[92/365] podcasts
Apr. 2nd, 2021 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistMe: ugh I can't think of anything to say today. It was a very boring day. Let's see what the questions meme has for us today.
Questions: 2. Do you listen to any podcasts?
Oh boy do I ever!
I was just extolling the virtues of The Dollop this afternoon, when it was the reason I could answer "...yes?" whendiffrentcolours asked if I'd heard of Rube Waddell. It's not usually about baseball but it's a comedy history podcast that I think is famous with good reason; it's been fun to watch its normie white guy hosts get more radicalized the more they learn about history.
I think I've mentioned You're Wrong About a couple times lately; I'm absolutely in love with this podcast and have at this point listened to almost all the episodes I can manage (because it can be kinda depressing). Often we're wrong about things by thinking they're worse than they are, or that they have individualistic causes with no context when it turns out they have systemic causes often with deep roots. I'm pretty much the same age as these guys and with a similar background which helps because they're led a lot by things they half-remember or half-understood that were in the news when they were kids or teens, and they're weird people obsessed with things like changing policy rather than changing people's emotions about something. These things, combined with a mental state that made me binge-listen quite a lot of episodes at first, led me to very quickly develop a parasocial relationship with both hosts that I'm enjoying very much, thank you.
I actually got into You're Wrong About because of one of those hosts, Mike's, other podcast: Maintenance Phase. This is co-hosted with Aubrey Gordon, Your Fat Friend on Twitter, and it's a little bit like You're Wrong About but specifically you're wrong about stuff to do with fatness and the wellness industry. I love this -- it can also be kinda dark because how fat people are treated is grim, but they're such a light shining in that darkness. And it's the same kind of format as You're Wrong About, which I love: one person researches a subject and we hear the conversation where they're telling the other person about it. It draws you in as an audience because either you also know nothing or else you have strong feelings of your own about the Presidential Physical Fitness Test or Weight Watchers or whatever.
Lingthusiasm is one of the first podcasts I ever listened to, and one of the reasons I did an entire linguistics degree. Again it's very conversational (although this time both hosts know the thing they're talking about, there is a script, but it's still conversational and friendly. You don't need to know any linguistic concepts to listen, they'll cover a lot of stuff you learn in say your first year of linguistics (in a much more fun way!) but also their particular interests and they interview other people about their stuff and actually it turns out everything is about language so they can talk about anything.
My other language podcasts include the History of English, which is a guy with a nice voice who has meticulously collected the history of English going back to Proto-Indo-European, it takes him a while to even get to English as we know it, but it's fascinating in its immense detail. It also includes a lot of history which is useful for understanding stuff in the language, because many of the changes and developments are due to politics, wars, immigration, the economy, and tons of other stuff outside of the language itself.
And The Vocal Fries is particularly about linguistic discrimination. It has two chatty hosts who are friends and linguists, but the episodes are almost always interviews with specialists. I just listened to one with a non-binary Spanish/English translator talking about gendered language (in both those languages) and it was great. Linguistic discrimination is a particular interest of mine since I moved to the UK and fell victim to so much of it, even as a fellow white native-English-speaker.
I found Unexplained Mysteries by accident when I was searching for something else, but I really love it; it tells the kind of stories I used to love as a kid (the Somerton Man, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, etc.) but also actually tries to explain them and strikes a good balance in the explanations somewhere between "boring" and "believing every conspiracy theory" (which is, honestly, also boring). And because of that I found Supernatural, which again is not too credulous or too malicious in naysaying. These two make the best work-commute podcasts, for some reason.
I listen to a few BBC podcasts: You're Dead to Me (more comedy history in a much more family-friendly way), The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry (really lovely and engaging science communication), and sometimes Word of Mouth (more linguistics) and In Our Time (academic subjects that usually stay the right side of snobby despite its host's best efforts as a total snob!).
And recentlydiffrentcolours told me Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama have a podcast, which was a very confusing combination to wrap my head around, but he said "That sounds like the most Cosmo thing ever" and I'm afraid it is, I love it. It's called Renegades: Born in the U.S.A. and it's feelgood stuff for liberals that avoids the difficult questions about race it pretends its about, but it's still just nice to listen to thoughtful people having a good conversation with their friends.
There's a few more I occasionally listen to -- a not-great podcast my friend co-hosts because it's nice to hear her voice in conversation, a few others I stay subscribed to in the hopes I'll get into them but I haven't quite managed it yet -- but this is basically it.
Questions: 2. Do you listen to any podcasts?
Oh boy do I ever!
I was just extolling the virtues of The Dollop this afternoon, when it was the reason I could answer "...yes?" when
diffrentcolours asked if I'd heard of Rube Waddell. It's not usually about baseball but it's a comedy history podcast that I think is famous with good reason; it's been fun to watch its normie white guy hosts get more radicalized the more they learn about history.I think I've mentioned You're Wrong About a couple times lately; I'm absolutely in love with this podcast and have at this point listened to almost all the episodes I can manage (because it can be kinda depressing). Often we're wrong about things by thinking they're worse than they are, or that they have individualistic causes with no context when it turns out they have systemic causes often with deep roots. I'm pretty much the same age as these guys and with a similar background which helps because they're led a lot by things they half-remember or half-understood that were in the news when they were kids or teens, and they're weird people obsessed with things like changing policy rather than changing people's emotions about something. These things, combined with a mental state that made me binge-listen quite a lot of episodes at first, led me to very quickly develop a parasocial relationship with both hosts that I'm enjoying very much, thank you.
I actually got into You're Wrong About because of one of those hosts, Mike's, other podcast: Maintenance Phase. This is co-hosted with Aubrey Gordon, Your Fat Friend on Twitter, and it's a little bit like You're Wrong About but specifically you're wrong about stuff to do with fatness and the wellness industry. I love this -- it can also be kinda dark because how fat people are treated is grim, but they're such a light shining in that darkness. And it's the same kind of format as You're Wrong About, which I love: one person researches a subject and we hear the conversation where they're telling the other person about it. It draws you in as an audience because either you also know nothing or else you have strong feelings of your own about the Presidential Physical Fitness Test or Weight Watchers or whatever.
Lingthusiasm is one of the first podcasts I ever listened to, and one of the reasons I did an entire linguistics degree. Again it's very conversational (although this time both hosts know the thing they're talking about, there is a script, but it's still conversational and friendly. You don't need to know any linguistic concepts to listen, they'll cover a lot of stuff you learn in say your first year of linguistics (in a much more fun way!) but also their particular interests and they interview other people about their stuff and actually it turns out everything is about language so they can talk about anything.
My other language podcasts include the History of English, which is a guy with a nice voice who has meticulously collected the history of English going back to Proto-Indo-European, it takes him a while to even get to English as we know it, but it's fascinating in its immense detail. It also includes a lot of history which is useful for understanding stuff in the language, because many of the changes and developments are due to politics, wars, immigration, the economy, and tons of other stuff outside of the language itself.
And The Vocal Fries is particularly about linguistic discrimination. It has two chatty hosts who are friends and linguists, but the episodes are almost always interviews with specialists. I just listened to one with a non-binary Spanish/English translator talking about gendered language (in both those languages) and it was great. Linguistic discrimination is a particular interest of mine since I moved to the UK and fell victim to so much of it, even as a fellow white native-English-speaker.
I found Unexplained Mysteries by accident when I was searching for something else, but I really love it; it tells the kind of stories I used to love as a kid (the Somerton Man, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, etc.) but also actually tries to explain them and strikes a good balance in the explanations somewhere between "boring" and "believing every conspiracy theory" (which is, honestly, also boring). And because of that I found Supernatural, which again is not too credulous or too malicious in naysaying. These two make the best work-commute podcasts, for some reason.
I listen to a few BBC podcasts: You're Dead to Me (more comedy history in a much more family-friendly way), The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry (really lovely and engaging science communication), and sometimes Word of Mouth (more linguistics) and In Our Time (academic subjects that usually stay the right side of snobby despite its host's best efforts as a total snob!).
And recently
diffrentcolours told me Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama have a podcast, which was a very confusing combination to wrap my head around, but he said "That sounds like the most Cosmo thing ever" and I'm afraid it is, I love it. It's called Renegades: Born in the U.S.A. and it's feelgood stuff for liberals that avoids the difficult questions about race it pretends its about, but it's still just nice to listen to thoughtful people having a good conversation with their friends.There's a few more I occasionally listen to -- a not-great podcast my friend co-hosts because it's nice to hear her voice in conversation, a few others I stay subscribed to in the hopes I'll get into them but I haven't quite managed it yet -- but this is basically it.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-03 12:37 am (UTC)LOL
I feel like I also saw this happen on my true crime podcasts and it's been a relief to hear.
LOL to this description, which is Not Wrong.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-03 05:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-04 06:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-04 08:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-04 08:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-04 08:56 am (UTC)It's such a good podcast, Aubrey Gordon is my new stan. I recently subscribed to Jameela Jamil's I Weigh podcast and saw that she interviewed Aubrey <3