Podcast recommendation thread?

Cafe Society
1

I think there was a thread here recently with people recommending good podcasts. I thought I had subscribed to it, but apparently I didn’t. With search disabled, I can’t find it–paged back as far as the board will go, but it must be further back. Does anyone have a link to it?

I absolutely adore This American Life. I’d love to find something along those lines with episodes that are at least 30 minutes long, with new podcasts at least once a week. I’ve started a new exercise routine, and I find it motivating to listen to This American Life while I work out. However, now that I’m working out almost every day for 20-30 minutes, I go through each week’s show well before the next one will be released. If I don’t find a show to supplement, I might have to resort to kidnapping Ira Glass so he can entertain me in person while I do my exercises, and I don’t think he’d appreciate that. (I’m kidding, Mr. FBI man. I’m kidding. Please don’t arrest me!)

Anyway, if you have the link and can post it, many, many thanks!

2

Agree with you about TAL, Ira does a really good job.

If you like science topics, Astronomy Cast is pretty good, and they’ve got a backlog of about 100 episodes to wade through.

How about Bryan Lehrer’s show? Give it a shot, he interviews a zillion people, does a very good job, and he’s done so many shows you can just download a bucketload and skip around until you find a topic you find interesting. Also Fresh Air, for similar reasons.

3

I just subscribed to The Moth podcast, bits of which have aired as segments on TAL. iTunes didn’t find it, but you can subscribe at themoth.org.

Also, it’s not what you asked for, but I also really dig Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, the NPR news quiz show. Always hilarious.

4

A good podcast is worth its weight in gold. My list reflects my particular interests, but here’s what I listen to:

Arts and Ideas - BBC Radio 3
AVRant - an acquired taste, to be sure, but Tom and Dina feel like my own personal friends now
By Design - ABC Radio National Australia always interesting and often eclectic
gdgt weekly - a new gadget podcast Peter Rojas and Ryan Block - the guys that started Engaget and Gizmodo - two guys that really know their stuff
Harvard Business IdeaCast - meaty chunks of business strategy goodness
In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg - often impossibly esoteric but wonderful for it.
Late Night Live with Philip Adams - ABC Radio National - daily treat presented by a most interesting man. Be the first on your block to know the difference between a “poddy” and a “gladdy”
NPR Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me - sounds Like a 1950s radio quizshow except funnier, and more pointed
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe - weekly dose of clear and critical thinking. Delightfully homespun in its own way.
Stephen Fry’s Podgrams - his rich and mellifluous voice would be entertaining literally reading the phonebook. This is becoming quite an irregular and occasional treat but it’s always worth sitting back and immersing oneself in Fry’s world.

Hope this helps!

M

5

Wow, thanks! I appreciate the recommendations and will start checking these out. I’m doing so well with my exercise routine, and I want to keep myself motivated. This is a great way to do it.

6

Great recommendations upthread. May I add -
CBC Radio: Vinyl Cafe Stories. Stuart McLean is a wonderful story-teller, and combined with his interesting and eclectic taste in music, this was something I was delighted to find as a podcast.

12 Byzantine Rulers - The History of the Byzantine Empire. Lars Brownworth’s casual speaking voice combines well with the astonishing depth of his knowledge and research. The standard by which other non-fiction podcasts can be judged.

I also love The Traneumentary and NPR’s Jazz Profiles - I don’t know the extent of your interest in jazz music and its history, but I love these.

And I am going straight to iTunes to sample some of the previous recommendations.

7

For those who are of a military bent, there is the Pritzker Military Library. Over 150 free Podcasts featuring books on military topics. I-Tunes has them.

8

These are mostly my interests, but I singled out the interesting/good ones from the so-so offerings:

NPR/The Kitchen Sisters’ Hidden Kitchens: Short, infrequently-released vignettes about cooking around the world. Ones I particularly liked include “The Birth of Rice-A-Roni” (how immigrants from Canada, Italy, and Armenia, all moving to San Francisco, resulted in the creation of this boxed food) and “Weenie Royale” (the WWII internment camps for Japanese-Americans, and how that influenced their food, their eating habits, changing it in unfortunate and perhaps not quite so unfortunate ways).

NPR - Car Talk: A release of Tom and Ray Magliozzi’s weekly NPR show, which usually eventually gets around to the topic of car troubles. :wink:

Dan Savage’s Savage Love Podcast: Warning, very sexually explicit content. If you’ve read his sex advice column, this is (as he calls it) “the once-a-week, out-loud version”, but it does not overlap with the column. He has a call-in number where listeners can record questions, he’ll read and answer selected questions on the podcast, and often will call the questioners for further information before giving them his answer.

Radio Lingua’s Coffee Break Spanish: If you want to learn Spanish, are a total newbie at it, and can understand two Scottish people (with at least one being Glaswegian, I think) trying to teach you Castilian Spanish, this is probably the podcast for you. :slight_smile: I have to keep reminding myself not to “lisp” the sounds he’s doing that on (like “grathias” for the word “gracias”) but other than that I’m pleased with it. Nearly 80 different 15-minute lessons, intended to coax you along in learning Spanish if you start from the beginning.

The Brewing Network’s The Jamil Show: Expert homebrewer Jamil Zainascheff explains a different beer style each show, talks about characteristics, and then goes through a recipe and the reasons behind different ingredient and method choices. Can occasionally be NSFW.

9

Escape Pod (SF short stories; hosted by the guy who invented the Invisible Pink Unicorn). Related podcasts: Podcastle (fantasy) and Pseudopod (horror).

If you like radio drama:
Decoder Ring Theatre (original stuff; best-known character is the Red Panda, a Batman-like character in 1930s Toronto)
Atlanta Radio Theatre Company (wide variety of stuff, including adaptations of famous stories)
Texas Radio Theatre Company (variety; I haven’t listened to as much of this so far)
X Minus One (radio dramas from the 1950s, adaptations of SF short stories from some of the grand masters of SF).

10

Seconded. I listened to the last couple episodes of this one on my computer, not my iPod, with my dad in the room, and even though he hadn’t heard the earlier episodes he got really into it. Right now I’m going through the Napoleon podcast, which is also good, if not quite as stylistically excellent as 12 Byzantine Rulers. (I think you would find it if you search iTunes for Napoleon. It’s two Napoleon buffs - an Australian amateur and an American history professor - chatting and telling the history of Napoleon. They’re both really, really enthusiastic, especially about reading Napoleon’s letters in the most dramatic way possible, which they then tease each other about.)

BTW, the Moth podcast is available through iTunes, I’m subscribed to it.

I’m a foreign affairs junkie - if you are too, I recommend Worldview, which is produced by Chicago Public Radio, and PRI’s the World.

Another vote for the Savage Love podcast, which is awesome.

One I don’t think has been mentioned yet is The Bugle, a sort of British podcast version of the Onion, with Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver (the English guy on The Daily Show). It’s hilarious.

I am - in case this isn’t already obvious - a podcast addict. I use my iPod to listen to podcasts probably 95% of the time. I have, um…128 podcasts in my iTunes at the moment. (And that’s good! It was 160!) A large percentage of those are parts of entire college courses, which I am slowly going through. <3 iTunes U.

11

X Minus 1 is great! This show was recommended to me a few years ago and I was initially hesitant about listening to old radio dramas, but this show is wonderful.
You can get cover art and episode synopses here:

12

More good suggestions–much appreciated! I’ve already started downloading some.

13

Since other people have mentioned language learning podcasts, I should mention listening to newscasts in other languages. For news in English, I listen to CBC Radio: The World at Six and the Hourly News, and the BBC Global News. In French, I listen to Les Bulletins de nouvelles nationaux (Radio Canada) and in German, there is the incredibly useful Deutsche Welle Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten (Slowly spoken news.) Wish I could find more things like it in Italian and Russian - going through some of the Radio Lingua stuff to find some.

Loving everyone’s recommendations - Vivat the Straight Dope.

14

My current podcast subscriptions:

Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me - humorous news quiz show from NPR.
Car Talk - Callers call in to the radio show describing their car problems, and over and over again the eventual answer is “Take it to a mechanic”, and yet along the way I am always wonderfully entertained and convinced that the hosts are automotive geniuses.
Keith and the Girl - The podcast that really eats up my listening time - I needed just a bit more filler to fully occupy my commute, but instead I got this hilarious comedy talk show that is produced 5 days a week and that is usually a bit over an hour long, and now I’m behind on all my other shows.
Sick and Wrong Podcast - The world’s source for anti-social commentary. The hosts comb the internet for the worst sick and wrong stories and discuss them. Can definitely go too far for some listeners.
.Net Rocks, Hanselminutes, and Deep Fried Bytes - Pure geek territory here - these podcasts are aimed at software developers. .Net Rocks is the best of the three. Hanselminutes is a close 2nd with an equally informative podcast, but Scott Hanselman is not the most entertaining voice to listen to. Deep Fried Bytes is newer, hasn’t quite found its footing yet, and tries a little too hard to push it’s southern theme, but I think it will develop into a pretty good podcast. There are other podcasts in this area that I occasionally check and download if the topic is interesting, but these are the 3 best that I subscribe to.
This Week in Tech, Windows Weekly, and Tech5 - geek territory still, but not specific to developers. News and rumors from the tech industry.

I don’t subscribe to many video podcasts, as I don’t make time to sit and watch them. But Scam School is pretty good and worth carving out a few minutes of time to watch. Each episode works through a new bar trick or puzzle designed to scam a free drink off of a body, and most of them are pretty entertaining.

15

The Onion Radio News is lots of fun, but is just one minute long.

16

The Ongoing History of New Music is really good.

ETA: it looks like the podcasts are just edited one-minute bits due to copyright/distribution laws. You can get the episodes streamed online though. Still very good!

17

Smodcast - Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier. Even if you don’t like their movies, you may still like the podcast. Kevin is very personable.

18

Can you convince me about Fresh Air? I listen to The Business, and sometimes The Treatment, and those are NPR interview shows, but this show gives me this vibe of the quintessential Public Radio Hippie. I sometimes can’t get past Gross saying “this is Fresh Air.” The way she says it springs to my mind the flannel wearing PNW superduperliberals who might try to buy free-range potatoes at Applebees. Remember the SNL women who had an NPR show and got high on portabello (sp?) mushrooms?

I constantly picture her in her split rail studio, surrounded by dream catchers and posters of Che, murmuring, “Yeah, yeah” into a mic.

Can someone convince me to give it another go?

19

Oh, the Naked Scientists is decent, if you can get through the call-ins from the kids and the fact that some of the staff are kind of dorks. I do learn stuff there, if I’m willing to use the FF button.

20

Just remembered another: Not necessarily your cup of tea, but “The Radio Adventures of Doctor Floyd” is very cute and very family-friendly. The title character has invented a time machine and travels around with his colleague Doctor Grant. Usually chasing after Doctor Steve, who stole the spare time machine and is running around through time trying to steal artifacts so he can bring them back and sell them on eBay. They’re short, you (or the kids) can learn a snippet of history here and there, and my kids LOVE them.