Welcome to my new blog. Here at the Podcast Dilettante, I'll be reviewing a variety of podcasts on hopefully a daily basis, or semi-daily basis. I've been a long listener of podcasts and as the years have progressed I find that I spend more and more of my time listening to them. There are so many podcasts out there that I felt that they needed an appreciation site. The A.V. Club still does a weekly round up called podmass, but often their reviews are fairly scant and insubstantial, especially when compared to the great work that site does with T.V. Shows, games, and films.
Obviously, I'm one man, and I'm not sure how much time I'll be able to devote to the upkeep of this blog, but as the wise man said, the road to disappointment is paved with lofty ambitions. With that said: I follow a lot of podcasts, and while not all of them are ripe for review, especially some of the smaller ones, I do plan on reviewing many. Here is a list of the thirty podcast I plan on covering on this site. If you have any suggestions for podcasts you'd like me to cover, please comment as I'm pretty open to suggestion.
- Comedy Bang Bang: The Podcast
- The Thrilling Adventure Hour
- Serial
- Radiolab from WNYC
- Planet Money
- Freakonomics Radio
- 99% Invisible
- StartUp Podcast
- Savage Lovecast
- With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus
- I Was There Too
- Superego
- Improv4Humans with Matt Besser
- Judge John Hodgman
- Slate's Political Gabfest
- This American Life
- Slate Presents Lexicon Valley
- The Dead Author's Podcast
- Mom on Pop
- Criminal
- Reply All
- Invisibilia
- Slate's Working
- Selected Shorts from PRI
- Risk!
- How Did This Get Made?
- No Such Thing as a Fish
- The Bugle
- Slate's Culture Gabfest
- The Allusionist
So that's a lot. We'll see how this week goes. Of course several of those podcasts are biweekly, and some happen whenever the folks behind it feel like putting out an episode (I'm looking at you Superego and Radiolab...). Others conform to a much more regular weekly schedule. I'll be reviewing any that I listen to, and I'll give a quick TL;DR (another good podcast) at the top of each review letting you know if it's worth listening to. This isn't exactly fair to some of the anthology shows, like Risk! or This American Life, as a collection of stories can often be uneven with highs and lows, but we'll see how it goes.
A quick note about some absences on that list. Obviously one of the biggest and most notable podcasts, Mark Maron's WTF is off that list. That's because, while I've definitely found some of his podcasts to be transcendent, I find that my interest in listening to an episode correlates with how much I want to hear from whatever guest he's interviewing, and lately as he's been interviewing more and more musicians and less and less comedians, I've found that I barely listen to the podcast anymore. Also, and this is just me, but I sometimes find Mark Maron, while always impressively honest and vulnerable (which is why I think he makes such a great and truly unique interviewer) also gets on my nerves a bit. I often find myself wanting to shout at him: Shut the fuck up, Maron! Nobody cares about your neuroses!!
But obviously a lot of people do. And I'll probably occasionally review his show when he interviews somebody of interest to me, or if I catch wind that it's a good show. If you start following this blog, let me know.
Another absence from the list is Welcome to Night Vale. This is a supremely interesting and darkly funny podcast that I came very late to discovering last spring, but already has a rabid following. Set in a Lovecraftian/Twilight-Zone like nightmare town, called Night Vale, the podcast is ostensibly a public service radio show for a town that sublimely treats the horrific with a sense of banal normalcy. It is also has a long mythology and is tight on continuity. Leaping into a current episode without backstory can feel like being at a party with a tight knit group of friends telling injokes that you just aren't getting. I will at some point get caught up, but they're dense episodes, and as you can see, I already listen to a lot of podcasts as it is, so I just haven't had the energy to backtrack and listen to all of the prior episodes.
There is a lot more to discuss about podcasting in general: about the form, the art, the craft, and the business. But we'll have plenty of time for those kind of discussions later. Periodically I'll review new podcasts that are not on that list, and again, if there's a particular podcast you'd like me to check out, let me know via your comments.
I'm not actually sure anybody's going to read this blog, but I personally know that I enjoy reading analysis of the things I love and I just felt that there was a lack of good podcasting reviews out there. But then I could be wrong on that account too. Regardless of how long this lasts, I'm looking forward to it and thanks for coming along for the ride!
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