The Best Podcasts of 2021
The shows about music, family, crime, and more that pushed the medium forward.
By Sarah Larson
December 13, 2021
newyorker.com
This year, as podcasts continued to proliferate and corporations continued to incorporate, the art of podcasting also continued to evolve—including into the realm of audiobook production, which has begun to break free of creative constraints. Many of my steadfast favorites, such as “ Ear Hustle,” “ In Our Time,” “ Heavyweight,” “ Death, Sex & Money,” and Avery Trufelman’s “ Nice Try!” (this season, cleverly focussed on domestic appliances), remained transporting; quality investigative podcasts, such as Reveal’s “ Mississippi Goddam: The Ballad of Billey Joe” and Gimlet’s “ Stolen: The Search for Jermain,” abounded. An extraordinary “ Song Exploder” episode, in which John Lennon, via archival audio offered by his estate, elucidates the creation of “God,” pairs wonderfully with the ongoing Paul- fest and Beatle-fest that this season has granted us. Here are a few of the year’s other gifts, which brought beauty and wonder to our headphones.
“ Radiolab: Mixtape”
Some of my favorite podcasts use the medium to explore the history of audio recording, reflecting on our current aural-cultural moment in light of what’s come before. “Radiolab: Mixtape,” a five-episode miniseries, does this with the humble cassette, presenting stories about the ways in which that format, now underappreciated, changed the world. The series, hosted and produced by Simon Adler, takes us to surprising places—a Tokyo park in 1979, Bing Crosby’s studio in 1946, nineties South Sudan—to show how providing people with the ability to record, edit, and transport sound has altered our relationship with culture, politics, history, our loved ones, and reality itself. It also captures dozens of stunning little moments in the process. In the first episode, a group of journalists gathers in that Tokyo park, where Sony executives astound them with what the world would soon know as the Walkman. Later, we jump to late-nineties China, and the story of how Western pop music from junked American cassette tapes—dakou—“sparked a musical explosion and totally reimagined what rock and roll was.”
“ The Paris Review Podcast”
There’s a reason that “The Paris Review Podcast” is an industry favorite, beloved by makers of other great podcasts: in its cocktail of poetry, fiction, archival interviews, music, and field recordings, it’s an art work in itself, a glorious sound bath to luxuriate in as we absorb the magazine’s literature and ideas. The podcast’s last full season was in 2019, and its return, this fall, had been eagerly anticipated ever since. Its format lets you float from one element to another, largely unchaperoned but gently oriented—this season by the magazine’s new editor, Emily Stokes (formerly of The New Yorker). On a recent relisten, paying attention to the sound design (by Helena de Groot, John DeLore, and Hannis Brown, with mastering by Justin Shturtz), I realized the source of some of its magic: by flecking in hints of sound from daily life—wind chimes, piano, background conversation—the production locates the work more firmly in the real world, avoiding the preciousness that some literary readings can fall prey to while elevating the beauty even further.
“ Stay Away from Matthew MaGill”
There’s a mystery at the center of Eric Mennel’s series “Stay Away from Matthew MaGill” (which Mennel produced with Elliott Adler, for Pineapple Street), about a handsome stranger who moved to a small town on the Georgia-Florida border, opened an exotic-plants nursery, spent decades alienating everyone in town, and died friendless and alone. The mystery is: Who was this guy, and what happened to him? MaGill left behind details from a credulity-straining personal backstory—a childhood of privilege, a marriage to a Broadway actress, a government investigation, a plane hijacking, stolen cars—and also a box of his effects, which Mennel opens and investigates. In the course of seven episodes, researched over five years, Mennel uncovers MaGill’s truths, and begins to weave in a story of his own, about alienation, secrets, and tentative reconnection within Mennel’s family. Like “S-Town,” it strikes an elegiac mood of rumination on a tragic, extraordinary life.
“ Forever Is a Long Time”
The producer, musician, and sound designer Ian Coss (“Ways of Hearing,” “Over the Road”) describes this series as being about divorce; it’s equally about love, family, and understanding. As it begins, Coss, who has been married for several years, explains that every living relative of his who has been married also got divorced, and, in an effort to understand it all, he sets out to interview them. In an early episode, a simple trick of editing—layering together his long-divorced parents’ account of how they met—is stunning in its gentle beauty and power. Later, a particularly thoughtful uncle, who has worked as a firefighter, compares the failure of a marriage to a medical emergency. “It’s usually five or six things that are going wrong,” he says—abnormal lab work, which nobody looked at, then the patient got dehydrated, and so on. “You have to keep an eye on the things that are stacking up.” As the episodes proceed, they accumulate meaning, the interviewees becoming more fascinating in relation to one another, like characters in a multigenerational novel. Coss ends each episode by performing an original song inspired by its interviews. (“Maybe in another life,” he sings.)
“ Southlake”
One of the most devastating podcasts that I listened to this year, “Southlake,” about turmoil in an affluent and formerly collegial suburb of Dallas, zeroes in on an all too familiar situation. The NBC News reporters Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton reveal the story of how a struggle for racial justice, spurred by a high school’s inadequate handling of a 2018 video of white students chanting the N-word, was reframed as being racist itself, eventually inflaming the passions of parents and voters (not to mention Fox News) and ultimately affecting local elections, school boards, employment, and curricula. The series—produced by Frannie Kelley, with expert sound design by Seth Samuel and original music by Ali Shaheed Muhammad—treats an overheated scenario with patience and care. It incorporates audio of school administrators, community meetings, parents, teachers, and students, and its quiet moments—such as a conversation between a queer, nonbinary teen and their school principal about a bullying incident, which he keeps calling “a debate”—are as powerful as its loud ones.
“ 9/12”
Dan Taberski, the maker of reliably great documentary podcasts such as “ Surviving Y2K” and “ Running from COPS”—whose narration, by him, often sets my teeth on edge—did it again this year (and again, with “The Line,” about the Eddie Gallagher case). It’s a testament to his skill that he can write stuff like “how we turned 9/11 the day into 9/11 the idea,” deliver it with so-podcast-it-hurts conversational patness, and still be utterly terrific. “9/12”—produced by Courtney Harrell, for Pineapple Street (with Amazon Music and Wondery)—tells several evocative stories slightly apart from the tragedy itself: cast and crew members on a replica eighteenth-century explorer ship, filming a BBC series, who learn of the event while at sea; Onion staffers who try to contend with comedy; a Pakistani American businessman, in Brooklyn, who turns his fabric store into an investigation office after his neighbors start disappearing; Hollywood screenwriters who are secretly called upon by the government to help brainstorm other possible terrorist threats. The resulting mosaic evokes details of post-9/11 life that we might have forgotten—for example, that a Red Sox fan could get kicked out of Yankee Stadium, in 2008, for trying to get to the men’s room during “God Bless America”—and prompts insights about the world we lost and the world we adapted to.
“ Suspect”
The greatness of “Suspect”—a crime podcast, distributed by Wondery, involving a murder on Halloween—might startle listeners familiar with Wondery’s work, which tends toward a certain level of pulp. But its sensitivity and seriousness are evident from the beginning, and its power builds with each episode. Matthew Shaer and Eric Benson, who wrote the series and produced it with Natalia Winkelman for Campside Media, had access to all of the major figures—suspects, witnesses, cops, jurors, the accused—in a 2008 murder investigation in Redmond, Washington, near Seattle, that resulted in dubious charges. The victim was Arpana Jinaga, a brilliant, beloved, and motorcycle-riding twenty-four-year-old software engineer, who helped throw a giant Halloween party in her apartment complex, called the Valley View, and was murdered later that night. Shaer, who hosts, has studied the misuse of touch DNA in forensic analysis, and he painstakingly analyzes the details, re-creating the party scene, the investigation, and the trial through the voices of the people involved. The series raises essential questions about police procedure, DNA analysis, and confirmation bias, and does so organically, in a gripping, character-driven story that always foregrounds the humanity of its subjects, most of whom we empathize with and respect. It’s also a master class in tone, focussing on justice forthrightly without patting itself on the back.
“ Cocaine & Rhinestones”
Tyler Mahan Coe’s passion project and one-man show, this exhaustively researched, feverishly delivered history-of-country-music podcast was an instant cult hit among music obsessives when its first season came out, in 2017. Coe spent the next few years creating the second season, a wildly ambitious, and wildly long, epic about George Jones. In telling the great singer’s story, Coe zooms in and out to include the development of the Nashville sound, the history of pinball, the invention of ice cream, the Medicis, the production of moonshine, Martin Luther’s opposition to the Roman Catholic Church, Jones’s alcoholism, Tammy Wynette’s affair with Burt Reynolds, the history of drag and masquerade balls—and, quite deftly, cocaine and rhinestones. Coe, an autodidact and the son of the outlaw-country musician David Allan Coe, relishes his role as scholar-enthusiast-gadfly, and his zeal is the show’s animating force. It’s at its most sublime when he delves into the songs themselves: “The song ‘White Lightning’ isn’t exactly about outrunning the law with a trunkful of moonshine, but you wouldn’t know it from the music,” he says, playing a bit of the track. “Buddy Killen’s standup bass turns over like an engine, and all of a sudden you’re chugging down a mountain, Pig Robbins’s piano tinkling around somewhere in the back with all the glass jars, and Floyd Robinson’s guitar lines whipping by the windows faster than passing tree trunks.”
“ La Brega: Stories of the Puerto Rican Experience”
This seven-episode series about la brega (the struggle, or the hustle) of life in Puerto Rico, created by a team of Puerto Rican journalists and hosted and produced by Alana Casanova-Burgess, feels like a step forward in the podcast medium—and not just because it’s produced in both Spanish and English versions, available in the same feed. Elegantly written, grounded in sensate detail, and surprising at every turn, “La Brega,” co-produced by Futuro Studios and WNYC, begins with an unforgettable image: a photo that Casanova-Burgess sees of a water truck being subsumed by a huge pothole in Caguas, Puerto Rico. “It looked as if the asphalt had opened a gaping mouth and was trying to swallow the truck,” Casanova-Burgess says. Potholes are a rampant problem in Puerto Rico; this one was caused by a broken water pipe; the truck was bringing potable water to a community that needed it. “And lastly, as if adding insult to injury, the water in the truck was lost to the pothole,” Casanova-Burgess says. “It was a bit on the nose.” She talks to a man who has started an Adopt a Pothole program—la brega in action—and proceeds, in subsequent episodes, to explore the history of Levittown, Puerto Rico; a decades-long citizen-surveillance program; an impassioned basketball rivalry with the U.S.; and the legacy of Hurricane Maria. A through line is a more geopolitical struggle: the commonwealth’s relationship with the United States.
“ Resistance”
Saidu Tejan-Thomas, Jr., co-created and hosts this Gimlet series, about “refusing to accept things as they are”; it started in October, 2020, with a vivid multi-episode portrait of the Black Lives Matter collective Warriors in the Garden. This year, the show has continued to produce beautiful work about acts of resistance large and small, with a focus on Black American life. In “My Somebody,” a love story turns into a fighting-for-justice love story; in “Jesus Was an Enemy of the State,” a couple explores liberation theology; in “Bushwick and the Beast,” Modesto Flako Jimenez leads a “full-on black-box theatre on wheels” about gentrification; and, in “F Your Water Fountain,” a fifties photograph of the civil-rights pioneer Cecil Williams drinking from a water fountain marked “White Only” inspires a series about people with similar “fuck-your-water-fountain energy.” The show’s writing is muscular, wise, and funny; Tejan-Thomas, a twenty-nine-year-old poet and writer who worked on the podcasts “ Mogul” and “ Conviction,” has a keen ear for language, as do the show’s producers, including Salifu Sesay Mack, Bethel Habte, and Aaron Randle. In the Bushwick episode, Tejan-Thomas appreciates a point of Flako’s about graffiti, respect, and gentrification, and observes, “Even though there are hundreds of tags crowding each other on this wall, and there’s new tags being thrown up all the time, being able to see the tags underneath other ones—blues under greens, reds on whites, browns over oranges—these artists have figured something out: you can claim your spot without having to erase someone else’s.”
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