Podcasts for People Who Don't Really Listen to Podcasts
You're not a podcast person. You've tried. You downloaded four, listened to twelve minutes of one, and then went back to music or comfortable silence or just the noise of wherever you are. The format has never quite fit. It’s either too long, too structured or too much of someone explaining things you didn't ask to have explained.
These are not those podcasts.
This is a list for the person who finds most podcasts exhausting. The ones that feel like homework, or worse, like someone is very excited to tell you something you already know. What follows is five that feel less like content and more like the best kind of company: the sort that makes a commute disappear, a long flight bearable, or a Sunday morning feel like exactly the right length.
If you read interviews the way other people read novels…
Where it's at by AnOther Magazine
Portrait-style conversations with women who have built something interesting: designers, artists, writers, the occasional wildcard. What makes it work is the pacing: unhurried, genuinely curious, never trying to extract a lesson or a takeaway. You finish an episode knowing more about a person rather than more about a topic, which turns out to be a much better use of forty-five minutes. The AnOther sensibility is intelligent, European, slightly left of centre and runs through every episode without being stated. This is for the person who reads interviews the way other people read novels.
If you've been meaning to reconsider something you once loved…
Sentimental Garbage by Caroline O'Donoghue
The premise: the books, films, TV shows, and cultural objects that women were told not to take seriously and what they were actually doing all along. O'Donoghue is Irish, funny, and rigorous in the way that the best critics are rigorous. She takes things seriously without being solemn about it. There's an episode on Jilly Cooper that will make you want to read Jilly Cooper immediately, and one on Twilight that is genuinely more interesting than it has any right to be. The podcast for anyone who has ever felt slightly embarrassed about what they loved and then decided to stop feeling embarrassed.
If you want to talk about books without it feeling like a book club…
Bad on Paper by Becca Freeman & Olivia Muenter
Books, but for people who find book podcasts a bit much. The hosts are funny and opinionated and don't always agree, which makes it feel like eavesdropping on a conversation rather than receiving a recommendation. The format is loose enough that it wanders — into reading habits, into the publishing industry, into whatever has been annoying them lately — and that looseness is exactly what makes it easy to come back to. Best listened to on a walk or while doing something that doesn't require your full attention. The episodes where they disagree are the best ones.
If you want to feel held…
Home Cooking by Samin Nosrat
Samin Nosrat wrote Salt Fat Acid Heat, which means she already has your trust. This podcast is something different: warm, funny, and slightly chaotic in the best way, recorded during the pandemic when everyone was suddenly home and confused about what to cook. People call in with questions, she answers them, and somehow the whole thing ends up being less about food and more about comfort, care, and what it means to feed yourself and other people well. The episodes are short. I promise you, you will feel better after listening to one.
If you're sceptical…
Normal Gossip by Kelsey McKinney & Alex Sujong Laughlin
Anonymous gossip about real people you will never meet, told by strangers, discussed at length. That is the entire format. It should not be as compelling as it is. Someone's coworker did something unhinged at a work retreat. A woman's neighbour has been conducting a years-long feud over a parking space. A person at a pottery class made a decision that affected everyone else at the pottery class. None of it matters at all. You will be completely absorbed. The most purely enjoyable thing on this list and possibly the most purely enjoyable thing on the internet.
