THE GOOD STUFF

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.