Bello Weekly: Podcasts ‘n pie

7 podcasts we’ve never written about before, best of the week, and industry news

The Bello Collective

Published in

Bello Collective

9 min readNov 21, 2016

Beautiful copper roof on the Town Hall of historic Medford, Wisconsin. Photo: Dana.

An intro from Dana Gerber-Margie:

Bello friends,
I’m excited: I traveled north to the heart of Wisconsin this week, so I had hours and hours to listen to podcasts. My “unplayed” list is under 50! So from me and from our team of writers, to you, we have some excellent content for you to consume (as you also consume too much food, if you are celebrating Thanksgiving this Thursday!).
Not only do we have our regular recommendations for you to feast on, but we also have industry items, new shows to share, and a reader-suggested column. Scrumptious side dishes (if you will let me continue bad Thanksgiving puns).
We’re so thankful for you, readers.
Love,
Dana

New (or new to us)

7 shows we’ve never written about before

1. From Panoply: Why Oh Why

Featured on iTunes this week, Why Oh Why is a podcast reboot from producer Andrea Silenzi. It’s a memoir/documentary/fiction about love, sex, and technology. I loved the most recent episode, Just My Swipe, a live dating-experiment set up like the Bachelor or Match Game, but with Tinder.

2. From WBEZ: Do Listen Twice and Making Oprah

Two new shows from WBEZ in Chicago: Do Listen Twice is a This American Life mini-series featuring Ira’s favorite Mike Birbiglia stories on TAL, to promote the Ira-produced movie Don’t Think Twice. Listen if you want to revisit old favorite sections of TAL.

Making Oprah, a new three-part series (⅔ available now) about the rise of the Oprah Winfrey Show. Listen ‘if you like big hair shoulder pads, and 80s TV themes’.

3. From WQXR: Helga

This new show hosted by vocalist and activist Helga Davis won’t just be episodes about music making, but aims to foster a thoughtful look into the power of art and music for social change. The latest episode features frontrunner Shara Worden of a band we haven’t heard of in ages, My Brightest Diamond.

4. From De Facto Sound: Twenty Thousand Hertz

Cool thing we learned: the NBC chimes (you know, da-da-da) were the very first sound to very be awarded an audio trademark. This short-and-sweet new podcast, Twenty Thousand Hertz, tells the story of the most iconic and recognizable sounds in the world.

5. From KQED: Bay Curious

“There are just some days when a burrito isn’t very good”. The most San Francisco-ish opening line from Bay Curious, KQED’s new Q&A podcast about the Bay Area. 5 minutes to learn about the possible origin stories of the word hella.

6. From Slate: Warm Regards

There’s been so much to worry about with the implications of the election that climate issues have taken a backseat. But listening to this episode, Climate Anxiety in the Trump era, might change that. The show is hosted by an environment writer for the New York Times, a paleoecologist, and a meteorologist.

7. From the Podquest Shortlist: Third Culture

Radiotopia & PRX recently announced the winner of Podquest (Ear Hustle!) but there were close to 1500 other entries. Third Culture made the top ten out of a fiercely talented and competitive pool. In the first episode, Naima Sakande tries to answer the question “where am I from?” by returning to Burkina Faso, a place she knew well for so long but mostly through her father’s deep ties.

This week’s recommendations

Do you know what Adam said on the day before Christmas?
It’s Christmas, Eve.

Beefily Ever After, How To Do Everything

This week was the last week of one of NPR’s best shows, How To Do Everything. Instead of a special last episode, Mike and Ian continued to teach us useful things, like how fast we need to drive to follow the sunset around the world. Miss you already, HTDE. (Brittany)

The Crime, In the Dark

We’ve mentioned In the Dark before, but wanted to highlight it again. Madeleine Baran of APM Reports presents us with the famous Jacob Wetterling case, and the creation of the sex offender registry. This podcast is completed for now, but if you’re craving more from Baran we suggest The Podcast Digest’s interview. (Dana)

The Death of Kollin Elderts, Offshore

In 2011, a white, off-duty federal agent shot and killed a native Hawaiian. Through the story of what happened that night and after comes the tale of race relations in Hawaii and the rest of the U.S., and how those relations have and have not changed since Hawaii became a state in 1959. (Galen)

The Tip, Missing & Murdered: Who Killed Albert Williams?

A huge and deserved critique of the true crime genre is the obsession with white women. Much like Offshore is looking at race relations on Hawaii through the lens of a murder, this important podcast is part of a larger project looking at the Unsolved Cases of Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada. The podcast takes a look specifically at Alberta Williams, a woman who suddenly went missing on her last night in the area before moving back to the city with her sister. Her body was found on the Highway of Tears, and a retired cop thinks he knows who did it.

(Note: you simply must check out the beautifully done interactive video chapters of the podcast. Excellent work from the team!) (Dana)

Living the Roman Good Life, with Pliny the Younger- About Buildings + Cities

What was a Roman Villa like in Pliny the Younger’s day? We do have descriptions, but there is no real consensus on how it looked exactly and any reproduction that has been made reflects how the Roman Empire was viewed by that time period. This is great historiography through the lens of architecture. (Calen)

The Guardian Long Read: A lynching in Georgia: the living memorial to America’s history of racist violence

There are no public monuments in America devoted to the terrorism inflicted on black Americans. One town in Georgia tries to fix that with a painfully real living memorial. (Dana)

Homecoming — MANDATORY

Homecoming seems like a pretty promising show. I know that the premise seems familiar (cough Bright Sessions cough), but it seems that the direction it is going in will be interesting, and the dialogue is spot on and realistic. I’m not a huge fan of behind the scenes interviews they have at the end, but we’ll see. (Calen)

Short Cuts: Borderlands

Geography can create obvious borders: mountains, rivers, oceans. But sometimes — and now more often than not — borders have to be drawn by human wants and desires. Borderlands can be contested lands; a house could stay in one place but changed countries in an instant. In this episode, the lovely Josie Long (as usual) takes us to an actual newly created border of a micronation, complete with prince and princess, as well as to the more metaphysical border between life, death, and dreams. (Dana)

What else was good this week?

If you miss The Intern, you can catch Allison Behringer’s acting debut on the most recent episode of Doin’ It With Mike Sacks. Garth Brooks on Wait Wait! Don’t Tell Me. A weekly challenge from Do By Friday: send someone a weird thing from Amazon. Women of the Hour is back for season 2 with a promising new episode, Trapped. The future is female: Jenna Weiss-Berman and Laura Walker sit down to talk public media on Transom. Consider John Singer Sargent’s 1882 portrait of four sisters on the Lonely Palette. Chuck Palahniuk is too hot for radio. Imaginary Worlds recruits Dumbledore’s Army for the future. Singing Bones guesses the name of Rumpelstiltskin.

News/Industry

By Brittany

Radio + travel + wandering around

Favorite things combine: audio-tour-guide app Detour and Airbnb are partnering for a new thing called Airbnb Audio Walks. You can even ‘form a group to sync audio with friends’, which seems like a super valuable feature even outside of this context. If you have a voice for radio and a story about your neighborhood to tell (and your neighborhood is in LA, SF, London, Paris, Tokyo, or Seoul), you can apply to be a local narrator.

Can’t say we’re not critical

We got lots of feedback on our article last week about Gimlet’s StartUp mini-season on Dov Charney & American Apparel, and we really appreciate all of your thoughtful responses. I like Gimlet a lot, so here’s a quick shoutout about the good things they did recently! Hey Gimlet, your website redesign looks great, and the Reply All 48-hour call in show was one of the best things I’ve heard in weeks. (The newest episode of StartUp, however, might be the most disappointing yet).

We have a friend-crush on: Alex Laughlin

I came across Alex Laughlin’s name while reading about how to make a side hustle work for your journalism career, and I knew I’d seen her work before, so I did a quick Google search (okay, stalking sesh). From writing that 22 most influential women in podcasting article a few months ago, to her fabulous and thoughtful Ladycast podcast (which I admit I had never listened to, but binge-listened to several of because it’s honest and articulate and feminist and excellent), she is one cool lady.