My Favorite Podcasts

Here are my top five podcasts of the moment:

1. On the Media Possibly the best weekly news show on the radio simply because they spend the hour looking at what the media has been looking at and how they're doing it (or aren't). If you're like most news junkies you get plenty of day by day or minute by minute news coverage. How often do you examine the lense(s) through which your news is delivered? From bottom feeding scum like Rush Limbaugh to actual news organizations, Bob and Brook examine the stuff in the filter.

2. Le Show Every week Harry Shearer brings you up to date and fills in the gaps as he reads "The Apologies of the Week," "News from Outside the Bubble," "News of the Warm," "The Trades," investigates buried leads, and offers up phone calls between the President (is he still in office?) and his dad, mom, etc., "Dick Cheney: Confidential" and many more irregular features. This show has been broadcast for over 25 years and is available on a gazillion radio stations, shortwave, satellite, netcast, and podcast. The online version has the advantage of letting you hear the excellent music Harry plays.

3. Radiolab This show is something else. It takes the sonic possibilities of the medium to their extremes. Nothing else sounds like it and in many ways nothing else approaches the content. This is an advantage of the small number of new shows per year. The drawback is there are so few shows per year.

4. This American Life I don't need to say much about this show. It's the only radio program that I can almost bet will bring tears to my eyes at some point and make me laugh at another (or at the same time). Beautiful writing, production, and musical selections, masterful story telling and easy flow. The television show is also tremendous.

5. BBC Radio Comedy I'm kind of cheating by lumping these together but I'm going to anyway. The Friday Night Comedy Hour is reliably funny. "The Now Show" changes places with "The News Quiz" every month or so. I like "The News Quiz" better. There are a couple of comedy DJ duos I enjoy as well.

Radiolab, Best Thing Since Sliced Bread?

Looking at my fellow Americans that eat a lot of sliced bread I can't say that sliced bread has been all that good for us. But that's just the cynic in me. My Grandpa loved white bread though he knew intimately the entire process of raising wheat to the point of having the grain ground. Like so many Americans, he just loved that almost-dough consistency and the sweet chewiness of it. Can't stand white bread, myself, but I don't mind some sliced multi-grain kind of stuff.

So anyway, I thought I'd point out that Radiolab is probably the second best show on the radio, right behind This American Life. And if the two were starting out in a race at the same time (TAL has a pretty good head start at this point) I'm not sure who would be winning. Radiolab not only tells interesting stories fabulously, the show sounds absolutely amazing. At its best it's literally trippy with sounds swirling around, stretching, phasing, and echoing. I know it's just Pro-Tools. I know what he's doing. I still enjoy the matter of fact way they insert samples of their guests speaking into the host's set-ups, use effects for transitions, and replay samples from earlier in the show to emphasize the scope of the discussion. There is a nice question and answer report between the two hosts that flips between segments. The shows are almost all available for download via podcasts and every last one has been very good at least.