….it’s that time of year again.

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The Bingey List is coming next week.

Want to get caught up on my previous lists?

Nearly everyone I’ve surveyed would agree that Resonate manages to capture lightning in a bottle—an effort not easily repeated. And yet. It did. captured 10,000kW of energy inside one small, beautiful building. I cannot think of a single instance of something I’ve done three times in a row where all events measured up.

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The convenient term to describe Resonate festival is a ‘conference,’ in that it does more than just screen and watch. It actions big ideas and convenes creativity. But this term does not do justice to the mood that it captures and the experiences it shares with attendees.

This year the single word that I would attribute to this gathering is almost trite and simple: happy. When I examine this more closely, I’ve got some facts to back it up. The jovial big-voice of OhItsBigRon Ronald Young Jr, who acted as as co-emcee with Chioke I’Anson this year, was definitely the narrator.

It seemed very clear that folks were happy to be gathering, connecting, networking and co-conspiring together, despite a succinct description of where they work, or what they are working on. I couldn’t help but notice that many people I spoke to referred to their work as ‘art,’ or ‘experimental’, and the idea that ‘they didn’t know where it was going,’ was okay too.

People felt the unapologetic encouragement to dream big and think outside the box. There was a palpable discussion about the importance of risk-taking, trying new things, and embracing the WTF-ing version of whatever they are working on, or hoping to begin to work on...which, btw, they had already begun even though there didn’t seem to be a super sensible business model attached. And yet, lurking in the corners, new business models are quietly getting underway.

Perhaps this is because there’s something very grounding about mingling with folks of all stages and ages who are at a similar place as you. It doesn’t matter if you’ve worked for the biggest and most solid corporate entities in this business (Wondery and This American Life as two standout examples)...they too have lost their jobs, been downsized or re-assigned. It’s likely this adds to the decidedly non-snooty vibe of this event. I’ve been to many festivals over the years where the power imbalance is acutely felt; Resonate is the exact opposite.

I should also point out the unobvious fact that I’ve watched multiple institutions and entities recently work hard to open their doors and embrace independents and their work (Resonate itself with Pitch Party podcast; Tribeca, Signal Awards, multiple open calls for pitches). And then I’ve also noticed all kinds of independent work that’s fermenting, fomenting, creating, making and doing….it now feels like a wide horizon when just a few months ago I reported: Wow, is it quiet out there.

No, it’s not some new profitable business model that a new genius has just figured out. It’s good old fashioned hard work. Either that has meant finding a way to fund projects with multiple side jobs and hustles and corporate gigs, or it’s a balance of the two. I got a sense that after a few years of disappointing messages and pink slips from the corporate world, this indie-minded industry has dusted itself off, picked up its bootstraps, and gone back to its roots. Art is a forever industry.

This might feel speculative and a bit distant, but the facts do line up to support this case. No, it’s not a blank cheque to take to the bank. Certainly it’s not enough to pay for health insurance and support a family. What I feel, and see, is that there’s sense of transition within this industry. And perhaps against all odds, it’s rather joyful.

“Optimism is back!” beamed Tamar Avishai, co-founder of the Hub and Spoke Audio Collective. She shared with me that their inboxes are busier than ever at the no-money-exchanged, no-monetary-model attached, not-IP-Seeking network of Hub and Spoke [I’ll share that interview in an upcoming feature soon].

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Art is the space, art is setting the pace

The venue for Resonate—the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA)—is an art gallery, but that’s one that’s also big enough to act as a community centre and gathering place. It was a prescient design that’s nestled at the edge of where the beautiful campus of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) meets the border of the vibrant Arts District. The ICA clearly seems to function as the axis for events that are able to straddle the rich academic life of the institution and the growing vibe of Richmond. “I really like this city,” was a comment I heard often this weekend.

When a conference is hosted inside an art gallery that means if you need a quick breather between sessions, or have a latent 10 minutes between sessions and are feeling introverted, instead of pulling off to a corner and mindlessly scrolling, you can instead disappear behind a curtain into a gallery space to find immersive and engaging video projections, or stare at art on the wall to let your mind wander.

This was also possible on all three floors of the venue; a resource I tapped multiple times throughout the weekend. I met a new friend in the process of doing this, when my inside voice spilled out to say “this is exactly what I needed….” to which the reply came… , a”me too…” and then more conversation followed after we flopped on the bean bag chairs in the lobby.

Ahead of the conference, I was curious how it might adapt to the changes that were introduced this year. One day ahead of the festival, an industry-minded conference was organized through called Fast Forward Summit that brought together creatives with execs. And then, alongside the festival, there was The Growth Lounge, located a few blocks away at Common House, where creators were invited to sign up for one-to-one meetings with executives from different companies and networks who had agreed to take pitches, and start conversations (Sony’s The Binge, as well as ESPN 30-for-30, Slate and Pushkin).

Reviews from both events from folks that I spoke with was that these meetings were real, put conversations in motion, and didn’t take away from the creative vibe that was humming at the rest of the festival. It’s a tough note to strike. For me the key ingredient was that the two spaces were separated…and that the predominant values at the main venue were guided (and surrounded) by art.

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“No one makes a podcast alone…and it doesn’t exist until it lands in the brain of the listener.”

This was how Eleanor MacDowell set the pace for the festival in her opening Keynote “Heartbeat.”

This message appropriately set the stage for what I observed all weekend:

• The importance of community

• The essence of collaboration

• The desire to gather and convene IRL

• The connection between audio-making and the ongoing work of decolonization and reframing of power and truth in narratives

• The ability for audio to connect, transform, redirect and manage BIG societal change

• The steadfast assertion that this industry isn’t going anywhere, despite all the changes it has endured in the last few years.

I heard these thoughts echoed in the work of , when they compelled the audience to “lie with me.” The deeply moving story shared by James Dommek Jr with Isaac Kestenbaum from Alaska Is At The Center Of The Universe (from Audible). And the expansion, really a raising-of-the-bar for how to deliver a great live listening event, arrived with and In The Dark.

Speaking of: do you know how many times I heard a reference to a ”Live Listening Event?” This was not a coincidence….others noticed it as well. It’s clear this is something that’s a growth industry inside this niche of an industry. It mixes the act of listening with a community mindset.

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This is not new

Laura Rojas Aponte spoke about the past fifteen years of Radio Ambulante. In many industries, reaching teenage years isn’t momentous. But in an industry whose fossil records only goes back about twenty-five years, the fact that Radio Ambulante is STILL making stories, mostly in Spanish, and talking about their plans of the future, is something to definitely celebrate and acknowledge.

Resonate itself is basically new…but the appetite to bring audio folks together to relish in the art and craft of their work is not. This fact hit me on Thursday afternoon when I found myself standing beside Johanna Zorn, co-founder of Third Coast. I asked her something mundane like: ‘So how is your festival going so far?’

But as soon as I asked this question, I realized that for her, perhaps of all people here, this was not an entry-level question. She looked at me, eyes dusted, and said…”It’s just…it’s just….wow…” as she waved her hand around. “It’s so…great…”

Right away I punched some quick numbers into my mental emotional calculator. She was obviously quite struck by this event: the size, the connections, the inspirations, the people.

My quick instinct was to offer this to her: “You know that all of us here are standing on your shoulders, don’t you? What you did, what you and Julie (Shapiro) built at Third Coast, all those years ago…this here wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t the framework, the prototype, for what it is supposed to look like. And this here, all this magic, owes a debt of gratitude to the decades that you put into that work.”

Humbly, she denied each of my assertions. There had also been a rather depressing email from Third Coast that week that acknowledged it’s now entirely volunteer run. Over the course of the next two days I quietly fact-checked my opinion. Everyone agreed.

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Stand out session for me and many that I spoke to was from Aaron Edwards: Send me a voice memo. Edward’s ability to create a collective experiential moment brought everyone into a new orbit. Immediately I convened a new Voice Memo friendship with the woman sitting beside me, despite the fact that we had just met. After that session I had to take a walk through the sunny park to allow a moment for the new ideas that were unlodged during this session to wake from their deep slumber and present themselves to me.

Perhaps one of the biggest announcements is that Resonate is growing…in 2027 there will be a companion event in South Africa. This year a presentation from the talented folks at Radio Workshop helped to build that bridge between this continent and that of Africa.

Now back at home, I’m drawing on the energy bank I filled up at Resonate; I was able to put so much in there it feels like the battery can last for a while.

The closing moment came from from the Third Floor of Common House. In what seemed to be a Shaker-inspired call-and-answer format, the voices in the room were collected into one common thread. For me this deeply underscored the theme of the weekend: that a collective experience can draw people together, into one voice.

And with that, the official programming note of the fest ended with a giant karaoke singalong to Madonna’s Like A Prayer.

When you call my name, it’s like a little prayer
I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there…

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The style is unconventional, but it works. As the tone evolves from terror to tragedy, and then humour intermixes with empathy, a multitude of emotions pass through your frontal cortex. Host and producer Jodi Tovay is a total badass girlboss…politely but firmly calling bullshit on every bit of the story. The vocal range of this series is truly impressive.

Host and Producer Jodi Tovay was feeling burnt out in her job as a television producer

She needed a break, some fresh inspo, and just something a bit different. So she booked a trip to Edinburgh to take in some of the famous Fringe Festival.

One day it was raining, not unlikely in Edinburgh, which caused her to seek shelter in the nearest pub. As I understand (mostly from watching Baby Reindeer), the Fringe Festival takes makes every pub a festival venue….which is to say that the fact that Tovay landed in this exact pub was both totally random and entirely coincidental. This detail is also crucial to the story; chance and luck are defining features of this narrative.

Soaking wet and cold, Tovay sat down just as stand up comedian Edd Hedges began his set. The show has a cold open: a creepy, terrifying, desperate banging, like on a door. Then a voice: “Please welcome to the stage, Edd Hedges…” He addresses the knock right away: “I woke up to that noise coming from my front door on the 22nd of July, 2015…and we’re going to talk about that in a minute…but first, hello!” Which is the first of many times that he switches on a dime between terror and laughter.

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Hedges opens his story up: he was a chubby kid who was ferociously bullied at school, especially from one boy in particular. He couldn’t wait to leave his small town so he could swapout his cleats for a microphone and a bar stool.

Years later, Hedges went back to his home town to share his new talents with his hometown crowd for the first time. But the events that unfolded that night would change his life forever. The story that emerged from these events, which is addmitedly a stretch to consider comedy, would become the basis for his material for years to come; this podcast included.

Tovay sat in the audience, wrapped. When the show concluded she was stunned and wanted to learn more. She attempted to find him to chat, but Hedges evaded her. The next day Tovay returned to hear the show again. She wondered, would it be the same twice? She was so shocked by this story she had to see if it could be replicated.

On this second day, Tovay made a critical choice: she recorded the show on her phone. We know this because she tells us, and you can hear the show from a distant microphone. Her snap decision to do this is where the narrative begins in earnest because we are now invited on the journey.

The choice to share this recording with us gives the entire series an active voice in a way that’s rare. It removed the need for the script to write through memory, but instead examine the present moment through evidence and exemplar.

From there the story is deliciously built around a very linear timeline, which would feel very angular if there wasn’t such range in the material. Various timestamps anchor the story in a moment in time so that we can be brought into the plot as it unfolds. It unravels at various moments. It gets very uncomfortable. At some point you wonder if any of it is true. But not to worry, Tovay is out to get the doggone truth. She begins with one name…which leads to another and another.

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Don’t let facts get in the way of a good story

Hedges bakes a storytelling mechanism inside his comedy set. He tells his audience: “This story has three lies hidden inside.” It’s a brilliant trick, really, because as each fact is revealed, you wonder if it’s true. And then it bakes in a call-back, to keep the audience engaged, as they constantly weigh the odds of honesty and probability with each detail of the story. We bend over to pick up the bread crumbs along the ground. Remember, the subject matter is grisly and disturbing, so you also feel emotionally challenged by your own assumptions as you wonder which parts are true, and which parts you wish were a lie.

Just when we start to get comfortable with the facts of this creepy tale, Tovay stops to call bullshit on Hedges. She finds cracks in his details; untruthful bits that don’t add up. From there we shift from true crime to hardboiled detective, as we also examine the facts and ask pointed, direct questions. I found myself fistpumping her questions.

On this quest that Tovay has invited us on, we’re required to consider just how truthful something must be so that it can be both funny, and scary, in the same moment. And then we go into critique mode: Is this reasonable? Is it ethical? What are the limits to publicly processing trauma?

Her choice to call everything into question opens the book on this story. It makes the listener feel like they are a participant, rather merely an audience member, watching (or in this case listening). Her cross examination of the facts that the chilling, almost outrageous story feel interactive in a new and fresh way. It feels like a conversation; it acts like a yummy delicious assignment.

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Wisecrack tests the boundaries of what storytelling can, or rather, should do. It pushes you to the canyon that separates comedy and tragedy. As we stand there with our toes hanging over the edge, we are allowed to ponder where the division is between these two genres. And then reflect on what it says about us when we allow them to blur together.

Perhaps it’s apt to call Wisecrack a fact-checking thriller. Because it calls out comedy as tragedy, and then dissects the story to make sure that we fully understand why we laugh of the things that make us uncomfortable.

Should we laugh, cry, feel scared or have sympathy? Or is it pity that eventually gives way to empathy?

Perhaps each in succession.

At Resonate? Let’s chat…

Somewhere near the end of the summer, that steady trickle of narrative shows began to pick up. And I’ve been very busy listening! Sure, I could combine them into one post, but they both demand their own space.

So here’s what I’m going to do….this week I’ll drop two posts, right before I head to Resonate Podcast Festival…hey, are you going? Want to connect there?

Dirtbag Climber

This CBC Uncover series Dirtbag Climber is one of the most compelling and complicated true crime yarns I’ve unravelled in a while.

Dirtbag Climber begins with the local reporter, and now host of the series, Stephen Chua. He was living and working as a reporter at a small town newspaper in Squamish, BC, when a strange and unsolved crime took place. He understates the fact that this was by far the most compelling and biggest mystery he had ever encountered.

In 2017, a man who is introduced as Jesse James, was found dead in his burned out van. The crime was unsolved for years until his DNA was finally tested in 2020. But that would prove to be the beginning, rather than the end, of this story.

In a way, this series is about the period of time between his death and when his true identity was finally revealed. But the path between these two events was as twisty-turny as the old road was between Squamish and Whistler was before the 2010 Olympics help build the Sea-to-Sky Highway. James is the dirtbag climber in question, where the namesake for this series comes from. But suffice it to say that’s not the whole story.

This show manages to follow both the classic model of true crime (host introduces a mystery and follows the clues to solve it). But before you get too comfortable in that story mold, it breaks the convention and becomes a quest that involves a whole team of reporters slash producers.

There’s something about having a personal connection to the actual place that a murder mystery took place. I’ve been to Squamish many times….plus here’s where I must admit here to my guilty pleasure of the TV show Virgin River, which is actually filmed in Squamish, not somewhere in Northern California. With the hometown curious angle covered here, I started to do some digging…

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Chua establishes that he was living in Squamish at the time

He worked as a local reporter, back in 2017 when a badly burned remains were found in the back of GMC Yukon in 2017. So I figured out the name of the local paper (Squamish Reporter) and I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled back through their archives to find the original article that reported his death. The article does not have a byline, so it’s hard to know if Chua actually wrote or reported this. Once his identity was finally discovered, Chua wrote an article in November of 2020 in The Squamish Chief.

This is a small town. It does have two Starbucks, but there aren’t a lot of murders here. I’ll bet most of the town felt like they were living through it a strange episode of Clue as the facts began to fall into place.

It took days to discover the body, a week for the police to determine that this was a homicide, years to determine his true identity…and then maybe more years and a team of reporters with sharp investigative skills to find the true and conclusive backstory.

As I listened, I kept wondering if it weren’t for this podcast, would the murder ever have been solved?

In my digging, I found a Rolling Stone article which outlines the anything-but-typical life story of the man found shot dead, then burned out van (where all of his personal belongings also vanished as well…no computer, cellphone). The narrative spine of this piece covers much of the same ground of this series.

Jesse James, was previously known as Ethan Wolfgang Hawk. Back in 1999, the writer of this Rolling Stone article had spent a week with him when he was making a name for himself as a 20-year-old Neo Natzi student at Wofford College, in South Carolina, again for an article that featured him in Rolling Stone.

This Nazi history should not be confused with when Hawk emerged as the central character in the 2004 book Spam Kings, where the author Brian McWilliams dubbed him as the Spam Nazi. After the spam came a massive AOL lawsuit, the gold, and then the bitcoin….you will also find all of this in the podcast.

And then…perhaps improbably, he slipped into Canada. He adopted a new name, a completely new identity, became a prolific rock climber and posted social media missives about how the sport of climbing needs to diversify, and lived out of a van on a back road somewhere around Squamish….which is another way of saying that he found a way to fit right into Squamish.

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So no, this series and its terrific reporting did not solve the crime itself; although it certainly might make you feel like this is the case. Impressively, they did manage to find all the voices and put this story into audio. Most notably, they found the father of this man, whose voice became the most compelling aspect of this series for me.

This series perplexed me because Chua had a real-life connection to James/Hawke. He admits that he didn’t know him personally, but, it’s a small town, where rock climbing is the common thread.

But when it came time to unravel the pieces, to stitch together a complicated identity, that involved a fair bit of door-knocking and cold-calling, Chua was not the voice you heard behind the microphone.

When the story took these turns, it was producers Kathleen Goldhar and Chris Kelly, both listed as producers on the impressively long list of credits for the show, who were now also behind the mic. By episode two, they were equal characters in the show, doing the interviews, discovering the pieces.

Chua, meanwhile, is the seamless narrator. He speaks in the present tense and narrates the journey of this most incredible tale of crime. Perhaps this was his choice, but after the establishing shot. Chua is just the Host; the narrator who was there to offer a tangible connection to a horrific murder of man with a curious and shady past.

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The way this production came together left me with questions

Did the producers find this story, and then seek out Chua to narrate the piece, in order to give it that lived-through-it vibe? He had penned that original article in the local paper that made bare the connection between the corpse and the man.

Or did Chua take his pitch on the road, and in the process, his story proved to be just-that-good that the extremely experienced producers took it over, and gave him a short pat on the back as thanks, sending him home with a script to practice and a schedule for tracking sessions?

Or…was it the choice of Chua? He lived through this moment years before, and had already been wrapped up in this crazy, wild story, and really only wanted to be part of it, to just that extent, and not lose three years of his life to it? Maybe his life had moved on. Fair enough.

There are many ways to make a great story…and much of this is determined in the moment, when the pieces need to fall together. Perhaps we ask a lot of podcasts to be thoroughly transparent; but it doesn’t hurt to ask these questions when we look closely.

See you at Resonate?

You know that feeling that you have a show, that no one has knows about yet? You want it to get out into the world…but you’re just trying to figure out how to find an audience? Heard.

“We’re working to not only bring a bit of Resonate to listeners everywhere, but to help get some more brilliant narrative audio supported, created, and out into the world!” says of Tink Media.

Pitch Party is hosted by and produced by. And here you get to hear the pilot for a show…and then learn more about the creators and the backstory of who created it.

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Some Oldies But Goodies Are Back Again

This makes me feel both old and young again when I think about these two shows. Both of them have been on my radio diet for years…high protein, low carbs.

Love Me

From CBC Radio. Hosted by Lu Olkowski, produced by Mira Burt-Wintonick and Cristal Duhaime, mixed by Michelle Macklem…what’s not to love about all the things that make love messy. Help me love less confusing. Find Love Me here on all things.

Love Me has been testing boundaries, raising the bar for what intimate stories are. They make you cry, they make you laugh, they make you want to go run and hug someone you love.

Heavyweight

It’s baaaaack! Just before Halloween, and it’s not even a trick. Heavyweight has returned, from Pushkin, hosted as always by the forever radio character Jonathan Goldstein. And if you’re curious about why it took…sooo long…to come back, go ready ’s interview with Kalila Holt in The Squeeze.

It’s nice to see this forever show back…because if you compute like me, this actually began in prototype form at CBC Montreal as Wiretap, back in 2004, as a 10-episode summer experiment, moved on to radio, and then became a podcast in 2009. Wiretap ran until 2015, when Goldstein decamped for Brooklyn, to start new (and some old things) at Gimlet.

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And Something Else…

There’s an announcement of a new show that’s (finally) coming next week…I can’t tell you just yet…don’t worry, I’m pretty certain you’re not going to want to say “awe shucks.” I feel confident to say that it’s going to be full of lux radio vibes, and maybe even some ducks? Because out there in podcast radioland, we all seem to find ourselves at a crux, with so many things out there that sucks. But don’t worry, there’s still audio _ _ _ _. Coming October 22, 2025

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Speaking of Resonate Podcast Festival

I’m getting excited to head down to Richmond, VA soon…it’s shaping up to be a super interesting festival this year. You going? Let’s connect!

There’s a decidedly new vibe of opportunity and marketplace this year. The folks at The Binge are hearing pitches…ESPN 30 for 30 will be there…Puskin Industries. This is a big new vibe to check out.

If you’re an AIR member (and or a Resonate Ticket Holder) and want to learn more about what what they’re looking for…RSVP here for a workshop on October 29, 2025.

The reason why I put it off, to be totally honest, is trite, bitchy even. But months later it reminds me how the small things matter.

Here’s why I put it off: I was annoyed about the title. The email that landed in my inbox went something like this: ”Just want to give you a heads up the new season of The Retrievals is coming out…this one is about C-Sections.”

Sometimes I have a problem with being too literal. The title: ‘The Retrievals,’ with the slug: ‘C-Sections’ just didn’t work for me. My mind was strewn with images of baby being “retrieved” from a uterus of a labouring mother, a procedure often performed under duress as a life-saving measure. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

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My imagination didn’t help me either. I wondered if this would be about an evil anesthesiologist, more theft and fraud of pain medication? Or maybe go dark and profile someone who has pathological fascination of to observe women in pain, so they deny pain medication to women as they undergo emergency surgery to deliver their babies?

The Retrievals Season 1 won all kinds of awards in 2023, notably at Peabody. I also proclaimed my love for it on the Bingey List that year.

Out of protest, I didn’t listen. This was the first Serial Productions launch day that I missed. This was my loss, I now know. But it raises a flag to talk about other things.

The Medical Establishment and The System and The Unicorn

In Season 1, reporter and host Susan Burton uncovered an obvious crime: a nurse had been stealing fentanyl to feed a drug habit. No doubt the subject of IVF and childbirth touched a wide array of nerves. Hundreds of women send messages, emails, letters, articles and books to Burton. Some commiserated. Some shared more stories, books and articles. Burton began to notice another theme emerge.

Something bubbled up out of the ooze: not a crime, per se. Something that was much more widespread, and much less indict-able: women’s pain is routinely dismissed, but especially during C-section surgery, which also happens to be the most common major surgery in the US.

In Season 1, the women were asleep and thought they would receive pain relief, but instead received a fake medication. For a long while, this crime went unreported, or undetected—how could they know for sure they were also sedated?

In Season 2, the women are awake (by choice, to meet their babies), and are given pain medication, except it did not address their pain. The medication did not eliminate the sensation of cutting, the feeling of yanking, or the heaving and relocation of internal organs during surgery. This has often left an indelible mark of trauma on what was otherwise a successful day—this is not a series about dead babies.

More broadly, this season is about how The Medical Establishment [Heading 1] has dismissed women’s pain: underplayed it in diagnosis, conflated it to be something else entirely, completely misunderstood it. And then about how all of these factors have played into The System [Heading 2] to avoid addressing it, make new policy choices around it, or change procedures to address this oversight.

Burton narrates a series that’s screenplay-adaptation-ready

It arrives complete with its own Erin Brockovich character. Burton uses her intrepid reporter skills to uncover Susanna Stanford, the unicorn hiding in plain clothes. It didn’t take much effort, in truth to find her; she wrote to Burton after the first season came out. But it takes vision to see the Brockovich character as something more than a woman with big hair and short skirts.

Stanford is a patient, and a lay person, who went from circulating a small survey to a Mom Net group, to published author of several academic articles. By the end, we witness Change, on a grand scale, to The Establishment and The System, by this incredible woman who had the tenacity and bravery to stay focused on the issue, her issue, of women’s pain during cesarean delivery.

Many women, like Stanford, report that they still had feeling and sensation after the pain medications were dosed, during surgery. But instead of arriving the conclusion that the administration of medicine was faulty, or that the drug was incorrect, the conclusion was, on repeat, that the women were hysterical, prone to exaggeration, or just lying.

This concern over pain is what kicks off Season 2.

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As the first episode began, I waited for the smoking gun, or hints that might lead to an elaborate courtroom drama until the jack-in-the-box until the Gotcha! moment.

Instead I was drawn inside an odyssey. Over a tight five-episode structure, the series deliciously mashes up the medical drama trope with the investigative reporter archetype. After the discovery of a unicorn of a character, the story is unfurled through a captivating narrative that chronicles something very few people are willing to spend time contemplating: pain. Specifically, and even more rare: women’s pain.

Here’s where I got hooked

The writing is stitched together in a way that provokes a forceful jump off the page. Burton creates an entire medical drama, a story-within-a-story, a technique that requires incredible skill in both writing and delivery. The narrator must be flat and emotionless, but also have accuracy and stealth emotion…because the narrator is also a character. It must be both timely but also lead the zeitgeist, while actively avoiding the fact that medical drama is an overused genre of its own.

This narrative device that makes Burton a character does well to distance her from the subject matter. This works for many reasons. First, it is the classically trained reporter’s goal to remove themselves from a story…something that has become much harder to do in the podcast world where me-stories reign supreme, so this feels rare and special. But also, for another reason; Burton does not have children (this comes up in the show), and so for her, she can’t even approach this on a personal, I’ve-been-there-too level—something that’s hard to avoid in this personal storytelling arena of narrative podcasts.

The writing plays with form and exposes the tropes, in a playful way that makes it fresh:

[Burton]: “The person hands the reporter an envelope of files, that’s a trope, but we’re willing to go for it here.”

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What’s different: It’s multi-layered and it ends happy

The bigger reason this works is that it quietly mirrors the exact concept of this story—that the central character (the patient, but here the narrator) is actually very distant and foreign to the story unfolds inside the operating room.

This in turn mirrors the irony solidly embedded in this series: while the narrator unfolds the story, the use of the third person pronouns gives her distance from it. This is exactly the way these labouring women feel when they are delivering a baby through cesarean, without proper pain medication—undeniably present, but they feel distant and sometimes cold to the events.

Pull back another layer and it also echos the wider point that Burton is trying to make, for the last 15 years of her career: That sometimes women can feel distant or disassociated from the pain that they feel, despite the fact that it’s their own bodies.

And then on another level, this series is equally about consent, which is the unpleasant bedfellow of pain. Through the story of Susanna, this series calls into question the tests and mechanisms used in surgery to give, or imply, medical consent.

And then lastly, it’s about trust; women trusting their own intuition, trusting that the doctors will listen to them. But also trusting that the medical establishment is designed in, and can accomodate, their best interests.

Pain, consent, trust: three things that rely heavily on communication. And how this series ends is by showing us that a decade of advocacy, social science, community building and tenacity, on the part of Stanford, actually worked. Her message of consent and communication begun to show up in teaching hospitals, in procedure manuals.

The whole series ends an upbeat note, an oddity for this brand of storytelling. A story that begins in the darkness, but clearly moves towards the light. It concludes with Burton in the OR, watching this new form of consent-based communication between patient and doctor. And about how culture—and policy—has actually changed on Labour and Delivery floors at hospitals, at different hospitals, across the US.

So what am I still bothered about?

Should this have been its own series? Would it have survived on the shelf as a solo entity? Perhaps. Given the slower output of Serial this year, it’s not competing for shelf space like in the past.

Maybe the NYTimes/Serial also fallen prey to the “strandification” of shows—that concept that the Brand is the Channel (eg The Binge, Uncover, Slow Burn), and the Show is the Season.

But that’s not how they’ve done it before. Each show is its own thing (Coldest Case in Laramie, Nice White Parents). They were the last one, to defend the right of a show to just be a show. And not always a strand. Have we lost them too?

Perhaps it’s that the NYTimes/Serial has underestimated Burton’s ability to find a story that will connect. If they hadn’t, maybe this strand would have have a different name from the get-go: Pain: The Retrievals, and now Pain: The Blockers (that’s the wider term used to describe pain medication).

Burton has managed to create a voice that is unique and entirely singular inside the monolith of Serial. She has carved a voice out of the awkward silence that is women’s pain. She annotates this series without an ounce of squeamishness, no shrill inflection. This space she has created is unique and unconventional.

Her writing style and then presentation has culminated in something more. She has created her own trope, a convention to be used by others. I can see an editor telling their producer: Too much emotion, not enough detail. Go do a Susan Burton edit on that thing.

The last three years have brought an incredible amount of change and transition to this industry. In many ways I’ve tried to reflect this moment …but I could see the writing on the walls well before then.

Humbly, I admit that my most popular post, ever, was when I admitted I got it all wrong. That post took a long time to write and as I pushed publish, I inhaled a long, deep breath. Honestly prevails in this land of critical awareness.

Proudly, my second most popular post was for a series that I feel crazily, stupidly in love with. This was an early-to-market post, and I hope that my yodeling from the mountain tops helped it to go on to secure a big nom, and a big win and an enormous accolade…top 10 for NYTimes for an indie production?

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This publication comes to you from the bottom of my busy, frazzled, time-divided heart. If you have the ability to support the substantial time and energy it takes to pull it all together, I would be forever grateful. Discount codes apply.

Birthdays are about gift-giving, sharing and spreading joy, and making some new resolutions for the year ahead. And with that, I have seven gorgeous little treats for all of you.

PITCH IT!

1. Are you sitting on an amazing true crime story, but don’t quite know how to pull it altogether? PITCH IT to The Binge. The undeniable leaders of this space (Catherine Saint Louis and Jonathan Hirsch) are taking your ideas at RESONATE in early November. If you’re an AIR member, go find a replay of this webinar from yesterday with all the details. Only available to members, JOIN if you can (AIR is an incredible resource for this community).

CREATE IT!

2. Spanish-speaking audio creators…join the Sonar 2025 Challenge. Submit your 5-minute piece before October 12, 2025. Read all about the CALL here.

TEACH IT!

3. Are you an educator who’s looking for new ways to bring audio into your classroom? I’ve got you…for the last three years I’ve been conducting an experiment about how to teach university-level students how to create a short audio piece with zero background. JOIN MY WEBINAR tomorrow (Wednesday October 1, 11am EST). I’ll talk you through how I did it, and how this might be a fit for you.

FIND IT!

4. If you’re looking for ideas about where to apply for grants, prizes, residencies and really all kinds of incredible experiences and opportunities, you must be subscribed to All Hear. sends it out once each month, deadlines are rolling. Global in scope. Too much goodness to repeat it all here. Go to the source.

All Hear

Each month I gather together opportunities with upcoming deadlines from across the industry and around the world — grants, residencies, awards, calls for pitches and events spanning journalism, podcasting, oral history, sound art and more.

By Talia Augustidis

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5. Eurowaves is a newsletter for audio folks based across Europe. Today they announced that they will now be the place to learn about podcasting / audio / radio events all over Europe, right on their homepage. Go here to find out about conferences, meet-ups, residencies and awards, curated for you. Find the country, the language and the region that applies to you. Go here to discover what is happening in the podcasting beyond the English-language, and America.

   Eurowaves

   HAPPY PODCASTING DAY + A Gift For You 🎁

   Hi podcasters…

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   8 months ago · 5 likes · Andreea Coscai

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6. Just in time for it’s 25th anniversary year, Tribeca Festival has extended its audio reach with a new category. Previously, only yet-to-be-published series were eligible for competition. This year they’ve added a new category: The Tribeca Podcast Showcase List. It’s a new way to get your show in front of this huge audience (sorry not eligible for laurels as it’s not part of the competition category). YES! They are seeking exception Independent shows. Watch this space to find out MORE INFO here. Submissions now open

VOTE FOR IT!

7. The Signal Audience Awards are here. VOTE for your favourite shows. Polls are open until October 9th, 2025