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