Today’s not ‘List Friday’. But this week’s list comes to you today – Thursday – because tomorrow’s a special day for the most special person in my life. Last year, for many months,, and for a reason (or reasons) I don’t know, I stopped listening to podcasts (on my trusty old iPod mini (pictured)). But in the past few weeks I’ve started again. And my life’s the better for it. Here’s a list of the eight podcasts I currently subscribe to (in alphabetical order):
1. BrainStuff – short twice-weekly explanations of how things work. Really interesting.
2. Ethicist – also short. From Randy Cohen’s New York Times column ‘The Ethicist’. Fascinating scenarios. Great opera theme music.
3. Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 – No-one else does comedy like the Brits. Some of the content makes me laugh out loud.
4. Planet Money – Patchy, but mainly interesting. I love Chana Joffe-Walt’s voice.
5. Selected Shorts – Each podcast comprises 2-5 short stories read by actors. The stories are variable. But when they’re good, they’re very very good. The reading’s uniformly superb.
6. The Moth – true stories told live on stage without notes or any kind of safety net. Here too, the quality’s variable. But the best are brilliant.
7. This American Life – always high on lists of the most popular podcasts. I understand why. Enough said.
8. This I Believe – people describe the core values that guide their daily lives. It’s all a bit sugar-coated for me. Its contributors never talk about negative, impure or sinister beliefs.
I wonder how many of these eight podcasts I’ll be subscribing to in a year from now.
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