Jarrett Fuller

I’ve become much more promiscuous in my podcast listening over the last few years. I basically stopped listening to all podcasts at the start of the pandemic but over the last few years, I’ve re-introduced them into my life, listening mostly when I’m working out.

Where I once was a completist who felt like I needed to listen to every new episode each week, I now dip in and out of shows, mostly following my interest to specific episodes as opposed to entire shows¹. Because it’s summer and I have a more flexible schedule, I’ve been listening to more podcasts than I have in a while. Here are a five favorite episodes from the last few months that I feel like I can’t stop thinking about.

What nuclear annihilation would look like - The Gray Area

Vox’s The Gray Area, a show about the intersection of philsophy and politics is a favorite. Sean Illing is a great interviewer and our interests have a nice overlap. This episode, where he talks to journalist Annie Jacobsen about what nuclear war would look like, was sobering. Jacobsen’s new book is a deeply reported, clear-eyed look at what would happen if a nuclear war broke out. This conversation was fascinating and terrifying. As curious as I am, I don’t think I can bring myself to read her book. This is an important listen.

Annie Baker - Talk Easy

Subscribers to my newsletter know that I’m a big fan of playwright Annie Baker and can’t way to see her new film, Janet Planet. I’ve read, watched, and listened to every interview with her that I can find but this one, with Sam Fragoso on Talk Easy, is probably my favorite. I like Fragoso’s interview style and I liked Baker’s resistence to it. That tension, strangely, made for a deep, meta, and thoughtful conversation about art, literature, and being a creative person. There are passages from this that I can’t seem to get out of my mind.

The End of Libraries as We Know It - Why is this Happening

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes talks to Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and Library Futures co-founder Kyle Courtney about the power of libraries, the trouble with archiving, and the legal issues around lending e-books. I knew the Internet Archive was involved in some legal cases with publishers about their online library but I was completely unaware of the backstory and larger cultural and economic context libraries are in right now. As the son of a librarian (and part of a family that goes to the library every week), this reaffirms, for me, the social benefits and need for widely supported public libraries.

John Jeremiah Sullivan on Longform

After twelve years, the podcast for writers, journalists, and critics, is closing its doors. Each of the three host’s final episodes are worth listening to but the last episode with John Jeremiah Sullivan, one of my favorite essayists, is really special. I’d always been curious where he went and what he was working on these days and this provides some insights, as well as a look into his process, his evolving interests in writing, and his inability to meet deadlines.

‘Artifical Intelligence’? No, Collective Intelligence. - The Ezra Klein Show

I’m generally underwhelmed with artificial intelligence and find most conversations around it lacking. But when Ezra Klein interviewed electronic musician Holly Herndon, I perked up. Herndon has experimented with small-scale machine learning for years and appreciated hearing her perspective on how to use it, what it means for art, and why we should think of it, not as artificial intelligence, but collective intelligence.

Bonus Mini-Series

Despite mostly dipping in and out of episodes, there were three great podcast mini-series I binged over the last few months that I also want to recommend:

Navel Gazing with John Dickerson

This series of audio essays from John Dickerson use the insights from the notebooks he’s kept in his back pocket for the last thirty years as starting points to talk about memory, parenting, moving, changes, and how to live a good life. As someone who has also always kept journals and obsessively documents my life, I found this series beautiful and moving and it re-inspired me to keep a physical notebook again after years of keeping notes digitally.

Mind the Game with LeBron James and JJ Redick

I listened to this in one week, after it was announced JJ Redick was hired as the new head coach of the LA Lakers. In retrospect, this sounds like a long audition for that job but despite that, I liked hearing James talk about basketball IQ and appreciated the inside look at how basketball games are prepared for and played.

Widening The Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape

This six-part series is produced in conjunction with a new exhibit of the same name currently running at the Carnegie Museum of Art and hosted by Venus Williams (!!). These episodes, short but wide-ranging, look at the intersection of photography, landscape, colonialism, and the environment in a way that is deep but also accessible. It’s one of the best-produced arts podcasts I’ve listened to and was introduced to some thinkers I didn’t know and I’m now excited to dig into their work.