Political Gabfest

Launched in 2005, Political Gabfest is one of the oldest news podcasts out there. The show is hosted by former Slate correspondents Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz. All three hosts have been with the show since its inception, and have become masters of informal, yet intelligent, discussion. Having worked together for so long, the trio often sounds like bantering siblings more than cohosts as they tackle an array of political topics. As hilarious as it is informative, Political Gabfest never fails to entertain while delivering incisive analysis of the major political issue affecting our country today. 

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify

The Gist 

The Gist is one of the best daily news podcasts available today. Every afternoon, host Mike Pesca breaks down the most prevalent political and cultural issues of the day. Though episodes are only half-an-hour long, Pesca manages to cram into that small amount of time an incredible amount of useful information. Each episode follows the exact same three-part format. First, Pesca opens with a comedic introduction and overview of the topics to be covered. Second, he interviews a guest. These guests are often journalists, politicians, or other high-profile political figures who offer keen insight and unique perspectives. Each show concludes with a monologue, known as the “spiel,” in which Pesca delivers his own opinions and insights in order to impart upon the listener some of his understanding, and most importantly, his passion for progressive change.

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify

NPR Politics Podcast

Every weekday, NPR’s best political reporters present top-level analysis of the biggest political stories coming out of Washington with the NPR Politics Podcast. The show brings together a multitude of NPR reporters to provide a wide range of perspectives on the state of the country’s politics. In contrast to public radio, the NPR Politics Podcast gives way to the more personality-driven reporting that has become popular with the rise of podcasting. Guests are allowed to take off the kid gloves and present the facts alongside biting opinions and colorful commentary. As the podcast’s slogan says, “They don’t just tell you what happened. They tell you why it matters.”

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify

The Daily

As the name might suggest, The Daily is a daily news podcast produced by The New York Times. The show is hosted by Times political journalist Michael Barbaro. The episodes are short, only twenty minutes, and designed with the understanding that their listeners’ time is limited. The Daily is only concerned with providing the most important and pressing news stories of the day, compiled from interviews with Times journalists. Often stories are supplemented with audio recordings and interviews with the persons involved. Because Barbaro is so frequently talking to reporters, The Daily also offers a unique insight into the fast-paced, high-stress world of news reporting.

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify

Pod Save America

Pod Save America is hosted by four former aides to President Barack Obama: Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett, and Dan Pfeiffer. The three hosts founded the show along with their progressive media company, Crooked Media, in the wake of the 2016 election. They set out to make a podcast that would not only entertain and inform but inspire passion and activism. Since then, Pod Save America has gone on to become one of the most popular political podcasts of the decade. Not only do they bring on high-profile political guests, including presidential candidates, but the hosts have attained celebrity status themselves by way of their unique insight and passion for change.  

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify

Today, Explained

Today, Explained is a daily podcast from Vox that breaks down the major news stories from the day in a way that is easily understood. The show is hosted by Sean Rameswaram, a former correspondent for Radiolab. Each day, in less than half-an-hour, Rameswaram takes the most important stories in the news and deconstructs them in a way that is both entertaining and highly consumable. Today, Explained works as a sort of counterpart to The Daily, and not just because the latter releases episodes in the morning and the former in the afternoon. Whereas The Daily takes a more earnest approach, Rameswaram affects a more casual, more relatable tone in his storytelling, adopting the persona of a regular person doing his best to make sense of a chaotic world. 

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify

The Weeds

Also produced by Vox, The Weeds is in many ways the polar opposite of Today, Explained. The show is hosted by Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Dara Lind, Jane Coaston, all reputable writers and reporters of politics and economics. The hosts are often joined by other members of the Vox team with expertise in the specific topic of the episode. As the name implies, The Weeds sets out to take a deep dive into noteworthy topics such as healthcare, housing, and immigration reform. The episodes are essentially long-form discussions of a specific topic, intended to leave the listener with a broader, more holistic understanding of the issues at hand. 

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify

Up First

Up First is the best news podcast for listeners in a hurry. Each episode averages just 10 minutes and focuses on the three biggest stories of the day. The show is hosted on weekdays by NPR veterans Rachel Martin, Noel King, David Greene, and Steve Inskeep. There is also a weekend edition on Saturday mornings hosted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, former NPR foreign correspondent, and NPR Journalist Scott Simon. Up First has that soft-spoken quality that so many NPR listeners find appealing. It’s a great way to receive news early in the morning in a calm, straightforward manner that won’t provoke a spike in the listener’s cortisol levels.  

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify

The Brilliant Idiots

The Brilliant Idiots is the perfect podcast for those looking to get their news and cultural commentary in a more irreverent way. The show’s hosts–media personality Charlamagne Tha God and comedian Andrew Schulz–created the show specifically as a platform to express uncensored opinions that they wouldn’t have been able to divulge publicly while working for public radio. The show is relatively unstructured, usually anchored around a specific topic or set of topics, but always leaves room for plenty of comedic discussions. While they aren’t reporters, Schulz and Tha God are intelligent color commentators on the country’s most pressing current events, each bringing a perspective to the conversation that is always hilarious, often loud, and that never fails to be insightful. 

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify

Skimm This

The Skimm news podcast takes the most important stories of the day and breaks them down into an easily digestible form, all in 10 minutes. Rather than regurgitating all major headlines, The Skimm takes three to four major stories and makes them the focus of each episode. The show lives by the mantra, “Context is clarity,” and that is exactly what it aims to provide. Listeners are treated to a purely factual, unbiased approach to reporting that delivers news stories free of opinions that otherwise might skew one’s perception of the facts. The goal is to leave listeners with the context they need in order to not only understand what is happening in the world but why it is important.   

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify

Honorable Mentions: 

• NPR News Now
• BBC Global News Podcast
• The Takeaway
• CBS: The World This Hour  
• PBS News Hour
• World News Roundup
• Buzz Burbank News and Comment
• This Morning with Gordon Deal
• 60 Minutes 
• The Brief from Time Magazine

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The post 20 Best News & Politics Podcasts appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

Instead of neat, perfectly-constructed paragraph answers to my questions, Breakmaster Cylinder responds like an excited person on a group text thread, using emojis and often splitting answers into several consecutive messages. It’s endearing, it’s real. This is usually an issue when doing interviews over email, or in this case, Twitter DM. The answers are too often canned and lack any real emotion. When Breakmaster responds with a short answer, then immediately follows up with an added statement, you get the sense the thoughts are coming unobstructed.

Probably best known as the musician who crafted the Reply All theme song and the serialized space story in the credits, Breakmaster Cylinder has become something of a celebrity within the podcasting community. Their podcast music has become in high-demand and their resume now boasts over 60 podcast theme songs. Along with the famed Reply All theme, Breakmaster created the songs for Vox’s Today, Explained, The Pitch, Say Something Worth Stealing, We The Ppl, and several other podcasts you likely recognize.

ok you got me curious!
this is most of them, though some are video, not podcasts.
let’s say like 60 themes total, 50 originals (bold). pic.twitter.com/Q7phWA8rWa

— BREAKMASTERCYLINDER (@BrkmstrCylinder) March 28, 2018

Breakmaster isn’t just a talented musician, their name itself is a clever pun. As one Redditor pointed out “breakmaster” is a term for a musician who excels during musical breaks, while “master cylinder” is a automotive part controlling the brakes of a car.

As the tale goes, it started with a tweet. Then TLDR host, Alex Goldman, saw a YouTube video Breakmaster Cylinder did remixing The Chordettes Mr. Sandman while splicing in gory images from horror movies. Goldman tells Hrishikesh Hirway of Song Exploder, “I started following their music, and then when it came time to do a theme song, I was like, ‘who is just weird enough to work with us and make this thing?’”

When I finally get my own radio show, I want to have @BrkmstrCylinder compose the theme song.

— Alex Goldman (@AGoldmund) March 14, 2013

The TLDR theme sounds like a demented video game from the 80s. In other words, it’s weird and perfect and the epitome of Breakmaster Cylinder.

Breakmaster Cylinder then went on to do Goldman’s next project, the aforementioned Reply All. As the podcast has risen in fame, so has Breakmaster Cylinder’s mystique. Each episode ends with “our theme song is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.” This has led to what is likely a pretty lucrative niche career. That’s not all Breakmaster has contributed to Reply All, however. In more recent episodes, there’s an MCU-esque story arc that takes place post-credits. When listened together, the bits form together to tell a serialized story. Breakmaster describes the story, “Dog and I are lost in space without internet, learning things about ourselves and the universe. They’re like an old serial radio play and I get to mess with making impossible weirdness sound like a live recording, best as I can.”

This story only adds to the intrigue of Breakmaster Cylinder.

When asked about staying anonymous, Breakmaster Cylinder told Exolymph, “I just don’t wanna be out there. I don’t matter. It’s nice to be any / every / nobody.”

It would be too easy to compare Breakmaster Cylinder to famed anonymous street artist Banksy or Daft Punk. True they’re anonymous and have become influential within their respective creative spaces, however, Breakmaster Cylinder is as accessible as an anonymous person can be. They’ll respond to your tweets, comments on SoundCloud, and your emails. Whereas the other two personalities have embraced their mystique, adopting it as part of their schtick, Breakmaster seems to simply be anonymous for privacy reasons. When asked if they’d ever reveal themselves, they stated (in what I can assume is a very genuine response), “really my identity just doesn’t matter at all. I enjoy the idea of people imagining BMC however they like.”

Though I didn’t press too much about their identity — that was the sole question about it — Breakmaster didn’t seem especially interested in talking about it either. Our conversation was mostly around podcasts and music. They had previously analyzed and broken apart the Reply All theme in the above quoted Song Exploder episode, however, I was interested in a similar treatment for the new marquee podcast, Today, Explained.

For a daily podcast that covers the recent news and fluctuates from somber to lighthearted to informative stories on any given episode, the theme song needed to be versatile. “We tried a lot of different drafts. Ranging from organic sounds treated organically like the midroll music (a Books-style guitar chop up thing) to more purely beep boop Raymond Scott synth kind of jams.”

Asked about the final theme, Breakmaster admired their work, “I think what works with their theme is the clattering drums. They’re imperfect but still hold together, which is appropriate for a daily news podcast right this second. Other important elements include a distinct single tone or note that you could play and immediately recognize the podcast from.”

Breakmaster did mention a previous version that on my initial reading seemed more interesting. “I wrote another full length theme for them I really like actually but it’s true it didn’t fit as well as this one did. It sampled James Comey saying ‘lordy I hope there are tapes’ and then the beat drops.”

Though no two podcast themes are alike, neither is the process that goes into composing them. Breakmaster typically starts the conversations trying to get as much detail from the podcast creators as possible. Things like ideal song, theme, tone, and what they like about other podcast themes. From there, Breakmaster creates several samples to gauge initial feedback and both composer and creator go back and forth until the finished product, typically two to four weeks later.

For podcast themes in general, Breakmaster has the recipe. “Catchy hook, straight to business, sometimes an introductory single riff or sound effect so even just that one chime is enough to announce your show.. you need that stuff.” Breakmaster continued, “you should be able to conjure the show’s theme easily when listening. Sometimes that’s on the nose, like water sounds for a show about bathing. Wall-to-wall animal noises for a show about animals.”

Whether Breakmaster is in space with Dog or beamed into your brain via your favorite podcast app, you’ll now start to recognize their signature style.

The post Breakmaster Cylinder: A Conversation with Podcasting’s Most Prolific (And Mysterious) Artist appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.

I’m Brendan from the podcast BitRate. (You may also know me from the occasional articles I post like Empire On Blood, StartUpBus, and Podcast Ads Work.) BitRate is a podcast about the culture of podcasts, what it means to podcast, what is happening in the podcasting world; it’s a bit of industry self-reflection, hosted by me and Mark Steadman, developer of the podcast hosting service Podiant. We recently talked with Ma’ayan Plaut from RadioPublic about the word “podcast”, whether that is the right word for the industry, and what replacement words might be. You can find the podcast at https://BitRate.podiant.co. I’m @ThePodPlaylist on Twitter, and Mark is @iamsteadman.

Today, Explained

This has quickly become my favorite daily podcast. The format is very similar to New York Times’ The Daily where it’s one ~20 minute US centric news story covered in detail. The biggest difference is the Vox is having fun with the platform by performing parodies of songs and putting on skits and other antics. This doesn’t ever take away from the commentary or message, but adds a level of humanity and levity.

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher

Subnet

Another new daily show, this one being just about tech and only 3 headlines. If you have an Amazon smart device or other cylinder that can play podcasts, this could be a great listen while you’re getting ready in the morning. It’s quick, like this review, and comes out 6 days a week.

Listen: Apple Podcasts

Conversations With People Who Hate Me

A big shift away from daily news podcasts; this is a heavy hitter. Host Dylan Marron calls someone who has posted hurtful or hateful things online. The first season was about comments directed at him. His second season just started with episodes 10 and 11 where he moderates a conversation between two people with opposing views. It’s a civil and delightful conversation every time, and it always sticks in my head for days, weeks, and even months later. This podcast is in the top 5 most impactful podcasts on my mindset and my life, and I highly recommend it.

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher

The post Pods Review Pods: Today, Explained, Subnet, & Conversations With People Who Hate Me appeared first on Discover the Best Podcasts | Discover Pods.