THE GOOD STUFF

I came to Worst Club Ever with my usual resistance to grief content, expecting the soft tyranny of healing language and prefabricated hope. Instead, Allie Kramer met me head-on. Kramer, a bereaved mother and licensed psychotherapist, begins the podcast not with insight but with rupture: the death of her four-year-old son from brain cancer, an event so total it demolishes the idea of “before” and “after.” What follows isn’t a recovery narrative but a kind of public thinking-out-loud, raw and unsponsored by wisdom.

Kramer talks to grief and trauma experts, doctors, and other bereaved parents, but the show’s real subject is the daily labor of continuing to exist when meaning has been blown apart. She says her son’s name plainly, without spiritual framing, as if daring language not to flinch. And while the loss at the center is specific, the emotional terrain—love, fear, anger, helplessness—belongs to anyone who has ever lost anything they couldn’t replace. Worst Club Ever doesn’t make grief inspirational. It makes it human.

Valley of Shadows takes the familiar true-crime bait—missing cop, lonely desert, institutional stonewalling—and makes it taste oddly new by refusing to purr for the audience. Investigative reporters Betsy Shepherd and Hayley Fox treat the Mojave not as spooky décor but as a pressure cooker: heat, distance, silence, and the local power that can make a man vanish and paperwork stay obedient. The mystery starts with Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputy Jon Aujay, missing for nearly thirty years, and then widens into a small-town ecosystem where outlaw biker gangs cook meth and cops, allegedly, work both sides of the law. Shepherd and Fox build their case with the tactile pleasures of reporting—exclusive interviews, wiretaps, and buried police files—yet they keep a cool, scandalized eye on how institutions narrate themselves. It’s the sound of America’s “public safety” myth sweating in the sun, and you can almost hear the badge tarnish.

Split Screen: Thrill Seekers (from CBC, Vespucci, and Love + Radio) opens with a dare disguised as a question: would you surrender control for the promise of excitement? The story follows twelve people in 2005 Britain who answered a vague ad—“Thrill Seekers wanted”—and auditioned for a reality show without knowing what it was, a premise as reckless as it is irresistible. One participant remembers rereading the ad, laughing at how little it promised, and applying anyway, which tells you everything.

Hosting recedes into the background, letting the subjects speak for themselves, shaping a chorus rather than a thesis. With minimal exposition , the show builds tension through omission, offering up a compelling first person narrative that puts listeners directly in the shoes of the adventurous subjects.

Are The Doors a punchline or one of the greatest rock bands ever?

Really?? The Doors? is a podcast that knows its subject was never about restraint, and happily declines to practice any itself. It opens with a grin, keeps talking, and—refreshingly—rarely apologizes. Host Naomi Fry presides with a sharp, amused intelligence, guiding the conversation like someone who’s read everything, forgotten nothing, and still wants to have fun. She and her guests bounce off one another like caffeinated insomniacs, turning rock mythology into a conversational sport: part gossip, part cultural autopsy, part affectionate heckling.

What makes the show work is its lack of reverence. Jim Morrison isn’t bronzed; he’s examined, needled, occasionally adored, and frequently laughed with. The tone is breezy but not empty, curious without pretending to be definitive. It treats The Doors less like a sacred text and more like a great, unruly movie you want to argue about afterward—and that’s exactly the pleasure it delivers.

Hallelujah! It’s back and we could not be happier. The Truth unspools like a series of cinematic pranks—audio dramas that ambush you with their polish, their sly wit, their emotional stealth. If radio drama died, this podcast didn’t just resurrect it; it dolled it up, pumped it full of adrenaline, and sent it strutting back into the room as if it had never left. The creators have that rare gift: the nerve to surprise you. In a landscape cluttered with podcasters who mistake rambling for authenticity, The Truth cuts with the exactness of a razor blade. Each story is a miniature movie, but crafted with the intimacy of a whisper against your ear. You feel the actors breathing, the worlds tightening around them, the jokes blooming right on cue. It’s the sort of show that reminds you how luxurious good storytelling can be—sensual, sharp, and just a little bit dangerous.

Fela Kuti: Fear No Man moves with the unruly, irresistible swagger of its subject. Host Jad Abumrad guides the journey with a critic’s curiosity and a musician’s instinct, letting the story unfold like an Afrobeat groove — layered, hypnotic, and slightly dangerous. This isn’t a polished biography so much as a living encounter: part street parade, part political screed, part ecstatic séance. Abumrad treats Fela’s contradictions as wild currents to ride, not tame. What’s thrilling is how the show refuses reverence; it pushes, prods, and dances with Fela’s legacy until it feels gloriously alive, like the music itself.

Wisecrack is a rare jolt in the true-crime landscape, a podcast that doesn’t just recount horrors but reinvents the way we listen to them. It pairs sharp investigative reporting with Edd Hedges’s stand-up, threading humor through terror in a way that feels both daring and humane. The storytelling is nimble, moving between the intimate and the uncanny, making the audience complicit in uncovering the truth. What’s thrilling is how it reshapes the genre: true crime is no longer only about the crime, but about the telling, the memory, and the small-town textures that make horror feel startlingly immediate.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso has the charm of a long, slightly slanted stroll with someone who can’t help interrogating the scenery. Fragoso’s interviews aren’t performances so much as gentle excavations—listen to his searching conversation with Werner Herzog or his tender, darting exchange with Lorde and you’ll hear how he coaxes revelation without forcing it. The show’s pleasure lies in its unhurried curiosity, looping through memory and philosophy without ever feeling indulgent. Kael might’ve admired how he resists tidying emotion into bullet points. At his best, Fragoso feels like the most intuitive, disarming interviewer since Terry Gross.

Dying of Exposure with Dan Mangan is a sharp, quietly philosophical look at what it means to make art—and stay human—under pressure. Mangan listens more than he talks, drawing out the messy truths of creativity, failure, and self-worth with the ease of someone who’s been there. The show feels refreshingly handmade, unvarnished, and deeply humane. In the most recent episode with Rainn Wilson, Mangan somehow navigates from Tolstoy to Homer Simpson to the importance of actually liking your kids—all in the first fifteen minutes. It’s modest, funny, and searching, a rare podcast that makes reflection sound like an act of rebellion.

The Wind with Fil Corbett feels old-fashioned and handmade in the best way—stitched together from wind, birdsong, and quiet thought. Corbett’s lilt drifts through the fields like a friendly ghost, his narration tender but never sentimental. Each episode feels built by hand, from the creak of a gate to the hush between sentences. It’s part nature diary, part reverie, a reminder that sound can still feel human. In an era of overproduced podcasts, The Wind breathes—its imperfections are its grace notes. Listening feels like finding an old field recording that somehow knows your name.

The Audio Flux Podcast feels like a rebellion against the tyranny of the 40-minute podcast. Created by Julie Shapiro and John DeLore, it serves up three-minute bursts of sound—miniature worlds that expand in your imagination long after they end. It’s a reminder that audio can still surprise you, still jolt you awake. Each “fluxwork” feels like a secret, whispered from the edges of radio’s past and the frontiers of what might come next. There’s wit, strangeness, and something almost romantic about its brevity—but also a streak of playfulness and joy, the giddy thrill of sound set free.

Hidden Levels is a sly, shimmering excavation of how video games have quietly rewritten our reality. Produced with the precision of 99% Invisible and the warmth of Endless Thread, it turns pixels into portals—suddenly, a digital forest feels as alive as the one outside your window. The show doesn’t lecture; it seduces, inviting you to feel the hum of the circuitry beneath everyday life. It pulses with nostalgia—not the sugary kind, but the ache of remembering who we were when games first made the world feel infinite. Each episode is journalism with a joystick, and somehow, it makes you care.

Pitch Party from RESONATE Podcast Festival and Tink Media, is a joyous reminder of why people fall in love with podcasting in the first place. It’s part showcase, part pep rally—a place where bold ideas meet infectious enthusiasm. Featuring pilots for original new series that speak to the intimacy, power, and beauty of the medium of audio, the result is buoyant, funny, and full of that rarest quality in media: sincerity.

Lauren Shippen’s Two Thousand and Late is a time capsule cracked open with millennial precision—a blend of memoir, satire, and speculative fiction that asks what happens when nostalgia becomes a coping mechanism. Set in a near-future Los Angeles obsessed with early-2000s culture, the podcast follows a group of thirty-somethings who discover that their Y2K-era memories are being mined—literally—for data and profit. Shippen, best known for The Bright Sessions, layers her trademark empathy and queer sensibility into this absurdist premise, turning a cultural punchline into an emotional excavation. Each episode oscillates between biting humor and aching recognition; Britney lyrics, AIM chat logs, and dial-up tones become artifacts of longing. The production sparkles—lush sound design and razor-sharp dialogue make the world feel both hyperreal and heartbreakingly close. Two Thousand and Late isn’t just nostalgia bait—it’s a critique of it, asking whether remembering the past is a way of surviving the present.

Subway Takes is less a podcast than a guerrilla salon, where celebrities descend into the underground to prove they can still sweat among the people. The conceit—that anyone’s opinion, whether from a Broadway ingénue or a bleary-eyed commuter, carries equal weight—is deliciously absurd. Yet the show thrives on this tension, collapsing the distance between fame and anonymity in a rattling car. What other podcast would dare to turn a subway ride into a stage, coaxing the famous to compete with the city’s own chorus of know-it-alls? It’s brash, unkempt, and, like New York itself, impossible to look away from.

Try Hard with Alex Sujong Laughlin is a podcast about ambition, but not the glossy, LinkedIn kind—it’s the messy, anxious striving that makes people both unbearable and fascinating. Laughlin dissects hustle culture with the precision of a scalpel and the warmth of someone who knows the disease from the inside. She has a knack for coaxing confessions that sound like therapy and satire at once, finding the comedy in our desperation to matter. It’s intimate and sharp, a reminder that self-improvement is always a performance, and that failure is often more revealing than success.

Hyperfixed has the jittery, irresistible energy of someone telling you the strangest story they’ve just stumbled into—and it never lets go. Alex Goldman charges after obsessions big and small: black-market cat medicine, ancient medals, Shopify scams. He dives in with manic curiosity, sometimes circling too long, but that indulgence becomes part of the thrill. The podcast isn’t polished into a lecture; it’s messy, funny, and alive, the sound of discovery happening in real time. Hyperfixed doesn’t just explain the world’s oddities—it revels in them, and dares you not to get swept along for the ride.

Official selection at Tribeca, Stanland is a delirious high-wire act of audio fiction—satire, thriller, and fever dream rolled into one. With Rhea Seehorn’s sharp, weary wit, Bobby Moynihan’s manic charm, Jon Hamm’s delicious menace, and John Waters purring like a trickster sea creature, the show skewers celebrity worship with gleeful viciousness. Steve Little and Timm Sharp round out the circus with perfect absurdity. The writing is tight, the performances gleam, and the whole thing teeters on the edge of chaos. Like the best pulp, it’s messy, brazen, and gloriously alive. Stanland isn’t comfort food—it’s a mad banquet you can’t stop devouring.

Two Seasons in Galax isn’t a gentle background listen—it’s a dare. The podcast plunges you into fiddles, porch talk, and the hiss of summer nights, insisting you notice every texture of small-town life. At times it lingers too long on a banjo line or a pause, but that excess becomes its power: you start to hear the town breathe. There’s no hokey nostalgia here, just the prickly, funny, stubborn reality of Galax, Virginia. Messy, alive, and sometimes exasperating, Two Seasons in Galax captures not just a place but the unruly joy of sound itself.

Charlie’s Place is a radiant, soulful podcast that feels like stepping into a secret jazz club where history, music, and memory intertwine. With warmth and reverence, it resurrects voices nearly forgotten, weaving them into a lush, living tapestry. A gorgeous, essential listen for anyone who believes stories can sing.