The 50 Best Podcasts of 2017
This year, podcasts got funnier, sharper, and even more niche. Our recommendations here pass a vigorous audio smell test. First, the arrival of a new podcast episode must send you into an ethical quandary: How do I get out of at least some of my obligations today to listen to this? Second, you must be able to recommend this to a colleague with the knowledge that your reputation is at stake. A podcast that teaches you how to prepare your taxes by hand might blow your hair back, but it’s doubtful you’ll recommend it to anyone aside from your accountant. Third, we recused ourselves from ranking any podcasts produced by The Atlantic, including Radio Atlantic and The Atlantic Interview. Finally, the podcast world, like any other sphere, is about what have you done for me lately. The best shows don’t paint themselves into a corner. They evolve and progress or risk their listeners hitting “unsubscribe.” Podcasts, like cowboys, shouldn’t get fenced in. These shows generated maximum buzz, kept us refreshing our apps, broke boundaries, and made our future selves romanticize the golden years of podcasting.
50. Alone: A Love Story
With decades of producing under her belt, the Alone host Michelle Parise knows how to shape and deliver a story that will keep you coming back for more—all with the indulgent, delightful tone of a Lifetime movie. In 10 chapters, she takes listeners through the rise and fall of her marriage, and the bizarro choices she and her ex-husband made in its aftermath—like intentionally buying houses across the street from each other—will have you double-checking whether or not this actually is a memoir. (It is.) Her decision-making leads her to the edge of cliché but is also immensely relatable. You won’t leave Alone with new insights on what it means to be reentering the dating pool at almost 40 or having witnessed a brilliant epiphany, but you will feel like someone delivered you chicken soup on a cold day—and if you’re single, that can go a long way.
Gateway Episode: “Chapter 1: Not If, How”
49. The Bill Simmons Podcast
More than a decade ago, Bill Simmons cross-pollinated sports and pop culture and launched The B.S. Report at ESPN, the predecessor of The Bill Simmons Podcast. Early on—The B.S. Report predates Marc Maron’s WTF by two years—Simmons grasped that an uninterrupted, long-form interview scarcely existed in the media wasteland. He took note of the diminishing returns of what celebrities and athletes were willing to say and the disgust fans had for sound bites and puff pieces. Now, he routinely books guests who won’t, or don’t always, open up elsewhere: Kevin Durant, an NBA champion and typically a man of few words, for instance, showed up this year for a series of fascinating, raw interviews. Simmons’s talk with The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates is also a must-listen. The host steers the conversation toward sports to get them chatting, and then everything you want to hear from America’s writer-in-residence comes out in unexpected, new ways.
Gateway Episode: “Ta-Nehisi Coates on Storytelling, Challenging Obama, and the Kaepernick Situation”
48. Every Little Thing
The Every Little Thing host Flora Lichtman will make her obsessions your obsessions. The show follows her train of thought, taking listeners through unexpected twists and turns where they find out flamingos can drink boiling-hot water, robust mite communities live on our faces, and why no one ever sees a living armadillo (it has to do with a phenomenon known as eye shine). Lichtman has a fantastic sense of humor and a charming curiosity that seduces listeners into the topic du jour. The show is perfect politically neutral entertainment for conversations with the in-laws or for work parties. While no one—maybe not even Lichtman—can predict what the next subject will be, after a few episodes, listeners get a sense for the quirky world she’s created and how she moves through it. Every Little Thing embodies the old maxim that the best ideas are the ones we can’t forget.
Gateway Episode: “Rapture Chasers”
47. This Is Actually Happening
The experience of is different from most of what you’ll hear elsewhere. Every other week, people who have experienced a massive disturbance in their life tell their stories uninterrupted, no questions, no music. A male model becomes the target of the Japanese mafia in one show, and in the next, a victim of incest talks about how advocacy changed her life. They are all of the most articulate ilk, people who have done the hard work of thoughtful introspection and, without asking anything of the listener, they share themselves and what they’ve learned. This creates an intimate connection with the speaker, perhaps the closest thing listeners have to trying on another person’s consciousness. Each show title starts with to tell the listener exactly what to expect, but others are more rhetorical “What if you went to the dark side?” Others still are so specific (like “What if you spent 15 hours on the edge of sanity?”) that you’ll want to know how exactly that question was posed in the first place.
