The Best Podcasts of 2024 (So Far)

Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD (Wondery, Crooked Media, and Pushed Black)

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It’s good to hear Chenjerai Kumanyika’s voice again. The audio documentarian, known for the award-winning Uncivil and the Seeing White miniseries via Scene on Radio, leads this series surveying the rise of modern American policing through the lens of the New York Police Department, which has the distinction of being the largest and among the oldest municipal law-enforcement agencies in the United States. If you’ve ever paid even a scintilla of attention to these two subjects, you’re probably familiar with the fact that the institution has a deeply checkered history, down to its very foundations, that’s worthy of interrogation. The stories that Kumanyika brings do just that, threaded together in his signature propulsive oratory style.

In the Dark, season three (The New Yorker)

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It was always weird that In the Dark, the widely recognized investigative podcast that directly contributed to the reversal of a wrongful incarceration, couldn’t ultimately be supported by its old home, American Public Media. Isn’t stuff like this the point of a news organization? In any case, the show has since relocated to The New Yorker — becoming the magazine’s first true long-form audio series — and its first major project under new management sees host Madeleine Baran, managing producer Samara Freemark, and their team look into an American war crime in Iraq that was never fully accounted for. The resulting investigation is stellar, upsetting, and yet another much-needed opportunity to critically consider the state of U.S. military engagement. The choice in subject makes In the Dark an interesting pairing with Serial’s Guantanamo season, which came out earlier this year; it’s almost as if the country has a lot of explaining to do.

Dodger Blue Dream (Independent)

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A preface: I’m not a baseball fan (despite multiple efforts to become one, really, I’m sorry, I tried), and I naturally wouldn’t give two hoots about the Dodgers or how the city of Los Angeles feels about the team. But what I do like is listening to someone who’s both really into a subject and really talented at making me care about this passion. This, ultimately, is one of podcasting’s foundational utilities, and through that framework, Dodger Blue Dream is a champ. A scruffy li’l independent creation, the show sees Richard Parks III (Richard’s Famous Foods Podcast) intermittently serving up little stories about the team over the course of the 2024 season. Now, this is no simple sports-recap podcast. Instead, each episode plays a bit like a dispatch from a foreign land — in this case Dodgers fandom — in which a local correspondent (that would be Parks) walks you through present concerns. And it just so happens that the team is pretty rich with weird stories, including a bizarro betting scandal involving star player Shohei Ohtani’s translator.

Hysterical (Pineapple Street and Wondery)

Photo: Wondery

Dan Taberski (Missing Richard Simmons, Surviving Y2K) swerves into Radiolab territory with his new project and comes out the other side with something quintessentially his own. Once again collaborating with Henry Molofsky, and backed by a sprawling team of producers, Taberski revisits the story of a mysterious contagion that spread among a group of high-school girls in Western New York about a decade ago. The malady looks like Tourette’s syndrome but isn’t quite that. Eventually, the girls are deemed to be suffering from a case of “mass hysteria,” and as Taberski tumbles down the many rabbit holes surrounding the story, we’re treated to a thoughtful, cutting examination of the human fear of the unknown — and what that fear does to people.

Embedded: Tested (NPR and CBC)

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The categorical concept of sex has a fraught history in organized athletics, and in the six-part miniseries Tested, Rose Eveleth explores the controversial practice of “sex testing” in the governance of elite sports. Eveleth is no stranger to making stellar sports audio docs with a track record that includes some of the best episodes on the 30 for 30 Podcasts. Here, by interrogating the impulse to police the line between sexes, they draw attention to key assumptions baked into the historical design of sports and its relationship to the human body. Tested comes at a particularly resonant time, in terms of both the Olympics this summer and a larger political background of LGBTQ+ rights being under duress around the world.

Shell Game (Independent)

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We’ve now endured months, if not full years, of frothy chatter about artificial intelligence and the supposed revolution it’s poised to bring to society at large. Indeed, the hype is so dramatic that, as a normal person, it’s hard not to feel alienated by the whole thing. But what if there was a way to claw some sense of control back? That’s the question animating Evan Ratliff’s adventures in Shell Game, which sees the journalist tinkering with publicly available AI tools with the intent of finding its limits. The resulting series can be a little shaggy and uneven at times, but the underlying oomph of Ratliff’s exploits here is reliably compelling. It’s fun to hear a human being rebel in a bid to defend his own humanity.

Extremely American: Onward Christian Soldiers (Boise State Public Radio)

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As an organization, National Public Radio has been a constant subject of brouhahas and tumult in recent years, but that shouldn’t take away from the instances where it makes positive developments. Like, for example, what it’s been doing with the NPR Network branding, spotlighting great longform projects by member stations. If you’re interested in local features reporting from around the country, you should definitely take a look at what’s on offer. One from earlier this year that stood out is Extremely American — in part because (disclaimer) I have ties to Idaho, but also because American religious extremism is a huge story that continues to lurk beneath the surface. The series follows Heath Druzin, a local journalist, as he spends a year inside a Christian-nationalist movement with ambitions to convert the country into a theocracy that has rapidly accrued political and financial power in a small college town in northern Idaho. This story may seem like an isolated phenomenon, but it’s more widespread than you might think.

Animal (The New York Times)

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It is perhaps a little trite and way too NPR-y to describe Sam Anderson’s six-part miniseries as an ode to animals and what they help us understand about the human condition, because that is both exactly what Animal is and a blunt underselling of the show’s idiosyncratic sensibilities. Each episode follows Anderson as he saunters off on some international reporting adventure pegged to a different animal — puffins, ferrets, bats — which he proceeds to expound upon in sweet, reflective essays that draw upon feelings of awe, wonderment, and the bittersweet complications of being alive in the world. Sure, depending on who you are and how you’re feeling in a given moment, the emotionality with which Anderson leads his prose might cause Animal to feel a little saccharine, even corny. But his insights are what they are, and more than not, Anderson’s introspections are delightful bits of humanistic revelation. He lays his feelings so bare it’s hard not to be moved by them.

Primer (Maximum Fun)

Illustration: Geoff Tice

Breaking into any tradition of music lore has historically been a kind of pleasant challenge, but in the age of Spotify algorithms and a progressively ineffective internet, the task has become fairly onerous to achieve. This feat is tough enough for genres that are relatively accessible in the United States; it’s much more so when it comes to anything beyond American shores. It’s a testament to Primer’s efficacy, then, that learning about new music genres from abroad feels so easy. In its inaugural season, Christian Dueñas, joined by Yosuke Kitazawa, delivers a highly accessible and enjoyable introduction to City Pop, the ’80s-era Japanese genre whose fingerprints can be found all over the lo-fi music boom that’s taken over sizable pockets of YouTube. Dueñas and Kitazawa are irrepressible conduits of musical lore; armed with palpable enthusiasm and a gentle nerdiness, their particular trick lies in not even pretending to offer comprehensiveness. As the title reflects, they’re mostly producing something meant to get you started, and that is something they unambiguously achieve.

Hang Up (Radiotopia)

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This independent podcast by Zakiya Gibbons, Caitlin Pierce, and Ben Montoya successfully marries the delicious fun of reality dating competitions with the casual coziness of the podcast format. You have six suitors, one “star,” and multiple elimination rounds of phone dates that ladder up to two parallel choices. On the one hand, you have the star’s decision on who they’d like to take on an all-expenses paid vacation, and on the other hand, you have the question of whether the selected suitor will reciprocate and go on that trip with them … or take a cash prize instead. Hang Up debuted last year, where it made a strong impression. This second season perfects the show’s essential charm.

The Case of the Tiny Suit/Case (Independent)

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The trio of Karen Whitehouse, Helen McLaughlin, and Lauren Kilby faced a tall order in following up Who Shat the Floor at My Wedding?, their raucous romp that became a surprise podcast sensation during its original pandemic-era run. But with The Case of the Tiny Suit/Case, the team has pulled off a solid sequel. Their incredibly funny primary gag applies extreme (and occasionally line-crossing) investigative rigor on a banal mystery — in this instance, a decades-old discovery of peculiarly tiny luggage in middle-of-nowhere Sweden — and works due to Kilby’s commitment to playing the straight man under absurd circumstances. There may well come a time when the bit grows thin, but we’re far from there yet.

Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) (Cool Zone Media and iHeartMedia)

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Between The Lonely Island Podcast (see below) and Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), we seem to be in a minor boom time for millennial internet micro-histories. Created and hosted by Jamie Loftus (My Year in Mensa, Ghost Church), working once again with producer Sophie Rae Lichterman, Sixteenth Minute revisits “main characters of the internet” of yore; that is, people or objects once swept up by the heat of internet virality for one reason or another. Think the Boston slide cop, or the Dress, or Antoine Dodson of the “Bed Intruder” song, and so on. The point here isn’t simple nostalgia. Rather, Loftus takes each subject as an opportunity to bring listeners back to the moment of its peak fame and ask smart, interesting questions about what we remember, what gets emphasized, and what gets left out when a meme becomes a phenomenon.

➽ Read Nick Quah’s conversation with Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) host Jamie Loftus.

Broomgate: A Curling Scandal (CBC and USG Audio)

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As with Ghost in the Machine (see below), the winning formula with this audio sports doc is a simple one: Give me an obscure world and make me care about it. Broomgate is rough around the edges, but it’s hard not to be charmed and fascinated by a series that seriously grapples with curling, a sport that tends to be overlooked and ridiculed by Americans like myself due to our utter unfamiliarity with it. Sure, the notion of a sport revolving around intense broom sweeping feels inherently goofy, but isn’t basketball just a game of throwing a ball into a hoop? In this series, listeners are treated to host John Cullen revisiting a recent crisis moment in curling history: when it witnessed the development of a broom so advanced it threatened to destroy the sport. In the process, the audience might even come to see the beauty of the entire enterprise.

The Curious History of Your Home (Noiser)

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In Our Time, the great BBC radio show and podcast, should’ve spawned an entire genre of academia-core programming, and if the day ever arrives that we nerds get to formalize one, The Curious History of Your Home should fit in nicely. Hosted by the British social historian Ruth Goodman, the series offers listeners a fleet-footed romp through the many histories embedded in the everyday household objects we often glaze over: wallpapers, dishwashers, bathtubs, lighting fixtures … I can’t speak to the fidelity of Goodman’s scholarship, but the point here isn’t to provide a comprehensive history. Rather, The Curious History of Your Home is an accessible primer meant to help you take more delight in the world around you. There should be more podcasts like this: fun, light on its feet, something that would make for a great listen on a lark. Bookstores are filled with this kind of stuff. Why can’t podcast directories be stacked with the same?

The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast (Rabbit Grin Productions)

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Yeah, it’s another rewatch show, but when the formula works, it really works, you know? As the admirably generic title indicates, this podcast features Seth Meyers, former head writer of Saturday Night Live (2006–14), anchoring a breezy retrospective of the collected works of the Lonely Island (a.k.a. the comedy trio Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer), whose digital shorts helped usher SNL into the internet age — and, in some ways, shaped the internet’s humor as well. Perhaps you can still hum some of the Lonely Island’s most enduring contributions: “Lazy Sunday,” “I’m on a Boat,” “Dick in a Box,” “Motherlover,” or “Great Day.” In some senses, the podcast can be viewed as a microhistory, much in the same way that Fly on the Wall With David Spade and Dana Carvey serves the same function for SNL and comedy culture around the late ’80s and early ’90s. Here, the period in question is the specific moment in time right before American culture began its descent into social-media hell. I don’t mean to oversell the historiographical value of this thing, but I also don’t don’t mean to do so. Nothing has brought me back to the fanciful days of the first Obama term as much as this podcast.

➽ Read more of Nick Quah on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast.

You Must Remember This: “The Hard Hollywood Life of Kim Novak” Remaster (Independent)

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Speaking of milestones, this year marks the tenth anniversary of You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth’s reliably excellent independent podcast that powers her scholarship in Hollywood history. To recognize the occasion, Longworth has released a remastered version of her very first episode, “The Hard Hollywood Life of Kim Novak,” which was initially distributed behind the show’s Patreon wall and later, as of early April, released through public feeds. The remaster is a lovely bit of media preservation: You can hear a window into podcasting circa 2014, which was still accommodating to independent narrative productions like this; the very early goings of Longworth’s particular aesthetic, which she would continue to refine; and the foundations of a more interesting way to think about Hollywood’s past that YMRT champions to this day. Be sure to check out this great piece of podcast history. More long-running pods should do remasters.

Truth Be Told Presents: She Has a Name (APM Studios and TMI Productions)

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Nowadays, Tonya Mosley is routinely broadcasted to public radio stations around the country in her official capacity as the co-host of “Fresh Air” alongside Terry Gross, but she’s still keeping a healthy portfolio of creative ventures on the side. Among them: She Has a Name, which sees Mosley tackling a matter of personal history. The narrative picks up with the veteran radio broadcaster learning about the existence of a sister, named Anita, whom she never knew about during her Detroit childhood. The person bringing this information is Anita’s son, Antonio Wiley, who establishes contact with his newfound aunt after learning of a DNA test that determined the unidentified remains of a young woman who died 30 years earlier to be, in fact, his long-lost mother. United by this startling discovery, the two decide to team up to recover Anita’s story, which refracts into a parallel history of a city ravaged by the ’80s drug epidemic. What results is a fascinating and heartfelt work of memory and memorializing.

Serial: Season 4 (Serial Productions and New York Times)

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Six years after its most recent outing, and nearly a decade after its explosive introduction, Serial returns with a fourth season that feels simultaneously incongruous with its legacy and perfectly in sync with what it’s always done — which is to do whatever its creators want. This time, Sarah Koenig partners up with Dana Chivvis to construct an inside-out look at Guantánamo Bay, still in operation despite years of presidential promises to close the facility. Like the previous season, this iteration eschews a serialized narrative structure in favor of short stories that draw direct testimony from a variety of individuals who experienced the place firsthand: detainees, guards, wardens, and so on. The composite picture that emerges offers yet another reflection of the boondoggle that is American justice. The United States might’ve pulled out of Afghanistan a few years ago, but the forever war persists.

Finally! A Show (iHeartMedia, Little Everywhere, Lea Pictures)

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As much as the official shorthand name listed above is already a great title for a podcast, the complete version is even better: Finally! A Show About Women That Isn’t Just a Thinly Veiled Aspirational Nightmare. The production pretty much delivers on the promise: Each episode follows a different woman walking through a day in their life, which usually becomes a space where they describe and discuss their worldview on their own terms. The opening missives have included a Pike’s Fish Market worker who happens to be a folk singer, an Instagram-prominent octogenarian calendar girl, and, of course, a celebrity — in this case, the Grammy-nominated Valerie June. Created by Jane Marie, who makes The Dream, and Joanna Solotaroff, a seasoned producer who’s worked at Team Coco and on 2 Dope Queens, the series further strengthens its diaristic approach by cutting out the framing device of a host entirely. In doing this, Finally! A Show explicitly doubles down on its self-declared mission statement, which is to focus simply on the texture of the subjects’ lives — and quietly celebrating the very simple fact of their existence.

Beyond All Repair (WBUR and ZSP Media)

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On paper, the Beyond Repair possesses all the trimmings of a solid, if not generic, entry in the true-crime genre. A grim family affair sits at the center of its concerns: a 58-year-old woman, Marlyne Johnson, was found bludgeoned to death in her Brush Prairie, Washington, home in 2002. Her daughter-in-law, Sophia Johnson, was briefly convicted for the killing on the potentially perjurious word of her brother, Sean Correia, who claimed to witness the murder, but the Washington court of appeals reversed the conviction a few years later after finding fault in the proceedings. The second trial cleared her name, though only on paper; Sophia Johnson was deported to her native Guyana, and she continues to be the focus of all suspicion in the cold case despite her protestations. This could’ve been fodder for any number of true-crime shows, but this podcast stands apart from the pack. The reporter Amory Sivertson steps into the story almost two decades later, having found the case through happenstance, and, unlike other genre entries, she reckons plainly and honestly with the fog of mystery surrounding Sophia Johnson and her family. There’s a real commitment to the first-person point of view in this piece, though it never loses a clear enforcement of journalistic integrity. How do you convey the sheer uncertainty felt by the investigator without oversensationalizing the case? Sivertson and her team walk that fine line, and the way they balance the tightrope is fascinating.

Better Offline (Cool Zone Media)

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Tech-news podcasts are a vibrant genre dating back to the origins of the medium’s history, and these days, you’re not particularly short of good places to get ’em: our cousins over at The Vergecast and Pivot, the New York Times’ Hard Fork, indies like Dithering, OGs like This Week in Tech and Accidental Tech, so on and so forth. But there’s something about Better Offline, hosted by Ed Zitron, the punchy and puckish media personality, that feels like a fresh shot in the arm. Think of it as a tech-news show with an alt-weekly bent, largely approaching the subject with the inherent belief that the tech industry is a pure elite power now — and that there is nothing particularly redeemable about elite power.

The Ezra Klein Show: “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden” (New York Times “Opinion”)

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. There have been, like, what, a thousand profiles of the guy now, primarily pegged to his series of podcast episodes at the top of the year articulating Biden alternatives that’s widely thought to have softened the ground for institutional Democrats to actually go through with blowing up their ticket after the president whiffed in the first debate against Trump. But you know what? I’m placing Klein’s original audio essay on this list because, quite frankly, this thing should probably go down as one of the most consequential podcast episodes to ever exist.

Valley Heat (Maximum Fun)

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Christian Duguay’s comedy pod, which follows the dopey fictional misadventures of a freelance insurance adjuster named Doug Duguay as he uses his arcane skills to snoop around his neighborhood, continues to release new episodes on an aggressively sporadic non-schedule. Consider, for instance, how its second season “premiered” at the beginning of 2022, only to publish two episodes months apart before picking back up this January. But even that is part of the pungent charm of this bizarro indie production, which makes an art out of idiosyncrasy. Valley Heat is a strange and effortlessly hilarious creation that reminds me of the kind of oddball shows you’d find on Adult Swim or, more to the point, cable-access television. Don’t miss it.

99% Invisible’s Power Broker Series (SiriusXM)

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Some day, I’ll sit down and polish off The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s celebrated book about Robert Moses and his controversial machinations that built the modern New York City urban landscape. Or so I tell myself. Despite restarting the 1,300-plus-page tome multiple times over the years, I know the feat probably won’t happen unless I somehow find several months free of personal and professional responsibility. Thank goodness, then, for Roman Mars and 99% Invisible, which has come waltzing in with a special series on the book that provides hapless audiences like myself another way to get intimate with the text. It’s a book club for a certain Venn-diagram overlap that unites urban planning, architecture, podcast, public policy, and politics nerds with each installment covering several chapters of the biography while digging into the major threads and ideas embedded in Caro’s journalism. A parade of guest stars pop in to accompany Mars in each episode, including Caro himself, who appears in the first episode to bless the proceedings. I’ve been personally off the 99% Invisible train for a bit, and this has been a nice way to get back into the long-standing pod.

Ghost in the Machine (Stak)

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In my estimation, the best scandal stories are the ones that make me obsess over something I previously couldn’t give two hoots about, and based on that rubric alone, Ghost in the Machine is an exemplary yarn. Set in the high-stakes world of professional cycling, and led by journalist Chris Marshall-Bell, this series revisits a big ol’ brouhaha that happened in 2016 when a rising Belgian star, Femke van den Driessche, was allegedly caught with a bike containing a motor hidden in its frame. The practice is called, incredibly, “mechanical doping,” and while allegations of this type of cheating have been kicking around since 2010, the van den Driessche incident marked the first time evidence of “technological fraud” was found during a race. A downward spiral ensued: The sport’s authorities levied penalties, van den Driessche claimed that the bike didn’t belong to her and was mistakenly brought into the pit, her career was ultimately ruined. But what actually happened here? And how widespread is the practice, really? Since dropping five episodes earlier this year, the podcast has been on a break after shifting gears and becoming a “live investigation” — indicating that there’s loads more on this story to come.

Things Fell Apart, Season 2 (BBC)

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The odd Okja aside (which he co-wrote), Jon Ronson has spent the better part of his career cranking out nonfiction stories — ranging from The Psychopath Test to The Men Who Stare at Goats to So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed — on what, in hindsight, could be described as the rapid decline of our shared reality. In Things Fell Apart, which he produces for BBC Radio 4, Ronson focuses on stories of the COVID present, and they collectively make up an expansive study on how we arrived at our current warped society. After a strong first outing last year, the follow-up season, released in January, sees Ronson further rooted in his wheelhouse with an array of episodes that are often as equally provocative as they are unsettling. How does a best-selling book about trauma figure into the explosion of culture-war conflicts happening in colleges and workplaces? How did the mysterious death of Black sex workers in Florida in the ’80s connect to the killing of George Floyd and the movement against police brutality it sparked? Less an anthology of “hidden histories” and more an exercise in drawing attention to things that’ve been stewing out in the open for a long while, Things Fell Apart can be viewed as an excellent primer to today’s mass American psychosis.

Club Shay Shay: “Katt Williams” (The Volume and iHeartMedia)

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The comedian Katt Williams went on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast at the very top of the year and proceeded to set fire to the universe. Months later, the ash is still smoldering. For years, creators have grappled with questions about what it means for podcasting’s identity as a long-form audio format to be structurally inhibited from easily reaping the benefits of internet virality. The answer seems to have arrived in the form of shifting formats altogether; these days, podcasting is leaning deeper into video, and specifically YouTube. With that trend, a new species of podcaster is on the rise — and with it, new ways for the medium to inject itself into the broader culture. In hindsight, Williams’s appearance on Club Shay Shay feels like a genuine turning point in that transition.

➽ Read a recap of the outrageous highlights from Katt Williams’s appearance on Club Shay Shay.