Ah, 2025—yet another heck of a year! In the audio realm, as elsewhere, inventiveness is essential during challenging times—so when video-chat podcasts predominate, celebrity-hosted podcasts won’t stop proliferating, and our old friend public radio is under attack, high-quality audio shows, against all odds, persist. Jonathan Goldstein’s wonderful “Heavyweight,” done wrong by Spotify in late 2023, came back swinging, at Pushkin; Lauren Chooljian, of NHPR, returned with a justice-is-served follow-up episode to her excellent 2023 investigative series, “The 13th Step”; “This American Life” remained the industry standard, and has found success with a new subscription program; “Fresh Air” turned fifty and is going strong. And the ending, late this year, of two of the genre’s all-time best series—“WTF with Marc Maron” and the Melvyn Bragg era of “In Our Time”—provided a moment to reflect on the medium’s distinct power to educate, interrogate, and entertain, sometimes all at once. My picks for the year’s ten most impressive shows are below.
In an era of post-podcast-boom funding cuts, two independent projects have bravely voyaged toward the cutting edge of audio, fostering both community and surprising results. Audio Flux, an organization founded two years ago by the veteran producers Julie Shapiro and John DeLore, provides regular prompts for short-form, often experimental audio, and presents the best “fluxworks” online and at conferences and festivals. This fall, it débuted “The Audio Flux Podcast,” a “zine for your ears” hosted by Amy Pearl, to showcase the highlights, including Yowei Shaw’s “To Cry or Not to Cry,” inspired by her layoff meeting at NPR. “Signal Hill,” an audio magazine founded by Liza Yeager and Jackson Roach, has released two issues this year (accompanied by reportedly good parties) and combines long-form and shorter work, often beautifully produced and sometimes truly special; my favorite pieces included a dispatch from a sheep farm next to a military camp in France and a portrait of a friendship between an American entomologist and a brilliant ten-year-old fan in Japan.
The expertly produced “Sea of Lies,” from the CBC’s investigative podcast “Uncover,” begins off the coast of Brixham, Devon, in 1996, with a British father-and-son duo who make a grisly discovery in the net of their trawler: the body of a man, wearing a Rolex. From there, the series’ host, Sam Mullins, unspools a head-spinning story of keen detective work, puzzling clues, false identities, embezzlement schemes, naïveté, and murder, in a tone that seems to be trying to resist jumping up and down with narrative pride. But that pride is justified, and the story makes for a vivid reminder about the creative treachery of some kinds of crime, and the importance of guarding against it.
Jonathan Goldstein’s wondrous podcast, a work of gentle intimacy and subtle hilarity, has managed to maintain a high standard of greatness despite its own challenging conceit. In each episode, Goldstein or one of his fellow-producers explores a particular problem connected to someone’s past—an actor baffled by the blundering director of his first movie; a woman traumatized by a bizarre homecoming-queen mixup in high school—and tries to help resolve it. Often, this involves finding someone hard to track down and encouraging them to have a raw, honest conversation, which then becomes part of a satisfying narrative, for the benefit of both the subjects and the listeners. Sometimes the process takes years; miraculously, Goldstein keeps making it happen. His singular narration, tactful but dryly funny, is one of the show’s strongest attributes.
Avery Trufelman’s lively cultural history of clothing, having explored realms including the preppy, the punk, and the luxe, recently returned with a new season, “Gear,” about military garb (hunting clothes, performance gear, khaki, and far beyond) and its intricate connections with civilian life. Trufelman shoots clay pigeons and learns surprising stuff about camouflage; delves into the co-opting of military gear by sixties and seventies counterculture; and examines “gorpcore,” “the yuppification of the field jacket,” and the fact that military uniforms, owing to national-security concerns, must be made in U.S. factories, thus supporting the American clothing industry. As with all of her best work, including episodes of the design podcast “99% Invisible,” Trufelman finds seemingly hidden meaning in ubiquitous everyday items. She’s also a great narrative presence—casual but wise, curious but authoritative, friendly but respectful of our intelligence—with a velvety, fun-to-hear voice. Extra zing is hardly required, but drill-sergeant-style introductions to each chapter (“This is not your mama’s house! . . . You are now the property of the United States Army! Chapter . . . TWO!”) provide it.
“The History Podcast,” from the BBC, is essentially a series of miniseries, hosted by a variety of people. This year, it yielded at least three exemplary works. I was unexpectedly delighted by “Invisible Hands,” in which the shrewd and engaging broadcaster David Dimbleby, now eighty-seven, takes us through the history of free-market capitalism, a narrative that includes a Sussex chicken farmer, a wartime parachuting tragedy, and a vomiting conservative M.P.; in a year when economic philosophies have dominated headlines, it makes for an especially gratifying listen. “The House at No. 48” is a twisty tale of family secrets; it begins with a mysterious suitcase and morphs into a contemplation of whether past betrayals can ever be healed. “Half-Life,” another family chronicle, had me hooked from its first line: “My grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste.”
The Wall Street Journal reporter Valerie Bauerlein covers national affairs from Raleigh, North Carolina, and here she presents, with an appealing hint of a Southern accent, a stunning story about the fatal road-rage shooting of a man named Scott Spivey, on a country road near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in 2023. This is far from a whodunnit; the shooter admits to the killing and was on the phone with a 911 dispatcher when he did it, and there are witnesses. The question is whether the shooting was justifiable self-defense under the state’s Stand Your Ground law. The answer appears to be straightforward, but, thanks to a trove of damning audio that details police corruption, the killer’s intent, and more, it turns out to be anything but. The often baffling nature of Stand Your Ground laws, and of citizens’ freewheeling interpretations of them, is the context in which the whole thing swims, and Bauerlein does an exemplary job of presenting the characters, including the shooter and Spivey’s justice-seeking sister, and their circumstances. Both the podcast and the legal case draw on many hours of secretly recorded phone calls, which are all the more incredible for having been recorded by the shooter.
“Snap Judgment,” from KQED, in San Francisco, has made plenty of great work over the years, and this five-episode series, from the producer Shaina Shealy, is a standout. Shealy brings us into Union Point Park, where a community of highly organized homeless people in Oakland, California, are fighting for something “extraordinary”: the right to live together, by their own rules, in a city-sanctioned outdoor encampment. We get to know several of the group’s leaders, like President Matt, a former d.j. who now lives in a “Styrofoam mansion,” and Mama D, who plants mint to deter rats, along with city officials including Daryel Dunston, who climbs a pile of junk to negotiate about a “co-governance” model. Shealy is a deft, thoughtful interviewer, and the story makes for intriguing audio, evoking the inner lives of its subjects with empathy and respect.
This year, the Boston Globe’s investigative Spotlight team headed to the docks of New Bedford, Massachusetts, to bring us “Snitch City,” a gripping exposé of police corruption. Narrated by the reporter Dugan Arnett, the series begins on a summer night in 2018, with audio of a 911 call from a fisherman on a scalloping boat called the Little Tootie, where a frenzied man with bloodshot eyes and a pistol has come aboard, looking for drugs. “He says he’s a cop, but he doesn’t have no warrants,” the caller says. The cop claims to be acting on a tip from a confidential informant, and is instantly let off the hook. This is just the tip of a bad-behavior iceberg. Arnett presents stories of New Bedford cops lying, bullying, stealing, inflating crime-solving statistics—and of informants who feel trapped and fear retribution. The Spotlight team, best known for its reporting on the Catholic Church’s sexual-abuse coverups, shows the harm that secrecy fosters in yet another organization without oversight. Audio of dockside atmospherics, along with incisive, sometimes darkly funny interviews with former informants, dealers, and cops, makes for an especially vivid listen.
As in his 2023 series “Think Twice,” about Michael Jackson, the reliably excellent producer and host Leon Neyfakh creates a work that resonates far beyond one flawed man’s biography. The late Jerry Springer, who created the circuslike “Jerry Springer Show” and hosted it from 1991 to 2018, started his career as a talented political thinker and news analyst, and went on to serve as the mayor of Cincinnati, an anchorman, and the host of a progressive-politics chat program on Air America. But he is best known, rightly, as the purveyor of a genre of cheap and exploitative talk television, complete with fistfights and flying folding chairs, that helped give rise to even more corrosive media today. With his usual knack for good storytelling and brilliantly constructed audio clips, Neyfakh traces the history of this genre alongside the history of Springer’s own professional choices. We come away wondering what might have been, had Springer better deployed his gifts.
This fall, Jad Abumrad, the creator of “Radiolab,” “More Perfect,” and “Dolly Parton’s America,” released a mighty biographical podcast about Fela Kuti, the legendary Nigerian musician and Afrobeat pioneer. The show took three years to make. Abumrad and his team travelled to London, Paris, L.A., and Lagos, interviewing Fela Kuti’s loved ones; talking to musicians and admirers, from Obama to Flea; and digging up context about Nigerian art, politics, and social history. The result is bursting with life, humor, pain, interesting ideas, and, of course, sharp, catchy, hypnotic music. Abumrad, who loves a far-out groove, has a ball re-creating the textures of Kuti’s sonic and quasi-meditative greatness; a recurring metaphor about cycles builds throughout the series, just like one of its subject’s long, looping riffs. Kuti was also a vital dissenter during an oppressive Nigerian regime, and was often the target of government retribution; I can’t think of another show that’s both danceable and, by its end, profoundly heartbreaking. ♦
