[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. On today's show, Bobby Finger will be here. He's the host of the Who? Weekly podcast. He's also a novelist. His latest is called Four Squares and he'll join us in studio to discuss. I'll speak with actor Tory Kittles and director Kenny Leon about the revival of the play Home, originally performed in 1980. It's now getting a revival on Broadway. We have the director of a new documentary, Farming While Black, as well as one of the people featured in that film. That is our plan, so let's get this started with summer podcasts.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Let's say you're hitting the road this holiday weekend, driving, training, plaining to your company, for your company, we have a slew of summer listening. If you're a fan of gripping true crime, we have a tale involving the pope. Laughing, laughing out loud? Well, there's a comedy show about miniature dinosaurs. Crave insight, dialogue on why Bruce Springsteen is a queer icon. Well, there's a podcast there for you. Lifehacker, podcast writer, Podcast The Newsletter curator, and Tink Media founder Laura Passell joins us to share some of her podcast recommendations for summer. Laura, welcome back to all of it. Lauren.

Lauren Passell: Hi, Alison. How are you? I'm thrilled to be here with you today. Welcome back.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Listeners, we are crowdsourcing your podcast recommendations for the summer. What's a podcast that you really enjoyed lately or one that you've been planning to add to your library? Tell us about your podcast recommendations for the beach, for road trips, sunbathing, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Call or text us at 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC or you can send us a message on social media @AllOfItWNYC. We're crowdsourcing podcasts. Lauren, what's the emerging trends you were seeing in the podcast entering for summer of 2024?

Lauren Passell: Well, one thing I have been noticing is stories taking place in Italy, which is exciting. I mentioned we're going to be talking about one, The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi, which is kind of a Sopranos-ish story about Italian Americans, but going to the Vatican as we'll discuss soon. There's also this wonderful show called The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza, who's done tons of great podcasting stuff. It's about her going back to Sicily to find out who murdered her grandmother. It's loosely based on a novel that she wrote of the same name.

There's also one called Pack One Bag, about a Jewish-Italian man going back to his roots and looking into his family past. I'm feeling a lot of like maybe it's because of White Lotus, feeling a lot of Italian vibes, but also a lot of maybe people going back to their own family stories. I think I'm noticing a lot of that too. Of course, celebrities having podcasts is nothing new but there's that too. I didn't bring too many of those. I read some more interesting things, I think.

Alison Stewart: How have listeners' preferences and behaviors evolved in the last year or so and how is it driving the content and production strategies?

Lauren Passell: Well, I think listeners, their standards are going up as they should. I think it used to be a little easier to have a show if you have a top-notch engineer or editor or something. I think listeners are just so used to top quality that it's a little bit harder to have a great show if you're just picking up a microphone and you don't really know what you're doing, which I think is good. Our standards are going up, which is a nice thing to see.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious about the idea of niche podcasts because podcasts, they really have gotten close to one series of-- Let me start again. You said you get really close to one series of events. The really niche. What role do niche podcasts play in the current podcast ecosystem?

Lauren Passell: I think niche podcasts are the future. I really do. I think in this era, there are so many podcasts that sometimes I can't even differentiate. If I'm listening to several true crime podcasts in one week, sometimes I'm mixing up the storylines accidentally. The more niche, the more you're going to stand out and give people a reason to come to you. I've heard so many wonderful niche podcasts. I'd love to even come back sometime and talk about some of the best niche podcasts. One, there's an entire podcast about vertical farming. You can really dig in deep to a topic you know nothing about and find your people. I would advise someone thinking of starting a podcast to go as niche as possible. That audience is there.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing summer podcasts with Lauren Passell, Tink Media founder and curator of the Podcast The Newsletter. Listeners, we're crowdsourcing your podcast recommendations for the summer. What have you been enjoying lately? What have you been planning to add to your library? Tell us your podcast recommendations for the beach, road trip, sunbathing, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Call and text, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or send us a message on our social media, @AllOfItWNYC. Okay, let's get into your list so far. You recently crafted this list of true crime, fiction, comedy. We'll start with the comedy, Tiny Dinos, which stars Connor Ratliff and James III. What is the entire premise of Tiny Dinos?

Lauren Passell: Okay, so let's make this clear right up front. It is an improv comedy podcast, but it puts Connor Ratliff, who-- he was on Search Party. He had this very popular podcast called Dead Eyes. James III. They're two improv comedians. They are friends and scientists on the podcast, not in real life, who have brought back dinosaurs. They thought that would be too dangerous. They thought maybe if they were tiny dinosaurs, they wouldn't be quite so dangerous. They brought back tiny dinosaurs. The entire podcast is their friends stop by.

At first, they're trying to keep this big, exciting scientific break a secret from their friends. Their friends start figuring out they have tiny dinos in their house. It's kind of a great playground for them to play around with their improv skills and also play with their great friends like Lauren Lapkus, Jason Mantzoukas, and all these other great improv comedians come over. Everybody's playing along with this great tiny dino game. It's absolutely silly. I also just love the idea of feeling like I'm in this funny little house with them and seeing who rings the doorbell next. It's hysterical.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's listen to a clip of Tiny Dinos. This is the first minute of the first episode. Connor is quizzing James on the one thing they agreed not to do as scientists.

Connor Ratliff: James?

James III: Yes, Connor?

Connor Ratliff: We're best friends, yes?

James III: Absolutely. Of course.

Connor Ratliff: We are both scientists and we are best friends.

James III: Yes. Why are you recounting our-- Yes, of course, I know this.

Connor Ratliff: I just want to establish that before I tell you something that I think might make you a little angry with me.

James III: What'd you do, Connor?

Connor Ratliff: Okay, I have done something. Well, in a way, we have done something. We have done something. Let me ask you a question. What is one of the things that you and I frequently will say should never be done by scientists in the real world?

James III: We should never dabble in the dark arts.

Connor Ratliff: Yes, magic is off limits. It's too dangerous. It's too much. We don't understand about magic if magic exists-

James III: Sure. We can't even say.

Connor Ratliff: -which, scientifically, we can't even prove. Okay, what's something else? What's something that we should not do as scientists? Time travel. We always say time travel.

James III: We always say time travel.

Connor Ratliff: That's a no-go, right? Too many variables.

James III: Yes, there's no way to make sure that everything is in line.

Connor Ratliff: Okay, but what's a big one? What's a big one that you and I say should never be done?

James III: We shouldn't bring dinosaurs back.

Connor Ratliff: We shouldn't bring dinosaurs back to life.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] What's the format of each episode? How long are they?

Lauren Passell: They're pretty short. You can blow through them pretty fast, I'd say 45 minutes, maybe to an hour. You also get to meet some new great comedians that you can follow on further journeys. It's a great way to discover your next favorite improv comedian.

Alison Stewart: We've been getting some great texts. "Podcast recommendation. My Therapist Ghosted Me. It's two Irish women hosting who are hilarious. Love listening to their accents too. If you haven't listened to Matt Katz's Inconceivable Truth, do it." I second that. Also, let's see. "Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She interviews stellar women from Isabel Allende to Julie Andrews to Vera Wang to Amy Tan. It's fabulous. JLD is a terrific interviewer."

Thanks for those recommendations. Let's go to your next. Sixteenth Minute (of Fame). It's another show that made your Best of 2024 list so far. The podcast is about the main characters of the internet. For example, the dress that looked blue to some viewers and gold to others. How does this podcast encapsulate the culture of the internet?

Lauren Passell: Well, it is about these internet moments, but it's about so much more than that. Jamie Loftus is the host of this show. By the way, if you want more podcast recommendations, just listen to every single thing that Jamie Loftus has made. She has one of my favorite things ever called My Year in Mensa. Huge recommendation. She really takes a look at everything surrounding these internet characters.

No one wants to be the main character of the internet, but she looks back and looks at everything happening around it. For example, I don't know if you remember the Boston slide cop, the cop that shot down a slide at a Boston playground. He was the main character of the internet one day, but Jamie spends time interviewing people that have gone down the slide. She goes down the slide.

She investigates the lack of transparency in policing in the US, male fragility propaganda by Boston as a vibe, and even a physics expert who gives a lesson in slide projection. Okay, so it's not just talking about this one character, but it's also talking about the 16th minute, which is what happens after their 15 minutes of fame. She's absolutely hysterical and really is doing actual reporting and journalism to deepen our appreciation for these wonderful, wild moments of the internet.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's listen to a clip from Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), which explains why hundreds of Black TikTok creators went on strike in the summer of 2021.

Jamie Loftus: Black artists have been at the forefront of so many artistic movements only to have those innovations borrowed or stolen by white artists who had more institutional support put behind them while being a poor imitation. It's one of the many tentacled extensions of white supremacy. Oh, you thought I wasn't going to bring up white supremacy in the first five minutes of the show? Well, think again. This oppression continues to take shape in today's social media algorithms, because who's making these algorithms? According to the 2023 diversity report from Tech Report, still mostly-

Male Voice: -white.

Jamie Loftus: Yes, they're white and they are he. At present, only about a quarter of the massive tech industry consists of women and only 7% of the tech industry are Black.

Alison Stewart: How does this podcast explore which voices and what kinds of content are valued on social media?

Lauren Passell: Well, I think Jamie does a good job of explaining that a lot of these episodes are about how underrepresented people are getting a lot of attention and also ripped to shreds online. They're getting all this fame, but it comes at an enormous price. I think that is kind of the bigger story underlining a lot of these episodes.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call on Line 1. Hazel is calling in from Manhattan. Hi, Hazel. Hazel, are you there? Hazel. Sounds like she is not there. We'll check on her line in a second. Meanwhile, we are discussing summer podcasts with Lauren Passell, Tink Media founder and curator of the Podcast The Newsletter. After a quick break, we'll hear about a murder involving the pope. Stay with us.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We are discussing summer podcasts with Lauren Passell, Tink Media founder and the curator of Podcast The Newsletter. We have our caller back, Hazel on Line 1. Hi, Hazel.

Hazel: Hi. It's the two pods that I love. I'm addicted to Pod Save America and Lovett or Leave It.

Alison Stewart: Why do you like them so much?

Hazel: They're political but funny and clever and current. I like the guests that they will have occasionally and I just like their take on things. It's a very serious time and they just put a little bit of levity into it.

Alison Stewart: Hazel, thank you for calling in. Check out last Tuesday. We talked to the Pod Save America guys. We have that online. Lauren, we're going to go to our net-- Oops, quick. Let me get the phone number quick. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call or text that number with your podcast recommendation for the summer. What are you listening to? What are you planning to add to your library? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Okay, Lauren, let's get back to your list. This is called Everyone Knows That: The Search for Ulterior Motives. It's about a global search for a piece of lost media based on a 17-second sample of a song. Let's listen to this clip that backs it up. That explains it a bit.

Josh Chapdelaine: On October 7th, 2021, anonymous user Carl92 uploaded a 17-second sample of a song to song-naming community WatZatSong. It's a website with a community that helps people discover song titles of hard-to-find music or music that was never digitized. Here's the song.

[music]

Josh Chapdelaine: Alongside the sample, Carl92 leaves the comment, "Mid-'80s, bad quality. Everyone knows that."

Alison Stewart: Why was this such a huge deal and how to ignite an international investigation?

Lauren Passell: Well, I think it's so interesting because these days, how on earth could we lose any media, right? You can look up anything. It's like that was what's so strange about it. This story is really taking us up to present day. They've been searching for it for years and they just discovered it a few weeks or months ago.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Lauren Passell: It made me a little nostalgic listening to it because I remember having to call the radio DJs on my cord phone and say, "What song did you just play?" That doesn't happen anymore that we really can't find the origin of something. It's a little nostalgic for those days. There's bad things about those days too. Also, just this internet mystery, I think that's the coolest part. Then this song, you do feel like you know it from something. It keeps getting in my head and it's such an interesting song where you're like, "Yes, that could be from the '70s," or I feel like they could remix it today and it would be the song of the summer. I have no idea.

Alison Stewart: Also, we're getting texts from our listeners. This one is called We Can Do Hard Things. It's a great podcast. I think that's Glennon Doyle, I think. Also, from Marilyn, she sent this via Instagram. "Love the Ten Percent Happier podcast of Dan Harris. Insightful interviews on anything from weaving fitness into your daily rituals to seeing anger as a healthy part of healing. I can't stop quoting it."

Let's go to your next edition, Lauren. It's Because The Boss Belongs To Us. It's a narrative podcast series presented by London-based radio maker and drag king Jesse Lawson and zine maker and librarian Holly Casio that uses Bruce Springsteen as a lens through which to explore queer history, identity, and politics. How have you found the two of them finding validation in Bruce Springsteen?

Lauren Passell: Well, I just have to say I am obsessed with Jesse and Holly. They really have this mission statement of Bruce Springsteen deserving the queer icon stamp of approval. I feel like they'll have you convinced. Every episode, they tackle a certain issue. I feel like it's very convincing. Is Bruce camp? Does Bruce have a narrative of struggle? Do his songs evoke feelings of sadness and loneliness, of euphoria, or these other things that queer people often feel? Can you dance and cry to Bruce?

Also, underlining it all is this unspoken feeling that Bruce is giving a wink to queer people. The thing I really want to point out with the show is it feels homemade. Holly is a zine artist. I can almost picture Jesse and Holly making this podcast with their hands on the floor in their bedroom or something. The sound is so good. It's full of love and heart and humor. I think it will convince you that they're right.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's take a listen to a clip. This is Holly Casio sharing her queer Bruce origin story.

Holly Casio: I was making a zine and I was making a mixtape for a friend. I remember putting on Dancing in the Dark onto a mixtape as a novel song. I was like, "LOL, won't this be funny, putting on this old dad music onto a mixtape?" I've got Dancing in the Dark on in the background. I'm sitting on the floor and I'm making this zine. It's like I'm hearing the song for the first time.

Some of those lyrics just somehow hit me in the gut in a way that hasn't happened before. I'm recognizing it as the queer anthem of loneliness that it is. There's lines like, "I want to change my clothes, my hair, my face." Tell me Bruce isn't queer when he writes that line. Tell me Bruce isn't staring in the reflection of himself, thinking about gender, thinking about how no one else he knows looks like him and how he feels really alone and isolated.

Alison Stewart: That's Because The Boss Belongs To Us, our latest podcast. We're talking about summer podcasts with Lauren Passell, the curator of Podcast The Newsletter. We got from X, "A great podcast, You Must Remember This, by Karina Longworth. A great storytelling about 20th-century Hollywood." We got Logan and Brooklyn says, "Welcome back, Alison. Binging Bandsplain."

Bandsplain is a show where host, Yasi Salek, invites experts to explain cult bands and iconic artists. That's got to be a great one. Let's talk about pop culture podcasts, Lauren. Pop culture podcasts have become increasingly popular. We have Bobby Finger. He's going to be a guest in here. He's going to talk about his novel, but obviously hosts Who? Weekly with Lindsey Weber. They're great hosts. What makes someone a great podcast host and what doesn't make someone a great podcast host?

Lauren Passell: Well, I think a great podcast host is someone who can connect with the listener, period. Sometimes that means sharing about themselves. I think a lot of times, I help people with their podcasts and I say, "Your listeners want to get to know you better, so feel free to share things about yourselves." I think that you hear the word "intimacy" with podcasts a lot. I think anything that you can make the listening experience more intimate, whether that be through sound design or just sharing, that's great. Oh, my gosh. I can't believe you're getting to talk to Bobby Finger today. He's the master. Tell him I said hello. Big fan. Big fan.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Will do. Let's talk to Todd, who's calling in from Hopewell. Hi, Todd.

Todd: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Hello. What are you recommending?

Todd: I wanted to recommend Footnoting History. It is a podcast put together by four or five historians, who just dig into all of the little stories between history from addressing Marie Antoinette and talking about the people who put her clothing together to beyond sacrifice, Aztec medicine and healing, or they've got another episode that just came out. Choose Your Own Adventure: The Many Accounts of the Execution of Anne Boleyn. They also did a series of footnoting Disney where they look into the history behind the movie Aladdin or Mulan. It's just a wonderfully intersectional podcast but always has fascinating stories going on.

Alison Stewart: Sounds fascinating. Todd, thanks for the tip. All right, let's talk about Split Screen: Kid Nation. It's an examination of entertainment and pop culture. What does it do that's unique?

Lauren Passell: Well, Josh Gwynn is going back to investigate this TV show from-- I don't know. It was 2007. It didn't last very long where they're in a Lord of the Flies style thing. They put a bunch of kids on a desert island and saw what happened. Of course, it was a mess. Josh goes back to interview-- he actually gets the contestants, their families, the show's creators. It talks about the ethics of reality television and how it impacted these young people's lives years later. I think that's what makes it really interesting.

It follows the story through as adults. Imagine if you were in middle school, which was really hard for me anyway, and having to deal with all that normal kid drama. There were producers in your middle school trying to make your life absolutely worse and the entire world was watching. Just imagine that and what it would do to you as the kid and as an adult. Josh does a great job telling this full story. I think there's no time lost. It's perfectly succinct. It's a great show.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a clip from Split Screen: Kid Nation. This is field producer Emily Sinclair explaining the production crew's process of capturing the kids every day.

Emily Sinclair: I was part of the very first group of producers that was brought on before there was much of a format at all.

Josh Gwynn: As a field producer, Emily Sinclair was on set with the kids all day.

Emily Sinclair: My agent called me and pitched the idea as a modern-day Lord of the Flies. They really framed it as we want to give kids a chance to create their own society. It was 4:00 and 05:00 AM wake-ups every single day for the most part. We were on set by 6:00 because we wanted to capture the kids waking up. We wanted to see them actually getting up and dawn.

Alison Stewart: Oh, good Lord. We can understand why it got canceled. Let's talk about your last one on the list, The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi. In 1978, Pope John Paul I was found dead in bed 33 days after he was elected. Now, The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi revisits the aftermath of the pope's death and shows that it may have been a suspicious death. What was suspicious about the death of the pope at that time?

Lauren Passell: Well, this all goes back to this guy, Anthony Raimondi, who says that he was in on this deal where the mafia went in and poisoned the pope. It's a fascinating story. Obviously, that sounds fascinating, but really, you have to listen to Anthony Raimondi. He is the character that you just don't ever want to stop talking. The point of the show is he claims to have done a lot of things. The host, Marc Smerling, who, by the way, is from The Jinx, he's fantastic. He is kind of figuring out if this is true.

Anthony Raimondi claims to have killed someone when he was 16. He has a bunch of stories. He is one of those storytellers where you're just like, "Sit down." I almost don't care if it's true. "Tell me a story, Anthony Raimondi." Marc Smerling is going back and trying to fact-check everything Anthony is saying. I don't know. Someone on the show actually that's interviewed says, "You know when you were watching The Sopranos or something," she says, "being with Anthony Raimondi and his family is like you're a part of but you're not."

I get that feeling. You want to be eavesdropping on this man's life. It's also produced by the same team that did You Didn't See Nothin, which was my top pick of the year last year. It won a Pulitzer and a Peabody. I'm not alone in thinking it was great. It's the same team. The first episode alone just feels like this textured, beautiful, vibrant, almost like a comic book. It is truly one of the best first episodes I've listened to in a long time.

Alison Stewart: So people can hear what you're talking about, this is Marc Smerling, who is meeting 70-year-old gangster Anthony Raimondi, and this is part of the conversation.

Anthony Raimondi: Whatever they say they done, who said they're killers and they killed this guy and that guy, to me, it was my family. This is all I knew.

Marc Smerling: As Anthony goes on, I start to wonder if I'm really looking at an old mobster or if this is some kind of elaborate performance and I'm his captive audience.

[music]

Anthony Raimondi: They put me with my cousin Mac because I was getting into a lot of trouble.

Marc Smerling: Anthony drops a name I recognize. Mac as in Hugh MacIntosh, a notorious mob enforcer.

Anthony Raimondi: He brought me down to the diplomat. Joe Colombo came in one day and Tom DiBella was there. There was the Colombo family, Scappy, everybody's there. The first time I went to--

Marc Smerling: It quickly becomes clear that Anthony remembers every mobster he ever met-

Anthony Raimondi: I saw Joe [unintelligible 00:28:09]. They called him Yogi.

Marc Smerling: -and their nicknames.

Anthony Raimondi: They call him Top because he was top shit, what he'd done. There's a guy. They called him the Gorilla. They called him Catfish. Frankie. I forgot his last name, but they call him Frankie Blue Eyes. He's in the witness protection program.

Marc Smerling: He remembers every spot in Brooklyn where all his stories took place.

Anthony Raimondi: The cadaver club was on Third Avenue between 85th Street. We went to Honey's garage. Honey had a place on Cavill Street between 30. It was the Desiree after-hour club.

Alison Stewart: I'm sold. Sold, sold, sold. [laughs]

Lauren Passell: Yay. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: Lauren Passell, she has been our guest. The Tink Media founder and the curator of the Podcast The Newsletter. Lauren, thank you so much for being with us.

Lauren Passell: Thank you for having me and welcome back once again.

Alison Stewart: Thanks.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.