If you’re not already a podcast person, it’s time to put down your Instagram, crawl out from under your rock, and get involved in the latest form of free, on-demand, curated content.
Podcasts are a great way to pass time while being hands-and-screen-free. Kind of like radio talk shows. Remember those?
Now that we’re staring down the back half of 2017, here’s a short list of a few podcasts that will get you thinking differently about the world around us.
Us and Them
If the 2016 presidential election left you spooked, here’s a great podcast that helps open up conversation around some of America’s most dividing topics. War, sexuality, gun violence – all topics are on the table as the hosts extract stories from the trenches of a division.
Sound Africa
For our parents and our grandparents, the countries of Africa were often shrouded in mystery. In the absence of technology, information coming to the states about these countries often went through a very game-of-telephone-like process. Sound Africa aims to tell new and informative stories of Africa, free from the cliches and sensationalist news themes of yesteryear.
Modern Love
Even if you’ve never read it, you might be familiar with the New York Times Column, Modern Love. Well, the folks over at NYT upgraded for the modern consumer and are offering this column as a podcast. Their first episode from January 2016 starts with a story that involves one of the internet’s first foray’s into the romance scene – Craigslist.
Guys We F****d
A little on the nose” doesn’t quite cover the topics of these fairly lengthy but laugh-out-loud podcasts brought to you by the self-proclaimed “anti-slut shamers” Krystyna Hutchinson and Corinne Fisher. Underneath the jaw-dropping one-liners and titles riddled with the content, there is often, sometimes unbelievably, a social message.
99% Invisible
Brought to you from beautiful, historic, downtown Oakland California (as host Roman Mars would say), 99% invisible is a great podcast for people at the beginning of their journey into podcasts. These shortish, digestible episodes tell individual stories of the people and progress behind everyday things that we take for granted. How much thought have you put on the expiration date of your food? Or the bird sounds from your favorite nature documentary? Roman Mars and his team are thinking for you and presenting their findings in this delicacy of a podcast.
