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Vital stats:
Format: Q&As, often post-screening, with directors, writers, writer-directors, and other filmmakers
Episode duration: 40m-2h30m
Frequency: often weekly, though it varies

I moved to Los Angeles for the filmgoing, sure — how many other cities offer the chance to experience all eras of cinema, theatrically, pretty much every week? — but also for the post-film-Q&A-watching. Enough filmmakers and filmmakers’ collaborators live in or regularly pass through town that theater programmers don’t have to strain to add an enticing liveness to a screening: “Director in person!” “A conversation between the writer and cinematographer to follow!” “Three of the supporting cast will probably turn up!” Some become regulars: the guy who wrote Electra Glide in Blue’s screenplay seems happy to appear whenever and wherever the movie gets projected, for instance, and Los Angeles Plays Itself director Thom Andersen fields an hour of audience questions every time I catch his documentary. And sometimes you hit a surprise jackpot, as when not just Quentin Tarantino but Robert Forster and Pam Grier took the stage after the Los Angeles County Museum of Art played Jackie Brown. That Q&A fired on all cylinders, which not all of them do. But this very element of suspense keeps them interesting, as does the fact that you can never quite know in advance which ones will, to mix the metaphor, give off sparks.

Having held no particular expectations for a conversation between Looper director Rian Johnson and someone named Jeff Goldsmith, I in the event found them far exceeded. Were I inclined to listen again and scrutinize what, exactly, so impressed me, I could do so by downloading the very same Q&A as an episode of the podcast The Q&A [iTunes], Goldsmith’s own. Instead, I listened to a whole range of his other Q&As, one-on-one and sometimes one-on-two sessions with a variety of directors and writers, writer-directors, and occasionally producers and actors working today, creators as rooted in the mainstream as the writing team behind Horrible Bosses and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and ones as strictly independent as Man Push Cart and At Any Price auteur Ramin Bahrani. Most often, Goldsmith engages people like Johnson, established filmmakers entrenched in neither Hollywood nor the arthouse. I saw him do so at Cinefamily, a theater on Fairfax Avenue that, before I actually moved to town, displayed such acumen screening rarities and bringing in guests (and especially bringing in guests who had a hand in these rarities) as to force me to pull the trigger and rent a U-Haul. “This reminds me of the sixties,” a well-known broadcaster friend who lives in the neighborhood said of Cinefamily during their potluck showing of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, “the last time life was unquestionably good.”

There, on another night, I saw Shane Carruth, he of Upstream Color, discuss his first film Primer with USC physicist Clifford V. Johnson. Had I braved even standier-room-only conditions on a later night, I could have seen Johnson and Carruth (who provided time-travel consultation on Looper) talk Upstream Color. I opted instead to hear that evening on an episode of The Q&A which combines it with Goldsmith’s own interview of Carruth at his usual venue, someplace called the Los Angeles Film School, whose name sounds faintly scammy but which must bring enough legitimacy to attract a cinephile of Goldsmith’s standing. It doesn’t surprise me that students of film production would dig Goldsmith’s interviewing style. He asks the questions you’d expect about process, budget, and schedule, and in his having a standard line of inquiry to fall back on, as well as his playing to audiences of eager learners and his tendency to conduct what we might call praise-intensive conversations, he reminds me at times of a non-octogenarian James Lipton from Inside the Actors Studio.

Goldsmith’s version of Liptonism also features pre-written “geek questions,” those hair-splitting inquiries about plot minutia that you resent other audience members for squandering minutes of our valuable lives asking but which he somehow makes endearing. The geek questions, needless to say, get a field day after new-wave science fiction films like Primer and Looper, but Goldsmith has many other modes as well, which he switches between with startling efficiency. One week he’ll ask a director about the ways he circumvents the deadening conventions of the screenwriting process; another week he’ll ask a writer, with equal interest and earnestness, how he managed to adhere to those same conventions so successfully. But when Goldsmith talks to, say, Christopher McQuarrie about writing Jack Reacher, he doesn’t ask only about how best to craft studio-pleasing character arcs. Rather, he asks about that, but the conversation then shifts toward more meaningful points. I’ll always remember McQuarrie telling Goldsmith that experience, credentials, intelligence and skill all fall distantly secondary to whether people like having you around, a principle I suspect holds for every field of human endeavor. Woody Allen’s words about the attainment of a modest mastery by simply working, working, and working some more over long spans of time, even though he says them in an episode not hosted by Goldsmith himself, will also stick with me.

The Q&A delivers such deposits of universally golden wisdom with unusual regularity, and the more eccentric but endlessly fascinating Carruth drops one of them every few minutes during his appearance. He casts much light on how each element of filmmaking — writing, shooting, scoring, cutting — constantly informs all the others in a kind of perpetual creative cycle, and explains (to my mind once and for all) why a plot needs a core of unanswered, even unanswerable questions. Goldsmith even includes in the podcast, during his usual open-it-up-to-the-audience segment, an eloquent, impassioned, seemingly minutes-long declaration from my aforementioned colleague that Upstream Color indicts the modern condition: “Something happened. It was horrible. It happened to the environment; it happened inside us. It prevents us from talking to one another, or knowing what we’re saying when we talk. Whether God moved away from us or chemicals approached us, it doesn’t matter; we all feel this Martian, alienated state. And it’s our time.” But Goldsmith and Carruth also get into the nuts and bolts of do-it-yourself distribution, if you tuned in for that.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Vital stats:
Format: discussions of podcasts, podcasting technology, and podcasting issues
Episode duration: 25m-1h15m
Frequency: every 2-5 days

In one of Scott Adams’ Dilbert strips of long ago, the titular engineer reads a book of tips for a computer golf game. “So... you’re reading a book... about a computer simulation of an activity that’s almost a sport,” replies Dilbert’s girlfriend Liz. “That’s about as close as you can get to being a non-organic life form.” Our hero has, tonally speaking, a classic Adams half-response: “This chapter is about driving the little cart.” I do wonder what Liz, not one of the strip’s enduring characters, would say about writing an essay about a podcast about podcasting. Surely it doesn’t pay much credit to my organic status, but here I find myself, writing about Podcast Squared [RSS] [iTunes]. This episode is about apps.

The field of podcasts about podcasting doesn’t look very robust these days. Edgy Podcast Reviews, the last podcasting podcast I wrote up, came to a sudden halt nearly three years ago. Yet you can still download all 101 of its episodes on iTunes, as you can hundreds — thousands, probably — of other long-dead shows. This irks Podcast Squared host Andrew Johnstone, as does most every other aspect of iTunes, and most everything Apple has done regarding podcasting except allow for it in the iTunes Store. Though an enthusiastic podcast listener, he seems to dislike most of what now passes for the infrastructure of podcasting. If podcasting podcasts have gotten shambolic, then so, depending on how you look at them, have podcasts in general. This Johnstone aims to correct with his show, which offers an earnest mixture of podcast reviews, examinations of podcasting technology, and discussions of podcasting issues. For the issue of “women in podcasting,” for example, Johnstone invited a few female podcasters to co-host, interviewed the likes of AV Club podcast journalist Genevieve Koski and the Third Coast International Audio Festival’s Julie Shapiro, and recorded an all-lady panel discussion.

Clearly, when Johnstone takes on a subject, he doesn’t mess around, although “women in podcasting” strikes me as ranking somewhere on the scale of pressingness between “men in Pinterest” and “men in mothering (but not fathering).” (My own show recently received a review which justified its two-star rating by explaining that, though the reviewer had only just started downloading episodes, she didn’t see many female names on the guest list, thus ensuring that I’ll never take gender balance seriously.) On a later episode, Johnstone’s frequent co-host Dave Biscella makes a similar point, although this means I agree with a man who produces two podcasts called Movies on Up and Erik and Dave Talking with Erik and Dave. I’ve never heard those shows and thus wouldn’t dream of judging them, but their titles alone do sound like a reflection of the entire medium’s grand lack of ambition.

I may take occasional jabs at the dominant podcasting genre of Two Twenty/thirtysomething White Guys/girls Bullshitting About Culture, but Johnstone has even stronger objections. The entire Podcast Squared enterprise, in fact, sounds like it runs on pure dissatisfaction: his dissatisfaction with podcasting’s — and podcast technology’s, and podcast journalism’s, and the podcast audience’s — failure to reach what he imagines as its full potential. Despite having logged over five years as a podcaster and almost five as a writer about podcasting, I myself have no guesses as to the potential of the medium. Maybe it will realize its full reach, scope, and inclusivity decades from now ago; maybe it reached it years ago.

I once interviewed the producer of a suite of very successful podcasts — a fellow who’s also appeared on Podcast Squared, in fact — and after we stopped rolling, he expressed his surprise that we didn’t talk about podcasting’s big problem. He said that as if I would immediately understand what he meant, but I didn’t, so I asked what this big problem might be. “The technology,” of course. Both Johnstone and our mutual guest regard the necessity to download or stream podcasts through iTunes or some other app as an aggravatingly high barrier to listener entry, although some podcasters see a solution in their coming technological change of choice — internet-equipped cars, closer radio-web integration, the next iteration of the mobile phone — discussing it in the same tones others use to discuss the Singularity.

Yet listening to podcasts has long seemed to me one of life’s easier tasks, and I still manually sync my iPod up to my computer, which, so I gather from listening to Podcast Squared, now feels like the labor of Hercules compared to downloading and listening all on your phone. Innovation’s march will soon render even that minimal effort unnecessary, but I do wonder what such luxuriant ease has, in the final reckoning, contributed to mainstream radio, film, and television. We podcasters have to ask ourselves: do we want listeners without the wherewithal to learn how to download podcasts, or without the active curiosity to seek them out? But this makes for only one of the countless questions about podcasting yet unresolved.

Johnstone addresses many of these, but rarely do I hear much discussion of the medium’s essential nature. “You can’t believe everything you read on the internet,” older schoolteachers solemnly used to warn us. But they might as well have told us, an astute tech commentator would later point out, that we can’t believe everything we hear on the phone. Podcast enthusiasts, Johnstone included, tend to talk about podcasting as an internet-based version of, or even successor to, radio. But it seems to me that, like everything else online, podcasting as a communication tool owes more to Alexander Graham Bell than to Guglielmo Marconi. Still, if you seek an examination of the uses of this newfangled telephone from as many angles as possible, you’ll nowhere hear it more thoroughly done than on Podcast Squared.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Vital stats:
Format: interviews with writers and editors of long-form articles
Episode duration: ~45m-3h
Frequency: erratic

“TV Made Fresh Daily”: that, to me, remains the core product of the FX network. Then again, I haven’t watched since about the turn of the millennium, but so many of my pleasant televisual memories come from tuning in to FX back in high school that I suppose I don’t need to. I remember staying up “late” to watch their “uncensored” airing of Kevin Smith’s Clerks, for instance, an event I’d anticipated for weeks. This happened relatively early in my development as a young cinephile, that time when you do your movie-watching and knowledge-gathering indiscriminately, whenever and wherever it seems possible. You’d also value any meeting, even if only virtual, with fellow movie-hungry minds. I sensed one of those in the skull of a fellow named Chris Gore, who one day started popping up in FX promos for something called The New Movie Show with Chris Gore, subject obvious. I gathered that, in addition to his duties as a cable host — duties that, in their exuberant marginality, I found weirdly admirable — he’d founded a movie magazine called Film Threat. Cool.

Having mastered the sort of film journalism the hyper-mainstream would call “irreverent” during America’s indie boom of the nineties, Gore gained a reputation as an authority on independent filmmaking and festivalgoing. This he still exploits in a variety of ways, and his television appearances continue, I believe in the form of DVD evaluations, on G4’s Attack of the Show. A dozen years after The New Movie Show with Chris Gore, we expect anyone who makes their living commenting on the cinematic scene, and especially one who compulsively jokes around the way Gore does, to put out a podcast; the medium has suddenly become the spine of so many comedic, critical, and generally Gore-style careers, the likes of which none of us could have explained to our great-grandfathers. He says his fans had hassled him for years to do a podcast. But I’m too lazy to do a podcast. So I’ll just go on other people’s podcasts. This is PodCRASH [RSS] [iTunes]. Or so the theme song goes. Though Gore takes pains to highlight the self-obsession inherent in this premise, I find it one of the few genuinely interesting new concepts going in podcasting.

Each episode presents a guest appearance Gore has put in on another podcast, so when you listen, you hear not just PodCRASH, but whichever podcast he happens to have turned up on that week as well. He pitches it as an opportunity for us to hear a variety of podcasts, many of which we won’t have known about before, and as an opportunity for him to talk about whatever he wants. This may have a narcissistic element to it, but not one quite so painful as Gore, who constantly makes pre-emptive cracks about it, seems to think. His show really does provide a view across the landscape of podcasting (especially the patch where guys get “irreverent” about movies) and, beyond that, offers a study in how an individual must bend their personality to suit shifting contexts and circumstances. I get the sense that Gore prides himself on saying exactly what he feels at all times, regardless of who hears it, but as essentially an entertainer, he has no choice but respond to feedback from what pure comedians would call “the room” — even if the room in which he finds himself contains nothing but a couple 25-year-old white dudes, an iMac, and a cat. Then again, the guy certainly can talk, especially if you get him on the topic of superheroes or Star Wars.

Such concerns have always struck me as odd when expressed by a 35-year-old, as Gore was in the New Movie Show days. But from a man of 47, involved breakdowns of The Avengers or how George Lucas ruined The Phantom Menace verge on the grotesque. Reviewing that film, the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, only three years Gore’s senior (and someone who tends to come up often in Podthoughts these days) wrote, “I dutifully thrilled to the earlier films, to their contrast of black-velvet skies and blinding white sands, but I was a little too old to worship them or study the varorium editions. Even in the late seventies, we had a suspicion that Star Wars was nerd territory.” And I think Gore would actually agree, having proudly branded himself a lifelong nerd in PodCRASH’s first episode. Not that I long to return to the days when any we’d swirly any kid caught reading an Asimov novel in the cafeteria, but I sometimes wonder if we’ve let nerd culture gain a little too much ground, especially that formerly held by cinema culture. I myself originally moved to Los Angeles for the filmgoing but admit to a weariness with the aggressive slovenliness of this town’s filmgoers, compared to whom the T-shirt-clad Gore has the wardrobe of Luciano Barbera.

Lane elsewhere wrote about “a period when adventurous moviegoing was part of the agreed cultural duty, when the duty itself was more of a trip than a drag, and when a reviewer could, in the interests of cross-reference, mention the names ‘Dreyer’ or ‘Vigo’ without being accused of simply dropping them for show.” Then: “That time has gone.” Whether or not Gore has made a similar lament, I do suspect that visions of capes and lightsabers have not wholly colonized his head. I also suspect that he created PodCRASH in part out of a fear that his past decade or so in the media had reduced his personality to a narrow band of opinion on the capes and the lightsabers. Ironically, quite a few of the other podcasts on which he appears demand more — sometimes much more — of the same, but some let him speak on very different subjects. (Sex stuff, for instance.) Though Gore’s professional life has placed him well to pull off the podcast-of-podcasts form, I can think of a few others I’d like to hear try it. DC Pierson, for instance, whom I brought on my own show, Notebook on Cities and Culture, after hearing on a dozen others, has risen as part of a younger generation who didn’t have to get defined by time in the deep-cable trenches. So hey, Chris Gore, if you’re reading, come on Notebook for a conversation. You’ve said you want to talk about subjects other than movies. You’ve said you live near Koreatown, where I do. Let’s make this happen.

Comment or suggest a podcast on the Podthoughts forum thread

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Vital stats:
Format: interviews with writers and editors of long-form articles
Episode duration: 35m-1h
Frequency: weekly

Say 3:00 a.m. has rolled around. I’ve walked my lady home, downed whatever wine remained in the night’s bottle, sent the day’s last few dangling e-mails, read two or three page-downs on Twitter, glanced at Facebook, and checked the New Yorker for anything new from Anthony Lane. I could go to bed. Or I could check Longform.org. Though I rarely admit it, I only direct my browser that way in hopes of finding a 3,000-, 5,000-, or — jackpot — 10,000-word article so interesting as to deprioritize sleep and the dull preparations it demands. I imagine you’ve done this too. If you happen to have a day job, maybe you’ve burned hours of your employer’s time — even days of it — reading articles aggregated by Longform and its ilk (Longreads, say), luxuriating in a combination of boredom, fascination, and sheer spite. I had to ditch my own day job after envisioning the decades ahead melting into an ocean of text, often damned interesting but essentially opiate.

Though I no longer rely on Longform as that sort of drip-feed, it has remained in my night-elongating rotation — no morning pressure to get to “the office,” after all — and I took notice when the site began putting out a podcast [RSS] [iTunes]. The show delivers not audio versions of long-form articles but interviews with the sort of people who write and commission them: folks from New York magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine... you know, the publications whose sites you pull up after dark looking for an extended distraction. (Also publications with “New York” in the title. Longform does have its office, I believe, in New York, but guys, come on — America has two cities.) Built at the intersection of an addiction to long-form articles and a compulsion to listen to interview podcasts, the Longform Podcast should sit right in my personal (and thus professional) wheelhouse. Yet I approached with trepidation.

Scanning the guest list, I inhaled sharply: “Oh no — journalists.” To be fair, journalists have proven less a force of 21st-century irksomeness than has the concept of journalism itself. It once rode high, at least in the United States, on newspapers’ robust stream of classified ad revenue. But when the money dried up, journalism took the uniquely unpalatable rearguard action of insisting that we need it. Through little fault of journalists working today, American journalism had already drawn considerable resentment for its perceived high-handed self-regard; doubling down on yapping about the Fourth Estate raises predictably little sympathy. Here I defer to the aforementioned Anthony Lane, on Shattered Glass, Billy Ray’s movie about about disgraced New Republic reporter Stephen Glass: “Glass may be a rotten apple in the barrel, but the contention of Ray’s film is that the barrel itself, the noble calling of the reporter, is as sturdy and as polished as ever. Give me a break. On second thought, give me His Girl Friday. Five minutes of Howard Hawks’s speedy and cynical view of hacks in sharp suits, as they themselves bend the world to fit the shape of their own cynicism, is a more bracing sight than ninety-four minutes of Stephen Glass and his tragic slide from grace.”

From listening to their interviews, I do believe that the Longform crew and their subjects understand full well, if sometimes on a half-suppressed level, how weary we all feel with the established models of journalism. With each skilled, young-ish writer and/or editor I heard one of the Longform Podcast’s trio of hosts (one of whom comes from The Atavist, a new-media operation I don’t quite understand) talk to, I grew more convinced that they’ve all been badly hamstrung by both the irreparable old journalistic business models and the corruptingly pageview-driven current ones. But the money side has only done half the damage, at most; say the word “journalism” to today’s average young reader, and they surely think of some combination of plodding sequential narrative, pretend objectivity, deadening house style, and J-school piety. Pay occasional reflexive tribute to the positively spun versions of those qualities though they may, Longform’s interviewees generally “get it.” But get what? An idea that crystallized for me when I heard the new episode where travel writer Rolf Potts argues that travel writing concerns travel only incidentally and writing almost wholly: journalism will find itself replaced by essayism, or at least transformed by it.

Having built my own career of talking and writing, I can understand why someone might call me a journalist, but I still wince when it happens. I do pull up Longform in search of work by my (roughly defined) peers, but certainly not for anything I’d consider reportage. In those wee small hours of the night — or even during the day — I’m looking for essays. “An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question,” writes Paul Graham in "The Age of the Essay”. “You don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.” Longform mainstay John Jeremiah Sullivan has demonstrated mastery of, if not the pure essay, then at least the highly essayistic piece of reporting. I look forward to one day hearing him on the podcast. The conversation will surely not contain much hand-wringing about who will fund the Baghdad bureau. (If every Baghdad bureau shut down tomorrow, I doubt I’d notice for months, if ever.) The conversation surely will contain an insight or two into, explicitly labeled or not, the journalism that has become essayism. Forget the new journalism; bring on this new new journalism, the contours of whose stories follow the contours of human thought. Consciously or unconsciously, many of the Longform Podcast’s subjects, as well as Longform itself, will do the bringing. As soon as those fact-checking departments can't make payroll, we'll really tear it up.

Comment or suggest a podcast on the Podthoughts forum thread

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Format: two expats on the news from Japan, especially of the irksome variety
Episode duration: 35-55m
Frequency: erratic

They call it “Seidensticker Syndrome”, in a tribute of sorts to famed translator and Japanologist Edward Seidensticker. Seidensticker, to put it far too uncomplicatedly, had a love-hate relationship with the country and the people who made the subject of his career. Ian Buruma described it with more nuance, in The Missionary and the Libertine, as “the love that can turn to hate and then back to love again at enormous speed.” I still see these ever-mounting levels of both attraction and frustration today in the eyes of some Westerners who take up residence in Japan. Those who avoid Seidensticker Syndrome do so by pre-emptively abdicating all desire to fit into Japanese society, relishing instead the clear perspective of the permanent outsider. The late Donald Richie, a friend of Seidensticker’s, stands as the locus classicus of this strategy. Seidensticker to Richie: “You will not allow yourself to be furious with these people. Yet, you know at heart you are.” Richie, in his diary: “He really hated himself, not these people [ … ] he should acknowledge the depths of his self-loathing.”

Despite having no sense of whether the hosts of The Japan Show [RSS] [iTunes] suffer from Seidensticker Syndrome themselves, I should note that they spend most of their time talking about the subject that can most readily induce Seidensticker Syndrome: Japanese politics. Westerners who’ve just set foot in the country seem reasonably able to keep a safe psychological distance from their adopted land’s shifty, confusing government, but over the years the irritation evidently mounts to indigestible proportions. On each episode of The Japan Show John Matthews and Gavin Dixon make a meal of the distinctive behavior of Japanese politicians, an improbable-sounding mixture of the clandestine and the intransigent, the pathologically sly and the incompetent. And when an expat in Japan gets to talking about politics, they usually get to talking about political apathy, which there reaches levels disengagement close to absolute. As a Japan specialist recently asked me, what other country has burnt through six prime ministers in six years without any social disruption whatsoever? What other country could?

Thinking too much about Japanese politics thus strikes me as a recipe for madness, certainly for the voiceless average nihonjin but more so for the utterly powerless gaijin. Yet think about it Matthews and Dixon do, in an attempt to, and I quote their site’s header, “take you on a journey beyond the thin veneer of anime, high-tech, and funky toilets.” I welcome this, as someone with a long-enough standing interest in Japan that I feel desperate to stay as far as possible from the usual axes of the “cool” and the “wacky”. (Those toilets, however, still impress me, and I can take no pride in the West until we finally acquire them ourselves.) I don’t quite know what axis The Japan Show prefers to explore. The bothersome, perhaps? The grimly indicative? Many of its discussions have the subtext, and often the text, that Japan has become a country not only in deep social and financial trouble, but one unwilling to address its causes. Casual Japan-watchers know this — the country hasn’t even tried to hide the length and malaise of its bubble’s aftermath — but listen to enough hours of these guys telling it, and you’ll think Japan careens inexorably toward its own self-destruct button.

Yet I would imagine Matthews and Dixon do love Japan, on some level. They don’t seem to be going anywhere, at least. Like many long-term gaijin, they come off as smart, adventurous dudes indeed. Unlike some smart, adventurous long-term gaijin, they may have a wide variety of complaints, but none have to do with the cushy if piddling occupations that tend to absorb Westerners and hold them back. (Hang around Japan just long enough, and you’ll meet a saddening number of Westerners who could do great things anywhere else in the world, but pass day after day as essentially talking classroom appliances for vast corporate English-language schools.) Matthews, a Japanese-speaking American, has worked his way into an impressive media career hosting television programs and reporting for National Public Radio. Dixon’s professional background I haven’t quite discerned, though I like to think he speaks no Japanese at all and simply gets by on pure Aussie curmudgeonly grit. Despite sharing his people’s globetrotting impulse, Dixon has, I believe, spent longer than Japan than Matthews, to the point of (or maybe because of) marrying into the culture. So if these fellows do love Japan, they don’t love its “leaders,” its whaling industry, its nuclear power industry, its anti-dancing laws, the heat of its summers, or something called “Abenomics.”

I don’t mean to give the impression that each and every episode of The Japan Show rolls out wall-to-wall bitching: Matthews and Dixon also discuss sports, innovations, business deals both promising and unpromising, cycling, and their own lives. (Indeed, here we have one of the vanishingly few two-guys-talking podcasts where you want to hear more about the hosts’ day-to-day.) But I guess sooner or later, Japan’s inflexibility, xenophobia, and presumptions about its own uniqueness just get to you. The fact that these national vices now seem to have reached breaking-point untenability makes Japan, to my mind, a more interesting place to watch now than it has been for years. The Japan Show would make a promising venue to observe this diversify-or-die period of Japanese history — one that now more than ever badly needs its Donald Richies — assuming it gets past the tendencies that keep people from taking podcasts in general seriously. We can deal with podcasters compulsively calling attention to their own segues or lack thereof, I suppose, but I do wish they wouldn’t consider “been busy” sufficient excuse to delay an episode by weeks, or even months. For now, this one exists in the ultimate oxymoronic genre: the occasional news show.

Comment or suggest a podcast on the Podthoughts forum thread

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Format: reading/exegesis/celebration of one sentence to one paragraph of James Joyce’s Ulysses
Episode duration: 5m-25m
Frequency: weekly

If you described the medium of podcasting to an aspirational American of sixty years ago — the kind with a complete shelf of Mortimer Adler-approved Great Books of the Western World, purchased whole — they’d imagine something like Frank Delaney’s Re: Joyce [RSS] [iTunes] as its primary use. For a time, we envisioned all forms media as potential delivery systems for read-along literary and historical lectures by learned, articulate middle-aged men, preferably from across the Atlantic. Delaney thoroughly embodies these qualities, and in fact he once received National Public Radio’s anointment as “the most eloquent man in the world.” I know because the quote appears prominently in the header of every page on his site, as it would on my own. NPR has never made a big deal of my articulateness, but if they ranked me even among the top twenty, I assume they’d grant me as much airtime as I need to say whatever I want.

This, in any case, is why Delaney will dominate America’s public airwaves once a week for the next 27 years to discuss James Joyce’s Ulysses. As least I assume he will, since my mind can’t process the notion that NPR wouldn’t see fit to commit all necessary resources to an exegesis of one of the most important novels ever written in the English language by the man they named the most eloquent in the world. Though I personally listen to the show as a podcast, my brittle value system requires me to believe that other families gather round the wireless each and every Wednesday to hear celebrated one more facet of Joyce’s linguistic, structural, and sheer Dublinistic acumen. The majority of the broadcasts only run between five and fifteen minutes, after all, which only slightly exceeds American radio’s ever-supercilicizing estimate of audience attention span. In fact, I’ve surely gotten to you far too late; you’ve no doubt already listened to every episode since the show’s inception two and a half years ago. I should instead point you to something more marginal, like Two and a Half Men. I hear it is a situation comedy.

But if you somehow have yet to catch up with Re: Joyce, you’d best start now. Delaney has thus far spent 141 episodes reading through Ulysses, at a pace of what seems like one line to one paragraph per. He doesn’t read slowly; he appreciates extensively. Each scrap of text sends him on a textual dig, excavating another corner of this dense labyrinth of references, allusions, multiple meanings, and simple jokes. (Simple to James Joyce, that is.) Delaney’s enthusiasm for this novel comes through in every single episode in a manner that feels freakishly untiring until you consider that Joyce’s fans value his writing for its own bottomlessness. The author claimed to have “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant," and thought this would grant the book "immortality." I read this on Ulysses’ Wikipedia entry, a page at which I recommend prospective listeners take a glance. Otherwise, they’ll get through twenty episodes wondering why they keep hearing about the same brief, snippy exchange between a couple of Irishmen named Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan.

Wait, Stephen Dedalus? The guy from that other James Joyce — novel? Autobiography? — book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? And who’s this Buck Mulligan? I thought Ulysses followed a guy named Bloom on a day’s walk through a stringently, near-autistically realistic description of early 20th-century Dublin. Didn’t they name the day of this supposed walk Bloomsday for that very reason? Questions like these, as well as the difficulty of some of the prose that prompts them, tend to put hopeful readers off the book. A hearty Virgil like Delaney can help them power through this wall, but his very appreciation of Ulysses — of its intricate craft, of the genius of its creator, of its sheer greatness — can at the same time discourage them again. Finding your own approach to any work of art that has become a monument to its own achievement can seem impossible. Someone pointing out that it’s full of patterns usually helps as much as it sounds like it would.

But unlike many lesser teachers of literature, Delaney doesn’t really insist that you comprehend. He clearly understands that sometimes, with a worthwhile book — often, with a worthwhile book like Ulysses, especially the first few times through — you’ve just got to roll with it. Whether you choose to read the novel first and then listen to Re: Joyce, listen to Re: Joyce as preparation for reading the novel, or read the novel along with Re: Joyce, I offer the same advice about listening to the podcast: just roll with it. You’ll quickly tire of hearing the name “Buck Mulligan” spoken so many times, but I assure you the feeling will pass. Listen to five or ten episodes at a sitting; forty or fifty in, you’ll find your listener’s mind has engaged with Delaney’s readerly mind, and accepted that it can’t contextualize everything right away. Unless you’re especially young, though, I recommend you start reading Ulysses without waiting for Re: Joyce’s completion, which Delaney has scheduled for his hundredth birthday in 2042. So we have an additional drama in the question of whether he’ll make it — and whether we’ll make it. The finished product could well turn out to be the most compelling possible endorsement for eschewing retirement in the name of continued active-mindedness. To put it mildly.

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[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Vital stats:
Format: poor and/or freakish writing found on the internet, then read aloud
Episode duration: ~1h, plus the occasional special short
Frequency: weekly, in theory

The internet offers more of a chance than we’ve ever had to engage with the written word and with others who share our interests. As much fruit as this development has borne, The F Plus [iTunes] [RSS] reminds us that we’re dealing with, at best, a double-edged sword. Young “digital natives” aside, most internet users never prepared themselves for a life where they’d need to write anything at all, much less their everyday communication about the things most important to them. And who among us has adequately shielded himself against the universal human temptation to settle into a set of opinions and then retreat into an unthreatening — indeed, reinforcing — echo chamber? At the intersection of these two avenues of misfortune, this podcast taps into a considerable vein of comedy: almost 120 episodes’ worth, at this point, with no signs of resource depletion.

I don’t know whether anyone has written it as a rule of the internet, but for every interest, no matter how fringe, a forum must surely exist. Indeed, the fringier the interest, and so the deeper into the margins of society its practitioners must dwell, the more likely a forum somewhere supports it. The F Plus troupe — whom, for all my listening, still often sound to me like a barely differentiated gaggle of comedic-white-guy voices — scour these fora for the most bizarre, inept, or otherwise laughable posts, then read them out loud in funny voices. Some take pains to faithfully pronounce standard tics and errors — “LOL” becomes “lawl,” an apostrophe-less “I’m” becomes “im” — but that merely pours into the show’s abundant stream of cheap laughs. The deeper, more troubling humor, the kind that gives you as much of a pause as it does a chuckle, comes partially rooted in good old they-walk-among-us fear.

“You have just entered the very heart, soul, and life force of the internet,” reads Urban Dictionary’s top definition by far of the anonymous forum 4chan, to which I have added capital letters. “This is a place beyond sanity, wild and untamed.” And who dwells there? “You depend on us every day. We bag your groceries, we fix your computers. [ … ] We are 4channers. The people devoid of any time of soul or conscience, products of cynicism and apathy, spreading those very sentiments daily.” But this insistent nihilism, just slightly too aggressively dead-eyed to credit, bothers me less than do the punishing waves of ungrammatical self-righteousness this podcast rides. They wash in from all directions: from discussions of childrearing to body modification to something called “fat acceptance” to the relative merits of Stargate and Star Wars. And all those episodes came out recently; if I dug deeper, I’m sure I’d hear from, say, those guys who dress up as Gadget from Rescue Rangers. I understand they see themselves as persecuted, as do every group whose indignation earns the show’s mockery. “I worry that being indignant has almost replaced sex as the main pleasure of a section of the community,” once said novelist Ian McEwan. And you can’t spell “indignant,” after all, without “ig’nant.”

For all The F Plus’ entertainment value — high, by the way — I’m not at all sure I want to dig much deeper. This material discomfits, and not necessarily because of the fear it raises of encountering a frenulum-piercer or an omorashi fetishist or an unschooler in a dark alley. In their seedy anonymity, their self-perpetuating detachment from reality, their crude excess of every base emotion, and especially their sheer incompetence, these posts say things about humanity that we’d probably rather not hear — or, failing that, laugh hard enough to muffle. Encountering this sort of text in the wild, I find I can never actually envision a living, breathing human being typing it in the first place. I instinctively imagine, or simply hope, that I’m reading the work of a monster, or at least one of those hunched, greasy specters who squat on the public library’s computers. Still, nobody’s ever going to make me actually venture into these dampest corners of the internet, though each episode’s show notes provide the links to all the source material, should you dare cast your eyes upon it.

I myself swore off fora of almost all stripes — with, of course, a notable exception here and there — when I realized that internet arguments have, over and above the convictions you bring to them, an all-consuming power of their own. (I also realized that I have no convictions.) Anyone who’s laughed at that xkcd cartoon about someone being wrong on the internet knows what I mean, and understands the futility and waste inherent in that hapless stickman’s position. The F Plus ridicules these go-nowhere arguments and delusional agreement festivals alike. Rightly so, since they strike me as two sides of the same badly debased coin. Then again, if a fifteen-year-old in Wauganaukee can now, with the aid of the internet, find out that he is not, in fact, the only homosexual in the whole world, we’ve made a worthwhile trade-off. Trying to draw a meaningful line to wall that benefit off from that from the lively, completely incoherent discussions going on even now at OverflowingBra.com may, alas, prove a fool’s errand.

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[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Vital stats:
Format: moderated conversations between an author and an audience
Episode duration: ~30m (except when Douglas Adams comes on
Frequency: monthly

Despite having grown up in America, I’ve cultivated an overwhelmingly British, or at least British Empire, roster of favorite writers: Anthony Lane, Geoff Dyer, Pico Iyer, Clive James, Ian Buruma, Jan Morris — the list keeps unfurling, mostly on the other side of the Atlantic. (Even those who seem potentially American, like Douglas Coupland, usually turn out to come from fish-nor-fowl places like Canada.) Sometimes I’ll find my own readers — those, in any case, who’ve never heard me on a podcast — surprised at my lack of an English accent. (Not that they can then get a fix on the oddly placeless one I do have.) Should I put my attraction to U.K. letters down to my failure to master American English, or did too much time spent among all these Brits — natives, transplants, sons of former possessions — cause that failure? Either way, a reader like me can’t help but feast upon a show like BBC Radio 4’s Bookclub [RSS] [iTunes], which offers a robust archive of discussions with many of these very writers.

James and Morris turn up, anyway, as does Coupland. So, too, do an array of British men and women of letters whom I’ve barely read yet have always relished hearing speak: a Martin Amis, say, or a David Mitchell, or a Stephen Fry. Ironically, my serious reading career began when, as a youngster, I got into crime novelist Elmore Leonard and, a bit later, political humorist P.J. O’Rourke, two names I imagine strike reading Brits as among the most American wordsmiths alive. Leonard got his start with Westerns and went on to chronicle the sunnily sordid lives of wisecracking Florida lowlifes; P.J. O’Rourke dares simultaneously to have a functioning wit and vote Republican. They discuss these matters and others with Bookclub host James Naughtie and select audiences of twenty or so readers on their respective episodes or the program. Though most certainly of Britain, the broadcast hardly limits itself to Britain.

We have here, as I more broadly call it, a festival of articulateness. This extends to those sitting below the stage, the “intimate group of readers” who come armed with questions for the author of the month. These they ask, play into stereotypes though it may, in what mostly sound like the watery, faintly offended voices of middle-aged, middle-class womanhood. But know, dear England, that I mean no offense by this. Their equivalents in the states would sound even worse: louder, gravely but obscurely offended, scattering sentence fragments with vain insistence. America has a problem with question quality at literary Q&As; people here would rather ramble, make a declaration of self, or confront the author with half-baked ideas and unbaked lawsuits. Bookclub, perhaps due to a rigorous selection process, suffers no such problem, and can thus devote most of its half-hour, after a handful of quickly incisive opening questions from Naughtie, to a moderated dialogue between author and audience.

Listen to an episode with a novelist like Amis, Julian Barnes, or David Lodge, and you listen in on one more moment in a satisfyingly ongoing relationship between a country and its luminaries. Despite their disagreements — which, given the standard dash of emotional distance, some of these English writers love engaging in — they seem to speak on the same level, to be, no pun intended; on the same page. The Americans come in looking, if not like sideshow attractions, then like rougher-hewn curiosities. Jonathan Franzen and Amy Tan exhibit what I would call our national brand of amiably supercilious discomfort. O’Rourke and Leonard relax into an aw-shucks, brass-tacks attitude toward their craft — for a craft is what they clearly consider it — that must reassure anyone with certain ideas about how they like their Yanks.

Despite long prostrating myself before such eminent tri-named users of American English as John Jeremiah Sullivan and David Foster Wallace — the former I hope to one day hear on this show; the latter, alas, I never will — I doubt I’ll ever attain such mastery myself. Hearing the linguistic contrast between American writers and British broadcasters helps, but I mainly learn other useful lessons about writing from the candidness Bookclub stirs in its guests (the stealthily reserved Franzens of the world notwithstanding). This goes even though most of them write fiction, which I don’t. And if you don’t write at all, the show still has much to teach you about how best to ask about books, to chat about books, and to cast into words your reactions about books. “Boy, Colin,” a friend recently told me, “you really do view the world through the lens of books.” Unable to imagine any other lens, I’d never before considered whether I did or not. If you’re anything like me, this sort of program comes less as an entertaining sound-waves-through-earphones diversion about an entertaining ink-on-paper diversion than as an object lesson in how to consider and discuss reality itself.

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[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Vital stats:
Format: independently produced documentaries, mostly from Los Angeles and the U.K.
Episode duration: ~30m
Frequency: weekly

It’s not easy to title a show, granted, but avoiding fiction strikes me as a mark of no particular distinction in public radio. Indeed, in more judgmental moments I pin the blame for the creative malaise afflicting the industry on its upper ranks dominated by people who began in (or have spent a little too much time in) newsrooms. This produces a number of deforming forces, from flamboyantly pious J-school convictions about the truth all the way down to simple stodginess. What a pleasant surprise, then, to hear in UnFictional [RSS] [iTunes] very little stodge at all. Why, airing stories about colossally powerful car stereos, self-immolation, blind baseball, and the U.K. roller derby, it almost makes us describe it as stodge’s opposite — but let’s not go crazy. We’re talking about public radio standards here. In fact, I suspect I’ve already implied more radicalism than the show can realistically offer.

Despite no doubt having rattled a few cages here and there over the past three years, UnFictional comprises, for the most part, radio documentaries of the same basic type we’ve been hearing for three decades. (This tradition tends these days to favor things like “sound-rich” portraits of barrio life, which explains why I find so little support for my own projects, most of which are multi-hour conversations about Graham Greene.) The whole production comes as one of the newish offerings from KCRW, long the “cool” public radio station in Los Angeles. Don’t read those air quotes as sarcasm; KCRW really does have the coolest programming, in part due to shows like this one, though it also trades on “cool” as a vibe — again, public radio standards, mind. Yet as a listener, I’ve in recent years begun to glimpse a frown of deep discomfort behind the station’s Wayfarers. With its schedule split between music, news, and cultural talk — not to mention Tuesday night’s unmissable Santa Monica City Council meetings — KCRW probably fears the simultaneous eating of its lunch by predominantly newsy KPCC and music-oriented KCSN. An understandable fear, but one born, I would argue, of a framing mistake.

If I think of KCRW as cool, I do so because, at the risk of self-flattery, it attracts cool listeners. What’s more — and here comes the crucial bit — its schedule as a whole retains only the cool listeners. Anxiety about whether any given Angeleno will “stay with them” from music to news to film or book talk back to music thus strikes me as ill-founded since, as I see it, cool people can by definition shift cultural and aesthetic gears every hour or two — and want to. Even just taking UnFictional as an example, not only will a cool listener tune interestedly in for the high-dB amps and the Tibetan lighting himself on fire and the beeps of home plate and the Cockney lasses elbowing each other, they’ll come back for Irish train-hopping, lucid dreaming, and Whitey Bulger. Their engagement, to pull out a term admittedly sicklied o’er with the pale cast of marketing, goes broad and deep.

But seeing as the lame people, defined by the quintessentially lame practice of only being interested in their interests, outnumber the cool people thousands to one, the temptation to also attract assholes pulls strong. Yet I still recommend that quality-minded media outlets lash themselves to the mast, since now more than ever we find ourselves out of the three-channels-on-TV era and in the one where you can thrive on audiences that, while small, are actually good at life. But don’t let me hold myself up as some kind of paragon. Even I get into some KCRW shows more than others: I enjoy Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm, for example, to the point of worship, whereas I also enjoy Good Food, but it occasionally induces flop sweats at visions a revolutionary horde of 38-year-old women in the same way that some fearfully envision vast Jewish conspiracies. Yet my ideal public radio station would let a hundred flowers bloom, of the Bookworm to the Good Food varieties and all in between. This imaginary station wouldn’t just carry one UnFictional; it would carry dozens, each going off in its own direction.

As it is, the show opens too wide an umbrella to make description easy. Theoretically, it showcases real-life documentaries fostered by KCRW’s Independent Producer Project, which aims to get independently produced content into listeners’ ears. For a recently launched mission, this has a queerly pre-internet ring — I can, and often do, get buried with millions of hours of independently produced content at the click of a mouse — but even UnFictional ditches the premise when it feels like it. This most often happens when the show gets a visit from satirist Joe Frank, who today delivers the same sort of amiably humorous, subtly discomfiting, and maddeningly digressive scored monologues that made him cultishly famous on NPR Playhouse in the late seventies and early eighties. On a just media landscape, would Frank possess the regard and renown of a Howard Stern? Impossible to say, but at least his work will always resonate with the cool people. One such cool person, former station general manager Ruth Seymour, brought Frank onto KCRW in the first place. Despite having never met the lady, I get the sense that she embodies everything I’ve said about playing only to the sharpest. I’ve heard she’s sorely missed.

Comment or suggest a podcast on the Podthoughts forum thread

[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He's working on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Vital stats:
Format: on-location segments all over the world about “the people and ideas shaping our urban lives”
Episode duration: ~50m
Frequency: weekly

I know very few people without a conflicted relationship to Monocle magazine. My own began some five years ago, when I happened upon an early issue on a Barnes & Noble rack. Designed to the hilt, as interested in clothes as in coups, almost unnaturally calm but aggressively internationalist, taking full advantage (rather than desperately clinging to the legacy of) the print medium: here was a publication geared toward me, if almost too precisely. “Is This the Family of the Future? Meet Japan’s New Demographic,” “The Ascent of Brasília,” “Rebranding Britain,” “Generation Lusophonia”: all real Monocle cover stories, beyond which you’ll also find pieces on vintage bicycles, Swedish spas, cinemagoing in Bangkok, and the choicest brands of sneaker cleaner. Unable to bring myself to dislike any of this, l nevertheless sense that enjoying it too openly somehow exposes me, though to what I don’t know. Some disparage the magazine as “aspirational,” but no sooner do I agree than I wonder where, exactly, lies the problem with aspiring, especially if you harbor aspirations of such aesthetic immaculateness.

Seemingly always expanding beyond the core product, Monocle has founded an internet radio station, Monocle 24. As the host and producer of a podcast on “cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene,” I now find myself dead center in another set of the operation’s crosshairs. In no possible universe could I resist The Urbanist [iTunes], its program on “the people and ideas shaping our urban lives.” I plundered the archive just as greedily as I devoured the pages of my first issue of the magazine: slick fifty-minute episodes on late-night neighborhoods, on pedestrianization, on train stations, on “great shopping experiences,” on Auguststraße. I heard pieces on the metropolises that intrigue me or have given me lasting memories: Vancouver, Tel Aviv, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Wellington. Yet I heard little about the metropolis that fascinates me more than any other in America, and the one I have for that reason made my home: Los Angeles.

Not that this surprises me; I bore with weary resignation the similarly glaring absence in Gary Hustwit’s otherwise almost-too-appealing documentary Urbanized (which gets a segment, appropriately, in The Urbanist’s very first episode). Both projects overlook the West Coast’s largest city for understandable reasons, though ones that suggest troubling blind spots. From the beginning, Monocle’s framework of place drew me in, making me realize that I’ve long conceived of the world not as a collection of countries or even cultures but as a matrix supporting cities. I still scan their Livable Cities Index, but at this point the concept of “livability” strikes me as having fallen somewhere between meaningless and perverse. It has, so far as I can tell, something to do with clean streets, steep prices, public transportation, and sheer blandness. The perpetually high placement of Zurich continues to confuse me, no matter how often they explain it, and to paraphrase something a friend once said, any list that ranks both Sydney and Melbourne in the top ten is a list bought and paid for by the powerful kangaroo lobby.

We might put the terms “livable” and “civilized” side by side. I daresay that Monocle, and by association The Urbanist, cares more about civilization than anything else. Many of those irked by the Monocle sensibility get irked by the yawning moral vacuum this opens before their eyes. Not to put it too millennially, but this media enterprise seems to have civilized itself into a post-moral universe, where discernment is the highest value. This can smack to some of complacency, but nothing about the actual production of the magazine or this show — their crispness, their organization, their, er, urbanity — suggests even the slightest laxness. Now, I count myself as a true fan of civilization, but whenever I spend good time in the Portlands, Aucklands, or Kyotos of the world, something inside me immediately longs for a certain nebulous, hard-to-rank quality, faint or absent in these “livable” cities but ever-present in the outwardly inhumane Los Angeles — let’s call it vitality. The Urbanist surely understands, sometimes prizes, and often circles around this vitality, but it can’t quite bring it into its calculus. This town draws its strengths from its third-world qualities, and at this point I can say that if Los Angeles is a third-world city, I don’t want to live in the first.

As a healthy counterbalance to Monocle, I read Apartamento, an equally print-embracing magazine dedicated to international urban life in a more makeshift, improvisational, even ramshackle mode. Yet to judge by the clothes I wear, the languages I study (though I have yet to join Generation Lusophonia), and the sneaker cleaner for which I shop, a Monocular creature I remain. The Urbanist thus has much to offer me and the rest of my city-living, non-car-owning, all-downloading, design-obsessing, non-reproducing, national boundary-disregarding generational cohort. We’ll no doubt always wonder how far the internationalism, diversity of interests, and exacting aesthetics of what we read, watch, and listen to run beneath their surfaces — indeed, how far they run beneath our own — but continue reading, watching, and listening we will. Not every extension of Monocle’s world works for me — I doubt I’ll ever return to their store in the Brentwood Country Market, a remote shopping center that brandishes all the wealthy Angeleno’s faux-casual grotesqueries — but I suppose I can’t help but sign onto the overall program. We’re all complacent about something, after all.

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[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes] and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]