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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.

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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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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.]

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Format: Danny Baker, his co-host, his callers, and a bunch of (mostly British) celebrities talk football — but mostly go on tangents therefrom
Episode duration: ~1h30m
Frequency: weekly

“Because all of the subjects are British, there are qualities that leap out for an American viewer,” Roger Ebert once wrote about Michael Apted’s Up documentaries. “One is how articulate the subjects are [ .. ] they speak with precision, and often with grace and humor. One ponders the inarticulate murkiness, self-help cliches, sports metaphors and management truisms that clutter American speech.” As an American all too eager to run down his less fortunate countrymen, I certainly ponder those things. Yet I also ponder something I heard Lewis Black say years ago: the Brits need those accents to mask a stupidity even deeper than ours. Best, I think, to see each side of the pond as expressing its dimwittedness in different ways. Here in the States, we compulsively elevate the least thoughtful and (therefore) least articulate among us to the highest planes of media exposure. We consequently become colonials again, genuflecting to almost every Englishman sitting before a microphone. This goes for their workaday non-celebrities like those in the Ups as well as their craggiest, most donnish and experience-curmudgeonified broadcast hosts — or, as they call themselves, “presenters.”

Danny Baker may qualify as one such genuflection-worthy presenter, though you wouldn’t call him craggy or donnish. (As for the state of his curmudgeonification, it varies with the topics.) “It's almost inconceivable that Colin would be interested in covering this particular podcast,” a certain Alistair Johnson wrote on the Maximum Fun Forum, “but I'd love to see him take on BBC's The Danny Baker Show [RSS] [iTunes].” He went so far as to make a list of the reasons for my probable disinterest, including its being “an edit of a radio show,” “a phone-in show,” one whose “subject is (supposed to be) football,” and on top of all that, one that’s “British, and deals with British topics.” Though no Anglophile, I like to think I relish the opportunity to step outside my own culture in any medium possible, and Alistair added that “Danny Baker is considered a genius of radio by many in the U.K.,” and that his show is “not really about sport.” His personal testimony: “I have no interest in football, but listen every week.” Holding fast to my principle that few behaviors make one lamer than only taking interest in one’s interests, I began listening immediately.

We could always, it seems to me, use more shows ostensibly about a thing that nevertheless attract listeners with no interest in that thing. The medium of podcasting in particular tends to produce a few too many programs so fixedly about a thing that they actually turn off even enthusiasts of that thing. Now, I don’t really know the rules of football. (It feels wrong to write “soccer” in this context, and besides, I don’t really know the rules of football football either.) But I do know strong enthusiasm when I hear it, and boy, do I hear it in Baker, his callers, and most of his guests. (I won’t soon forget Baker’s reference to the “almost sexual thrill” of knocking the mud off one’s shoes after a rainy match.) Many of the latter two groups play or played football themselves, not that I’d know if they were just lying about it. The ones who haven’t played football, usually having earned their fame in music or comedy, seem rarely to do sit-downs in this kind of context: Mick Hucknall recently passed through Baker’s studio, as did Rob Brydon, Midge Ure, and even Alice Cooper — and even with them, football comes up.

Baker also has a co-host named Lynsey Hipgrave. Their scattershot conversations make her exact degree of investment in football difficult to discern, but, given her career spent mostly in sports broadcasting, she certainly has one. On the rare occasions they and their guests, present or telephonic, remain on the subject for more than five minutes at a stretch, she tends to provide just the right football-related factoid or ask just the right football-related question. But Baker himself, as engaged a football fan as I’ve ever heard, deliberately undermines the show’s potentially hardcore footballishness by taking phone calls. Though they occasionally want to make a point about football, callers usually ring up to answer one of the questions Baker throws out throughout the broadcast, seemingly offhand and in a build toward bewildering simultaneity. “What unusual animals have you ridden?” he may ask, or “What have you stolen without realizing it?” or “What jobs did you hold in primary school — hall monitor, milk monitor, blackboard monitor?” Sometimes he tacks on a proviso, as he did when asking the audience what they’ve stumbled over: it had to be something better than the life-size One Direction cardboard cutout that once caused his own midnight spill.

The supreme digressiveness of The Danny Baker Show culminates in a trademark feature called the “Sausage Sandwich Game.” Though I have by this point heard it played a dozen times, I can only vaguely describe its rules. A footballer calls in. A couple of listeners get on the line, each competing in the name of their favorite team. Baker asks the footballer a personal question — do they mark a book with a bookmark or just fold down the corner of the page; do they actually take the microwave dinner out midway to stir it like the instructions say — and the contestants guess at the answers before the footballer reveals them. This culminates in the same final question every time: does the footballer eat their sausage sandwich with red sauce, brown sauce — here you begin to understand how British cuisine earned its old reputation — or no sauce at all? In this as in every other aspect of the program, a matrix of British hypermundanity provides Baker the framework to exercise his freakishly formidable skills of comedic oratory. Those articulacy-loving Brits, even the ones calling Baker a “radio genius,” may have grown desensitized to it — a fish can’t tell you about water — but the man frees his appeal from the shackles of subject completely with laser-precise word choice, thorough self-deprecation, and cool, perpetually flattening tonal control. But these, I suppose, are just the demands of the old dry humour.

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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.]

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Format: Kevin Smith interviews the makers of films he likes
Episode duration: 50m-2h30m
Frequency: erratic

Finally, someone has given Richard Kelly a chance to explain himself. Actually, wait a second — he had a chance to explain himself, back on the Donnie Darko DVD commentary track. Or at least he had a chance to explain the movie — and to my great dismay, he did, with a sweaty, near-schizophrenic detail and consistency. But Kelly’s appearance on SMoviemakers [RSS] [iTunes] happened years later, after the world had already sneered his follow-up, the chaotically paranoid Southland Tales, into an early grave. Say what you will about the coherence of Kelly’s movies; they’re something, or at least they aspire to that state. My memories of Donnie Darko remain as hauntingly askew as the film itself, and as for Southland Tales, well, J. Hoberman and Manohla Dargis don’t win themselves over. I never would have expected a guy like Kevin Smith to lend Kelly a sympathetic ear, but so he does on the debut episode of this, his filmmaker-on-filmmaker interview podcast. And in a certain maligned-auteur-on-maligned-auteur way, the invitation makes perfect sense.

Whenever I bring up the maligning of Kevin Smith, I ask myself whether I’ve done my share of that maligning. Alongside many cinephiles of my generation, I thrilled to Clerks and everything it revealed about the potential of micro-budget independent filmmaking in the nineties. But like several other of the subsequent movement’s leading lights, Smith has arguably proven damp cinematic powder. Even a picture like Chasing Amy, regarded as one of his strongest efforts, falls victim to both a half-hearted interest in craft and an unpalatably thorough seediness. Smith himself admits, as a born writer and talker, to never finding film a particularly good fit. With the advent of podcasting, which made possible his flagship program SModcast and its countless spin-offs, he may at last have found his medium. SMoviemakers goes up a level by sitting him down with other directors, and ones he admires, thus harnessing his considerable drive as a film fan and his experience (even if he disclaims real skill) as a filmmaker.

This places him well to, say, spend four separate eighty-minute episodes talking to Penny Marshall, discussing her entire career project by project. Not only has he seen, and loved, Big, Awakenings, and A League of Their Own (not to mention the run of Laverne and Shirley) over and over again, he knows exactly what it would have taken to make them. Just as this goes for a grande dame of family films, it goes for a young genre director like Scott Derrickson, with whom smith conducts an almost three-hour two-parter. “Isn’t it interesting as fuck?” Smith asks us at the end of part one. And even though I’ve never watched — and let’s face it, may never watch — one of Derrickson’s movies, indeed it is. The same goes for the live panel episodes with guests who worked on Valley Girl, The Rocketeer, and The Breakfast Club. Whatever you think of his work, Smith’s enthusiasm has always made him likable, and that work gives him the expertise which this show fuses with that most enjoyable part of his public personality.

Yet you may sense a certain arrestedness in the choice of films here. If Smith has retained the winning level of film fervor you’d see in a fourteen-year-old, he may have accomplished it by sticking to the same films he liked as a fourteen-year-old. He tells a representative anecdote before the Breakfast Club conversation about how, immediately after seeing the movie in the theater, he put his name down to rent it at his local video store, months before its Betamax release. Nineteen-eighties teen pictures, budget horror, comic book adaptations, the deliberately cultish, feel-good Hollywood — it’s not as if I expect an exhumed Andrei Tarkovsky to jump on the second mic, but damn. It reminds me that I’ve never quite gotten comfortable with the type of adulthood of which Smith made himself a prototype: married with children (child, in Smith’s case), but still deeply invested in Batman (doing a dedicated Batman podcast, in Smith’s case). This always struck me as the worst of both worlds — barren fifty-year-olds with worn W.G. Sebald novels in hand being, clearly, My People — but he seems to be having one hell of a good time, who am I to quibble?

One strong sign that Smith’s interests may run to a deeper place appears, curiously, in a live SMoviemakers dedicated to a pillar of his moviegoing adolescence: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Though he usually speaks with what we might call the common touch — “Get the fuck outta here,” goes his most common reply to guests’ answers — there he launches into a hyperarticulate panegyric (as star Peter Weller later calls it) to the film’s brazen defiance of tradition, genre, and any form of audience expectation. This willingness to drop the viewer into an existing universe and trust them to possess the intelligence to figure it out on their own, he says, is art. Run with that thought, Kevin. And might I suggest that, into this fine showcase for your conversational abilities, you next invite your fellow alumni from the nineties indie boom? Robert Rodriguez, Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino — can an iPod, let alone a stage, even contain that much sheer excitement about movies?

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[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Format: actors, musicians, and intellectuals interviewed — by Alec Baldwin!
Episode duration: 20m-1h
Frequency: 2-3 per month

Here’s the Thing [RSS] [iTunes] is an interview show hosted by Alec Baldwin. Perhaps your curiosity requires no more detail than that. I wonder how much more detail the development of the program itself required. One easily imagines Alec Baldwin casually mentioning how he’d damn sure like to host one of those smart public radio shows, then a higher-up over at WNYC immediately giving the notion a pre-emptive green light. A prominent, name- and voice-recognizable middle-aged political liberal with a wide range of celebrity buddies (whoa, David Letterman?) a non-famous host would struggle to land? Add it up, and Baldwin almost slots too well into the existing machinery of American public radio.

Then again, one just as easily imagines a troubled gestation. Public radio, already a mildly anxious field, has fallen into the thrall of a lot of ideas about its relationship to the terminally anxious field of greater journalism. The industry has long provided refuge to many a program director who would dismiss the concept of an Alec Baldwin interview show out of hand as frivolous, unserious, insufficiently informational. I fear Here’s the Thing, despite its relative chastity of form, therefore qualifies as one of those Bold Experiments in Public Radio™. Somehow, the view of the show a comfortable no-brainer and that of the show as a brow-furrowing risk seem equally plausible. By the same token, Baldwin himself comes off as, simultaneously, an impressively thoughtful, curious accidental interviewer and a Hollywood actor “dicking around” between jobs.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” so this actually reflects well on Baldwin and/or his listeners. Actors strike me as especially possessed of this ability, though anyone who regularly listens to interviews with them — on one of those smart public radio shows or elsewhere — may with good cause hesitate to rank their intelligences at the first rate. I wondered if, perhaps, actors more willingly reveal their intellectual depths in the company of their own; if so, we’d hear it on Here’s the Thing. I mean, if Baldwin’s acting buddies — and you’ll hear from the likes of Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Andrew McCarthy — won’t open up to him, who will they open up to?

We professional interviewers might feel loath to admit that, sometimes, professions like acting or politics — those we secretly (or openly) look down upon — could make for better training than we ever got. On the level of basic human relations, and thus of conversation, an actor, or a politician, or even a salesman may well have sharper instincts than even the most driven “real” journalist. If Bill Clinton started a public radio show, I’d drop everything and listen to all his interviews right now. I feel I could learn much from a hearing a guy like Bill Clinton put his hand in the game, just like I’ve learned much from hearing Alec Baldwin do it. But about both men I would entertain the same faint doubt. Baldwin does sound genuinely interested in his guests and they subjects they discuss. But is he, really? Or are we hearing just another of his suite of actorly skills?

And does that make the slightest difference? I once asked a friend who works at a major public radio station in Los Angeles whether any of its daily talk show hosts actually care about the topics they discuss. Flatly he replied: “No.” If Baldwin fakes interest, he does it with a skill that, unlike most established public radio interviewers, at least doesn’t insult us. But given his selected guests and the directions in which he steers them, I suspect that he’s going with his heart, or his gut, or whichever body part an honest actor uses. When he brings on conservative commentators like David Brooks or George Will to spar, he does seem nearly as willing to learn from them as to beat them. When he sits down with Peter Frampton or Billy Joel and his piano, he does so out of clearly unfeigned fandom. When he talks to a pediatric endocrinologist, you know he cares about something to do with pediatric endocrinology. (Sugar addiction, in this case.) Nobody, I would wager, tells Baldwin whom to interview; nobody makes him gin up enthusiasm about what’s “hot” or “topical” or “good information.”

As a public radio listener, albeit one often disappointed though resolutely hopeful, I would always and everywhere rather hear people talking passionately about what interests them than mangling a topic that they think interests me. Alec Baldwin understands this, or his Here’s the Thing collaborators do. Charlie Rose, an early inspiration for my own interviewing, continually takes flack for “interrupting” his guests, but his willingness to actively participate has always struck me as a sign of engagement all too rare in the profession. Baldwin similarly interjects constantly, though in a fashion at once blunter and sharper than does Rose, always pressing for a detail or comparing a note. “Give me an example.” “How did that feel?” “Come on.” This manner doesn’t align with journalistic orthodoxy, sure, and I’ll bet it occasionally frustrates the guests, but it points to a kind of conversational vitality that I’d all but forgotten I wasn’t getting elsewhere. American public radio would do well indeed to throw open the gates to even more such unassimilated outsiders — you know, the way America itself used to do.

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[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Format: interviews about ideas, science, rationality, and senses of place
Episode duration: 25m-1h30m
Frequency: sometimes weekly, sometimes biweekly

Little Atoms [RSS] [iTunes] used to describe itself as a conversation about “conspiracy theories, cosmology, religion, the new age, human rights, and the state of the left.” Surely you can sense where that list hits a sour note. Conspiracy theories, cosmology, religion, and the new age fall into the wheelhouse of any show about truth and falsity. Podcasting, the medium that brought us the slightly wearying procession of Skeptoid, Skepticality, Skeptiko, and so on (you ultimately end up at Skepchick), has more than welcomed this sort of thing. Human rights, as a subject, can receive interesting or uninteresting treatment depending upon the context. But the very last thing I hope to hear when I hit play on my iPod is an earnest discussion of the state of the left. And I have no particular love for the right, so perhaps this illustrates the left’s whole problem. Implying that the left has a natural place in the grand separation of fact and delusion brings back to my mouth the bitter disappointment I tasted after momentarily believing the hype about leftism as the politics of the thinking man. We realize later in life that, alas, no -ism truly permits the thinking man.

Hence, I imagine, Little Atoms’ modified current opener, which more broadly but much more appealingly promises a show “about ideas and culture, with an emphasis on ideas of the Enlightenment.” You could describe this as a program about science and rationality, if you concentrate on certain episodes: Ben Goldacre on evidence-based medicine [MP3], Christopher Hitchens on atheism [MP3], Lisa Randall on cosmology [MP3], James Randi on pseudoscience [MP3], Mark Henderson on “why science matters” [MP3]. But in my experience, podcasts exclusively concerned with that can turn oddly pious; you can only listen to so much veneration of the scientific enterprise before beginning to feel you’ve lost its context. The pursuit of the truth, though one of the more robust single justifications one can muster for one’s work, strikes me as not quite a wide enough slice of the human experience. I would gladly take the side of logic, reason, and reality, but man, some of the guys on that team dress like real schlubs.

This program, then, gets even more fascinating when not directly discussing science- or rationality-oriented topics. Its conversation with Ian McEwan [MP3], for instance, whose last novel starred a “fat bastard” of a theoretical physicist, brings a funny kind of cultural skepticism to bear on scientists themselves. Its conversation with Iain Sinclair [MP3] approaches one of the show’s pet topics, the built environment, through the life experiences of a man who has written so personally about it for so long. And to get a sense of when things really hit their stride, listen to the three appearances of writer, television host, and This American Life regular Jon Ronson: on agnostics who turn Christian [MP3], on the diagnosing of psychopaths [MP3], and on his career [MP3]. Widely interested, slyly humorous, culturally high-profile, ever sensitive to bullshit, British: Ronson embodies the kind of sensibility that resonates well with Little Atoms’ own.

No pun intended with that “resonate,” for those who already know that the show originates as a broadcast from London’s freeform radio station Resonance 104.4 FM. This location and its relative lack of restriction places Little Atoms well to showcase a certain species of celebrity, or perhaps “public thinker,” or possibly “public communicator,” which has never quite taken root here in the States. As a regular guest of Ira Glass, Ronson has actually made deeper inroads into America than most of them. I speak of men, usually men of letters, who move freely from subject to subject, medium to medium, writing, speaking, and generally producing on whatever subject strikes them as vital. This show first intrigued me by offering an interview with Chris Petit [MP3], the man who directed Radio On back in 1979. He’s since written novels of various types and crafted films and television programs of various forms, even collaborating at one point with Sinclair. It makes sense that they’d get together; since the both men — as well as this program that has hosted the both of them — do work undergirded by a sense of place.

Of course, the strongest sense of place comes possessed by one of Little Atoms’ most frequent guests, a certain Jonathan Meades. A food and architecture writer as well as a novelist, broadcaster, inveterate sunglass-wearer, and what the U.K. calls a “presenter,” Meades has turned up many times, discussing things like building in Britain [MP3], his own semi-comedic televisual manner [MP3], and the possibiliy of urban renaissance [MP3]. Though by no means an Anglophile, I’ve long burned with jealousy over Britain’s ability to accommodate a reasonable number of well-known figures like Meades. They seem simply to fill the subject-independent role of “interesting guy” — of, in other words, the thinking man, and as Meades explains on one of these interviews, he creates what he himself would like to read and watch. Clive James, a prime exemplar of this sort of vocation, has said that his sort of celebrity doesn’t export well because Americans like to know exactly what’s in the can when they see the label. And even Meades, when he happens to come up on Little Atoms broadcasts not actually involving him, has been described as relegated to the “BBC Four ghetto.” But having glanced at the BBC Four schedule, I daresay I’d move into those tower blocks at a moment’s notice.

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[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Vital stats:
Format: the bits of interviews you weren’t meant to hear
Episode duration: 5m-11m
Frequency: weekly

“For journalists of all stripes, we are helping them realize the untapped potential of their work as dynamic, fresh content in a new, rapidly changing multimedia world.” You’ll easily find this lightly tortured phrase on the about page of Blank on Blank [RSS] [iTunes], though you may struggle to draw meaning from it. The verbiage farther down inspires little more confidence, describing the show’s goal of “creating a sustainable nonprofit media model through a combination of corporate sponsors, underwriters, grants, foundation support, private donations, licensing agreements, production fees, and media partnerships.” On the surface, this seems appealing enough; inside my head, I at best hear the garbled, mystifying drone of Charlie Brown’s teacher, and at worst view the howling abyss into which anyone’s knowledge about the future and even nature of media and journalism have fallen.

Put straight, Blank on Blank podcasts bits and pieces of interviews that didn’t make it into their intended contexts. It offers snippets of previously conducted conversations (sometimes long previously conducted ones) with well-known figures, selected to showcase particularly unguarded or simply unusual moments. If any intersection of subject and topic could sell me on this format, Andre Agassi discussing the mullet of his heyday [MP3] can. Catch up on the show’s archives, and you’ll also hear Martin Scorsese on his jones for driving with the stereo on [MP3], Ricky Gervais on his yearning for jetpacks [MP3], and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke telling off the “wankers” [MP3] that evidently surround him.

As often happens on public radio programs, death and family emerge as themes. You’ve got Chris Elliott reminiscing with his also comedy-doing father [MP3], novelist Peter Straub recalling how his daughter got him into soap operas [MP3], and Project Runway’s Tim Gunn on growing up as the son of a sports-loving FBI agent [MP3]. You’ve got a lady who fed Bob Marley pudding in his final days [MP3], Bono on his father’s own seemingly puddingless final days [MP3], and playwright Thomas Bradshaw on the proper deployment of funeral humor [MP3]. Recorded with everything from Skype to microcassettes and often not intended for broadcast of any kind, these segments would seem refreshingly public radio-unready. But they also come packaged in neat, brief segments, framed by the host with the kind of intros and outros called “chatty” by those who have worked in public radio for a very long time.

Astute observers of The Shifting Media Landscape™ will find Blank on Blank especially fascinating for its strange sunderedness, pulled as it is halfway toward the ostensibly free but secretly restrictive forms of public radio and halfway toward the undeniably free but rapidly habit-bound forms of podcasting. It delivers listening enjoyment in and of itself, certainly, but it also showcases the frustrating situation of the modern public radio experiment, almost all of which go nearly too far for a producer’s comfort, and almost none of which go far enough for a listener’s complete satisfaction. For this listener’s, anyway. Given the talky nature of the show, this dovetails with another thesis I throw around from time to time: the journalism geeks have long led public radio, but for all their strengths, journalism geeks just aren’t conversation geeks.

Natural conversation, so four and a half years of Podthinking has taught me, is the main thing podcasters understand. They can take it to excess, as any former enthusiast of the dominant Two Twenty/Thirtysomething White Guys/Girl Bullshitting About Culture genre may tell you, but at least they have the instinct. I suspect the rigors of legitimate radio journalism, at least as practiced over the past thirty years, have prioritized beating down that conversational instinct above all else. Here we have the main reason to value Blank on Blank: not because it offers us celebrities made human — how much interest can you realistically gin up for the bitter soul-searching of Kelly Slater? — but because it offers us journalists made human. What does it say that mostly in these sorts of outtakes do you hear interviewers share stories, compare notes, lay bare their real curiosity, and joke — honestly joke, not crowd-pleasingly joke — with an interviewee? It says no praise for the past, definitely, but makes tantalizing promises for the future. I guess let’s round up some more corporate sponsors, underwriters, grants, foundation support, private donations, licensing agreements, production fees, and media partnerships.

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[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Vital stats:
Format: modern Japanese rock and modern Japanese rock talk
Episode duration: 35m-2h
Frequency: monthly

My friends who taught English in Japan in the nineties insist that the glory days have gone. They describe having stood in the blast radius of the last and most exciting flowering of Japanese popular culture, that which burnt out with the twentieth century. Of course, older Japanese scholars I meet insist that, on the contrary, the country stopped generating exciting works of art around the end of the sixties. I’ve never met him, but somewhere, a supercentenarian Japanophile surely insists that nothing of note has come out of Japan since before the Second World War. Each of these laments applies to a different facet of the culture: the music twenty years ago, the film and literature fifty years ago, and eighty years ago... oh, I don’t know, netsuke?

None of this rearguard action for the mind or minds behind It Came from Japan [iTunes], the music podcast of the eponymous music agency. It Came from Japan itself has the unusual and highly geographically specific mission of, and I quote, “bring the freshest, creamiest Japanese bands to the UK.” Rock bands, specifically. And yes, the UK, specifically. An unusual pairing, you might think, but upon reflection the countries have much in common: small, islands, bound by a vast and often tacit superstructure of position and obligation, valuing politeness yet incubating youth cultures of studied rudeness. In both lands over the past half-century, these last have tended to execute their rebellion in one form especially: rock music.

On It Came from Japan, you hear modern Japanese rock music, you hear an Englishman talk about modern Japanese rock music, and you hear that same Englishman interview the particular Japanese responsible for the modern rock music. If names like Hotel Mexico, Trippple Nippples, and Donkey Vegetable Voxxx already mean something to you, then read no further — here is the podcast you desire. The name Shonen Knife, to which the band attached gets a reasonable amount of play on this show, probably means at least a little to you. Though of a previous generation of popularity than most of the other bands showcased here, Shonen Knife does indeed represent several of their qualities: blunt simplicity with a counterintuitive edge of experimentalism, known in the west or trying to be, of a certain age, female.

While this show offers tracks from much more than girl-bands-turned-woman-bands, the interviews strike me as slanting in that direction. Tokyo-based host Daniel Robson regularly connects over Skype with Japanese rockers, usually ladies, who make or contribute to the records he spins. Often, he issues warnings to the listener beforehand: she doesn’t speak much English, I had to edit this down a lot, she had to memorize her answers, she read her answers off a card, she read the wrong answers off a card, etc. I take these conversations less as segments meant for information delivery as conceptual exercises, although the halting, quizzically toned English in which the guests speak (and the chuckle of quasi-comprehension with which Robson sometimes responds) makes for a much more endearing experience than the average conceptual exercise.

Still, even the least linguistically capable J-rocker here speaks English with a damn sight more mastery than I speak Japanese, although I’m working on it. Robson also seems to possess a far more comprehensive knowledge of Japanese rock than most mortals could hope to possess. If there exists an easier way to dive into any segment of the genre, I can’t imagine it. Japanese rock, like the Japanese cellphone, has spent quite some time evolving its own peculiar set of subspecies in Galapagosian isolation. It Came from Japan focuses on Japanese rock that sounds always mildly goofy, sometimes slightly harsh, often sonically adventurous, and occasionally aggressive, but not in an apparently angry way. You could do much worse to diversify your musical portfolio. Most of us do worse with every trip to Spotify.

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[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Vital stats:
Format: a man speaks of many things — in Spanish
Episode duration: 5m-30m
Frequency: maybe not a going concern, but 71 episodes exist

So here’s one entirely in Spanish. If you don’t understand that language, I won’t stop you scrolling on, but if you understand even a little bit of it — or if you want to understand all of it — you might consider having a listen. On La Casa Rojas [RSS] [iTunes], the Peruvian-born, St. Paul-based Spanish teacher Luis Rojas talks about events in his life, events in the world at large, events in history, and the many vagaries of language-learning. A simple premise, to be sure, but I listen to a great many language podcasts, and at least half of them complicate themselves straight out of usefulness. This one has held to a certain purity. You want to learn Spanish? Then hey, listen to a man speak Spanish for a while.

Put the foreign linguistic element aside — not that it makes much sense to do so here — and this show would seem to follow a common but usually unfortunate podcasting form: some guy talking about stuff. But even when I began listening, my Spanish rusted to near-uselessness, the impressive friendliness of Rojas’ personality shone through. You don’t realize the rarity of this until you hear it; I get the sense that most podcasters, eager to quickly scrape together whatever audience they can, affect sour pusses and hope to gather listeners under the banner of common (if exaggerated) prejudices. The strain of this charade, I would guess, has become a leading cause of the disease known as podfade. But Rojas comes across as a genuinely friendly, open fellow, just the sort of person you hope for when you know you’ll miss some to most of the meaning of each sentence spoken. Should I go to a word like “avuncular” here? Or perhaps the closest Spanish equivalent I can find, the awfully literal “de tío”?

What’s more, Rojas’ choices of topics seem equally reflective of his personality. Some episodes verge on the academic: popular music in Latin America between 1960 and 1965 [MP3] [MP3], using the always-tricky subjunctive [MP3], the word quedar [MP3]. Others connect to to his heritage: the reign of Peru’s controversial president Alberto Fujimori [MP3], the distinctive street sounds of his homeland [MP3], the origin of the pisco sour [MP3]. And then we have the episodes that, by the standards of language-learning programs, rank as almost startlingly personal: heart trouble in the family [MP3], his ride on a Grayhound bus [MP3], what Supertramp meant to him during his adolescence in military-governed Peru [MP3]. One of Rojas’ most endearing mannerisms surfaces whenever he mentions his American wife, Joan, or as he almost invariably says, “Mi esposa — Joan.” I don’t know how well it comes across in text, but he tends to say it with that odd pause and emphasis, like he’s afraid of forgetting her name. Joan, a student of Spanish, actually turns up on the podcast now and then. As she tells it, learning the language no era tan fácil como pensaba [MP3].

But by now, you surely sense that the resemblances between La Casa Rojas and garden-variety “some guy talking about stuff” podcasts, even those in Spanish, stop at the superficial. The complexities of Rojas’ topics, the considerations inherent in compressing them into five- to thirty-minute episodes, and the necessity of hitting certain linguistic points along the way force him into what sounds like no small amount of scripting and editing. (Supertramp cannot simply be described, after all; Supertramp must be heard — in fair-use-sized clips, of course.) Even so, the most valuable things I learn about the mechanics of Spanish while listening tend to come neither directly from the subject of the day nor the parts of grammar explicitly described. The importance of music in the life of Luis Rojas, for instance, has not been lost on me, nor has his tendency to describe speaking and listening to languages in musical terms. When one day he happened to mention his experience of Spanish-speaking students learning by replicating sounds and English-speaking students learning by internalizing written words, some important undergirding element of my foreign-language education — obviously, one too important to describe with much clarity — locked in.

As with any language-learning podcast, I recommend listening to each episode of La Casa Rojas definitely not once, and not just twice, but at least thrice. Given its 71-strong archive, that practice gives you over 35 hours of Spanish-language listening to do. Confusingly, Rojas hasn’t posted a new episode since March, but hope against podfade springs eternal. But even if we already possess the complete Rojas canon, it still provides a comfortable, well-positioned step in this particular podcast-based linguistic journey. If you lack any Spanish whatsoever, you might consider beginning with something like Coffee Break Spanish, moving up to its successor Show Time Spanish, putting in those 35 hours with La Casa Rojas, and then steeling yourself for the sufficiently vast realm of podcasts made for native Spanish speakers. Watch out; those guys talk a lot faster than Luis Rojas. Sometimes they’re barely avuncular at all. Nada de tío. Completamente nada.

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[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]

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Vital stats:
Format: talk with travelers, and talk while traveling
Episode duration: ~28m
Frequency: not a going concern, but 85 episodes exist

Cultural England seems to have always loved a traveler. Perhaps this affinity lingers from the days of Empire, or maybe an island people instinctively understand wanderlust. Just behold the gallery of luminaries that is Wikipedia’s English travel writers page. If its seemingly broad definition of “travel writer” bothers you, any designation that encompasses the likes of Geoff Dyer, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Pico Iyer, Michael Palin, and Evelyn Waugh can’t go far wrong. None of them seem freighted with the same burdens which Sisyphize many of the unfortunates we regard as travel writers in America, haphazardly collecting a third of the information they need in half the time they need so as to make the word count for an “If You Go...” box. Something tells me Colin Thubron never put up with that.

A traveler like Thubron, of course, deals with challenges all his own, and you can hear about them on BBC Radio 4’s Excess Baggage [RSS] [iTunes]. He shows up to discuss his journey up a Tibetan mountain so sacred that the truly faithful can never ascend; they just sort of go around and around the base. [MP3] Such a story could almost have come ripped from the diary of any of the Empire’s finest, but Excess Baggage as a whole attempts to cover a width of the traveling spectrum between these forcefully soul-searching Thubronic adventures to, say, the lure of moonlight [MP3], or knitting in Iceland [MP3].

That’s the traveling spectrum, mind you, as opposed to the tourism spectrum. And yes, rarely has a jerkier-sounding sentence appeared onscreen, but this gets into a genuinely substantial philosophical, or at least terminological, question. What counts as tourism, and what counts as travel? Does there come a point when the farrago of simulacra that is tourism ends and the genuinely experiential travel begins, or do the two occupy entirely separate psychological spaces? I feel as if every trip I’ve heard the hosts and guests of Excess Baggage discuss counts as proper travel: writing thriller novels about the Philippines after visiting the country [MP3], digging through Europe to expose your own grandfather’s Nazi past [MP3], running tours of North Korea [MP3]. Even a two-part [MP3] [MP3] guided exploration through Istanbul struck me as safely out of the utilitarian, two-weeks-of-time-off touristic zone — even as I listened to it, in a somewhat utilitiarian fasion, as preparation for a possible couple of weeks there myself.

So perhaps the difference between travel and tourism actually comes to nothing, and the BBC accents on a show like this simply cut straight to the supplicating colonial at my core? But given the extent to which we tend to view standard tourism — scrape together accrued vacation days, flip through a phrase book on the flght, eat a crêpe, take pictures of your partially focused self standing before similarly focused monuments, maybe ride a boat — the smoke must lead to some kind of fire. I think back to an old David Sedaris piece remembering a childhood neighbor recently returned from a midcentury middle-class European tour: “‘It changes people!’ our neighbor had said. Following a visit to Saint-Tropez, she had marked her garden with a series of tissue-sized international flags. A once discreet and modest woman, she now paraded about her yard wearing nothing but clogs and a flame-stitched bikini.”

But does tourism change people? I’ve begun to suspect that change is exactly what tourism doesn’t effect — rarely a change more substantive, in any case, than tissue flags and flame-stitched bikinis. We might thus define travel as acts of self-displacement that do, by whatever means, change people. In this we have at least one sound reason to call Excess Baggage a travel program, though I should make it clear that it isn’t a currently running program. Though it boasts an easily accessible archive of 85 episodes, the show ended its run in April of this year. It did so with a special broadcast on “the point and pleasure of travel” [MP3], which addresses all these issues and more. So you might consider listening to that one first, not last.

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[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]