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Format: astrologically flavored long-form comedian interviews
Episode duration: 45m-1h15m
Frequency: 1-4 per month

For the purposes of this review’s first five paragraphs, let us assume that astrology works. Don’t question it — just roll with it. So we have this fully effective system based upon the positions of the planets that, when applied to our personalities and others’, reveals the hidden mechanics of these personalities. It “gets inside heads,” you might say. As an interviewer myself, I notice that interviewing has pretty much the same aim: to probe a person’s intracranial workings, to learn about their ideas, desires, and bêtes noires — to find out, in short, what makes ‘em tick. Bringing interviewing and astrology together thus only makes good peanut-butter-and-chocolate sense.

Brian Palmer, host of Saturn Scene [RSS] [iTunes], has done this in podcast form, creating what he calls “an astrological look at pop culture.” I have many friends who would groan at the word “astrological,” but over three years of Podthinking have redirected all my own groans toward “pop culture,” a subject whose moratorium among new podcasters remains long overdue. In this case, though, the use turns out to be relatively benign; it just means Palmer has called in his entertainment-journalism connections to snag guests like Michael Cera [MP3], Jen Kirkman [MP3], and Paul F. Tompkins [MP3].

If Palmer just horsed around with these comedic visitors, this would stay pretty garden-variety. Luckily for us, the astrological angle forces him to give his show the kind of direction most comedian-having pop-cultural podcasts lack. He sits down with these people ostensibly to give them an astrological consultation; using something called a “birth chart,” he tells his guests about themselves based on his calculations about the locations of certain planets at the moment they were born. Apparently This American Life contributor Starlee Kine [MP3] — who, for the last decade, I just realized I’d been wrongly calling Starlee Kline — fits the archetypal profile of an Aries. Similarly, my more granola friends have informed me that I’m a “classic Scorpio.”

But if I’ve taken one fact about astrology — which we’ve assumed, remember, works — away from this podcast, I’ve taken the fact that none of that hey-baby-what’s-your-sign talk means anything. Knowing just that one sign, the “sun sign,” tells you nothing; you’ve got to know where all the planets were on your original birthday. Palmer seems to mention most of them during the course of each interview, and which “house” they fall into for each interviewee. We here, alas, hit the limits of my astrological knowledge, but he talks a lot about which particular planet resides in each guest’s “eighth house,” a topic I find oddly comforting to hear about.

But know that near-ignorance of astrology, be it yours or mine, doesn’t really matter! While Saturn Scene’s conversations periodically find their way back to astrology, most of their content has no direct relation to the stuff. Palmer uses it as a jumping-off point to get Cera talking about his time in an intensive meditation retreat, to get Tompkins talking about his view of collaboration as the one true way to make art, or to get Kine talking about the old Ukrainian woman who wouldn’t stop accusing her of selling drugs. Through the terms of astrology, Palmer finds an angle that gets his guests, none of whom profess an astrological bent of their own, to open right up.

Since you’re probably still wondering: yes, this show is seriously, unironically, about astrology. (The end of each episode lets you know how to book your own consultation.) But in another, equally meaningful way, this show departs early and often from the astrological hardline. All the talk of Geminis and Venuses and houses and retrogrades — and you actually won’t hear that much of it — simply gives rise to the kind of long-form (the Tompkins interview runs two hours over two parts), substantial, yet laid-back interview program of which we could always use more. To that end, astrology does work.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

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Format: lectures and debates to do with long-term thinking
Episode duration: 20m-2h
Frequency: usually monthly, though some months have their own miniseries

It always comes back to Brian Eno, doesn’t it? I mean, everything in my life does; I’ve got no reason to assume yours is any different. Rarely do I pick up an interest without soon finding out that Eno — music producer, visual artist, oblique strategist, public intellectual about the very basis of culture, and author of my favorite book, A Year With Swollen Appendices — got there first. This has reached the point where, instead of looking for new things to get interested in, I just look up what he likes at the moment and get interested in that. Easier that way.

Brian Eno counts long-term thinking among his interests. He counts it so hard that he, along with other perpetually fascinating thinkers like Stewart Brand, sits on the board of The Long Now Foundation, an organization founded to further the cause of long-term thinking. Long Now people, so I gather, think of us as sitting smack in the middle of a 20,000-year story of human civilization, and if we want to do a better job in the next 10,000 years than we did in the first 10,000 years, so the logic goes, we’d better consider our actions in the context of all the rest of the story. The Long Now Foundation encourages this with a variety of projects, most iconically a 10,000-year clock, but most directly a lecture series, hosted by Brand, conveniently available as a podcast: Seminars About Long-Term Thinking [RSS] [iTunes].

If you have any familiarity at all with what I think of as TED culture, you’ll know many of the Long Now lecturers. The group boasts heavyweight names like Lera Boroditsky [MP3], Paul Romer [MP3], Michael Pollan [MP3], Craig Venter [MP3], and Nassim Taleb [MP3]. Sometimes these luminaries give straight-up lectures, perhaps with a Q&A session following. Other times, the events take on more unusual forms, like debates structured into a series of rounds where, not only does each participant state their case and respond to the others’, but each participant also explains the opposing point of view. In lots of venues, debates can wind up as time-wasting shams; performed Long Now-style, they achieve actual engagement between the ideas involved — a rare thing — pretty much every time.

Unlike the TEDs of the world, The Long Now Foundation doesn’t just bring people in to flog their pet theories. When they announce a Seminar About Long-Term Thinking, it stays about long-term thinking. So these guests from myriad different domains — astrophysicists, historians, engineers, writers, politicians, “technologists” — all have to consider and explain their own ideas within the frame of the next 10,000 years, the last 10,000 years, or preferably both. Some of the seminars get quite creative to work within this frame, as when PC game designer Will Wright and Brian Eno get together [MP3] to talk about the common long-term-y elements of their separate work with generative systems. Eno has built generative music systems that can crank out single pieces that last thousands of years; Wright has built games that simulate thousands of years of evolution.

Seriously, guys. This podcast has a good deal Brian Eno in it. How much more do I really need to tell you?

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

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Format: one guy talking about the history of political issues
Episode duration: 15-40m
Frequency: 3-4 per month

I tire of nothing quite so quickly as political arguments, especially ones about the blood-angrying issues of the moment. Paul Graham wrote sagely about what makes these so tiresome to hear, or worse, participate in:

I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.

Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't. No one would know what side to be on.

Bruce Carlson, host of My History Can Beat Up Your Politics [iTunes], knows this. The historical lens glimmers as one of our last hopes for a way to talk about politics, a reasonable-izing agent, a technique that neutralizes the way politics can get so, well, political, and so he uses to look at current political questions. You might say that he either approaches history through politics or approaches politics through history — both seem true enough. Does the politics spice up the history, or does the history temper the politics? Does the history offer a way to understand the politics, or does the politics offer a way to understand the history? Does it matter?

The show uses the blessedly simple form so many popular history podcasts have settled on: one guy talking for a while. Carlson starts talking about an topic of long relevance to American politics — unions, social security, rights — or one that’s gained particular currency in the day’s news — gas prices, secret anti-terror operations, filibustering. He then lectures on the history of that topic, usually focusing on echoes of today’s concerns throughout the United States’ lifetime. Students of ancient and world history know there’s not much new under the sun in the public forum, but Carlson shows you don’t even have to go far back or far afield to understand that.

Despite his attempts to use history at the anti-politics, I’m sure people still accuse Carlson of political bias every so often. Putting out episodes called “The Dark Side of Rights” [MP3] or ambivalent assessments of unions [MP3] surely draws charges of crypto-conservatism, and — as I have learned from my peer group — conservative is the worst thing you can be. Then again, I’ve heard quite a few moments on the show when Carlson declares that conservatives won’t like what he’s about to show history revealing, and iTunes suggests Best of the Left as a show to which My History Can Beat Up Your Politics listeners also subscribe.

But regardless, doesn’t the one-guy-talking format sound... flat? People who’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to get into history podcasts again and again think so. I find that Carlson improves it with each program, sounding slightly more conversational and slightly less scripted. (Though you can still hear him turning the pages of his notes.) Listen to the older episodes he occasionally re-runs and, though the content holds up, you hear a farrago of strangely choppy editing, dropping out in mid-sentence, dropping in in mid-word, suddenly jumping back a sentence or to, repeating sonically identical parts of an intake of breath four or five times. The show can still sound a little glitchy, but it’s made much progress — something that, if you listen to enough of these talks, you’ll wonder if the American political process has ever made.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

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Format: Japanese-learning skits and conversations
Episode duration: 5m-20m
Frequency: every 1-4 days

An interviewer recently asked me what forms of podcast I’ve found make for the most brain-jazzing listening. In the middle of my spiel about how tired I’ve grown of hearing pairs of twentysomething white guys bullshitting about pop culture, I suddenly realized that, sure, I listen to a few choice comedy and culture podcasts each week, but I listen to at least three language-learning podcasts each day. If I’m going to Podthink honestly, I have to reveal these preferences.

All podcasts exist in a lawless, Wild West-y landscape: unable to tell the good from the bad from the ugly at a distance, you’ve got to spend hours and hours getting to know them individually. For podcasts built around cores of Labyrinth jokes, hey, fine, whatever. If they suck — and they usually do — move on. But you theoretically trust language podcasts to accurately and effectively teach you how to communicate with real human beings who live in other places. If their creators slack off, your embarrass yourself — in front of wise foreigners!

I thus urge you not to try learning languages from the ground up by podcasts. You’ll navigate this world infinitely better with bit of grounding, no matter how meager, in the language you want to learn. Common sense says a legitimate academic course or just talking to foreign friend work best for this, but if you don’t like leaving the house, a diversified portfolio of language-learning YouTube videos and sketchily-HTML’ed language-learning sites await you. So if you want to learn, say, Japanese, find a way to get a grasp on the mechanics of the language, even a loose one — then fire up JapanesePod101 [RSS] [iTunes].

Spanish has so many speakers and students across the world that high-quality internet ways to learn it grow like mushrooms. (I previously Podthought about Coffee Break Spanish, though I personally listen to the higher-level Show Time Spanish.) Korean has few enough speakers and students that, when the internet does offer a way to learn it, it turns out pretty solid. Japanese, though; we’re talking thousands upon thousands of aspiring speakers all over the place, yes, but so have made themselves undiscriminating, their minds addled by glue inhaled from Gundam models, their bodies in shambles from weeks on end spent hunched before erotic Naruto fan fiction.

At first sight, JapanesePod101 looks confusing enough that I’d wondered if it would repay the trouble. It seems to have duplicate pages in the iTunes directory, some updated and some not, and the episodes come in a wonky order: after a linear series of “Introduction” shows comes “Beginner Lesson #38”, then “Beginner Lesson #41”, and shortly thereafter comes “Lower Intermediate Lesson #18”, after which you soon find “Intermediate Lesson #75”. When you actually listen, they all sound different. Um, zuh?

Your mileage may vary, but I’ve adopted the strategy of listening to all the episodes in whatever order they arrive: if I listen to an intricate conversational episode way over my head followed by a “Newbie Lesson” telling me how to introduce myself followed by a lesson about mildly complex expressions pitched right at my level, so be it. I’ve realized that JapanesePod101 and podcasts like it serve one purpose above all: to provide an opportunity to hear and attempt to understand a foreign language every day — or just about. No matter what else you do to study and practice, hearing it on the regular is the sine qua non. (From what I hear, you can get more material from this show by some “freemium” means, but I’ve never looked into it.)

Plus, I’ve come to love the anti-dramatics of language-learning programs. Like most of these shows, JapanesePod101 delivers lessons by way of skits and conversations about those skits between affable native Japanese speakers and a range of affable English-speaking hosts including a girl from Australia and an American fellow with an accent of undiscernible origin. Goofier than most, this program comes up with sketches to do with, among other things, animal noises, three-seated bicycles, and boisterious grandpas. And you need to fill your actual-Japanese-hearing experience out beyond that, hey, there’s always Yan-san.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

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Format: mental illness-centric interviews with comedians, podcasters, and podcasting comedians
Episode duration: 50m-1h20m
Frequency: weekly

You hear cracks about how only the mentally ill would seek a fame-propelled career: in movies, in broadcasting, in writing, in the media, in comedy, in what have you. I’ve chuckled at these before, but always in a hollow, not-quite-comprehending kind of way. Most of the people I admire, after all, have these careers, and lacking any directly marketable skills, I have no hope but to obtain one myself. Sure, given greater sanity, maybe we’d land steady jobs as systems analysts and build stable family lives or something. But c’mon — can we all really suffer from malfunctioning brains?

Listening to Paul Gilmartin’s Mental Illness Happy Hour [RSS] [iTunes], I get the sense that... maybe we do, though to varying degrees. Gilmartin himself seems to have endured an especially nasty streak of mental illness; I don’t know the full story, but he hints at troubling enough aspects of it in this show that maybe I’d rather not get the whole picture. He certainly didn’t reveal it on Dinner and a Movie, the film-with-interstitial-cooking program he hosted from 1996 until nowish on TBS. I remember enjoying it as a kid, but I had no idea the man showing me how to prepare a Short Circuit-themed casserole struggled with such fiery personal demons.

The freedom to lead a less Road House chicken bake-oriented life has, for Gilmartin, meant the freedom to come forward about mental health, his own and others’. Running The Mental Illness Happy Hour as a straightfoward interview show, he brings on friends and acquaintances from “The Industry”, broadly defined, to talk about how they’ve coped with the conditions afflicting themselves and those close to them. Having built his career on speaking comedically about his many issues, Marc Maron makes an appearance [M4A] that, while you’d perhaps expect it, turns out no less rich and funny for it. When Gilmartin talks to Adam Carolla [MP3], he asks not just about the’ crushing depression of Carolla’s hippie parents, a fount of stories belovedly familiar to all Carolla fans, but his own illness/superpower of “hypervigilance” as well.

In fact, if we can go by this show’s first eight episodes, mental illness affects most high-profile members of the comedy podcasting community, or at least enough people near them that they can talk incisively about it. Jimmy Pardo [M4A], for instance, would seem like the picture of mental health. And he may be, but that doesn’t stop he and Gilmartin from digging deep into the motivations that can simultaneously fire up and shut down a comedian. Battleship Pretension (esteemed predecessor Ian Brill’s review here) host Tyler Smith [M4A] has a conversation with Gilmartin about his depression that both reveals specifics the condition I didn’t know about and lays out certain details that feel discomfitingly familiar to me. All that self-loathing... that’s — that’s not normal?

Gilmartin has points to make with The Mental Illness Happy Hour, but he comes right out and makes them explicitly, and they don’t seem particularly bothersome, as points go. I mainly notice him making the point that, if you think you need some meds, see a professional about getting some meds. I have no skin in this psychopharmacological argument, but his viewpoint seems sound. More broadly, he announces on the regular his one main Michael Jacksonian message to the listener: “You are not alone.”

This strikes me as healthy, whatever the context; if I suffered from full-blown depression, compulsive competitiveness, bad parenting cycles, anxiety, panic attacks, or hypervigilance, I’d rejoice at hearing from successful people who’d labored under the very same crap. As it is, I recognize elements of my own tics, twitches, and unhelpful impulses in Gilmartin and his guests’ bigger problems, and I’m glad I do. You could treat this as a plain old interview program featuring more-personal-than-usual examinations of all your favorite podcast-y and comedy types, but you’ll get much more out of it if you face the fact that, hey, we’re all at least a little mentally ill.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

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Format: One Presumably Thirtysomething Black Comedian and and One Fiftysomething Black Rock Star Bullshitting About Culture
Episode duration: ~1-2h
Frequency: erratic

Am I even allowed to review this podcast? When Max Funster Andreas “Duus” Pape — “mentioned at Min 30 sec 41 of Episode 162 of JJGO,” according to his e-mail signature — suggested I Podthink about The Field Negro Guide to Arts and Culture, my first impulse objected on grounds of my lack of qualifications: “But that’s not for white people!” My second impulse revealed the silliness of the first one. “Think of all the nerd-stuff podcasts you’ve written up,” it said. “If you can listen to two hours of discussion on Ringworld, you can damn well listen to a podcast with Negro in its title.”

It helps that this particular podcast with Negro in its title comes from two of the most likable fellows I’ve ever heard speak through an RSS feed. I already suspected I liked one of its co-hosts, comedian W. Kamau Bell, after hearing his JJGO appearance, which included a discussion of this very podcast in which Jesse brought up, with astonishment, the identity of its other co-host: Vernon Reid, guitarist, founding member, and “main guy” of the band Living Colour. As often as I deride the dominant podcasting format of Two Twenty/Thirtysomething Guys Bullshitting About Culture, hearing One Presumably Thirtysomething Black Comedian and and One Fiftysomething Black Rock Star Bullshitting About Culture comes as a veritable breath of fresh air.

Despite the early reservations about my suitability to review Bell and Reid’s program, I don’t actually buy the idea of a sharp cultural divide between “stuff for white people” and “stuff for black people.” I wondered if The Field Negro Guide would insist upon such a divide, but it actually does its part to muddle things up. Some think of space operas and comic books as white people-oriented, but damned if Bell and Reid don’t get into deep discussions of Star Wars and Spider-Man. Some think of rock music as white people-oriented, but damned if Living Colour isn’t a rock band and, if I can go by what I’ve heard from them, one hell of a rock band.

A career like Reid’s naturally generates all kinds of gripping stories — hopping on a plane moments after a show to secretly play on Mariah Carey’s debut album comes to mind — but so, even with fewer years racked up, does a career like Bell’s. For my money, their best moments come when comparing notes about the nature of performative careers, coming at performance as they do from two different angles. I’d normally prefer this, with infinite vastness, to analyses of Batman, but Bell and Reid at least do them with enough intelligence that the subject matter almost becomes irrelevant. You might expect this degree of sharpness from Bell, but Reid’s oratorial bombs impress me even more. I mean, who expects guitar geniuses to do just as well verbally? How did he find the time?

None of this is to say that these guys don’t get racial, especially as pertains to black presidents and black rock bands. All well and good, since I consider U.S. politics a branch of space opera anyway and, without the super-sized episode of Fishbone [MP3], I wouldn’t know much about Fishbone. I mostly just don’t understand a lot of it. I get what black is and what white is and all that, broadly speaking, but I find too few commonalities within those vast swaths of humanity for claims about “black people” and “white people” to resonate with me. So I wind up not feeling racial anxiety about all this, but anxiety about my absence of racial anxiety. (And if that reasoning seems tortured, wait until you see me review the other podcast “Duus” suggested.)

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

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Format: interviews with literary translators, mostly about poetry
Episode duration: 25-50m
Frequency: monthly

Hot tip for aspiring interview podcasters: literary translators make solid guests. They have ideas. They have observations. They show up on time. They, as you’d hope, communicate quite well... using language and stuff. I’d actually hoped those sterling communicative abilities would’ve rubbed off on me, since I’ve interviewed a few of ’em on my own show, but I guess they haven’t. Still, talking to translators on the radio has given me a jones to talk to more of them. Until I do that, I’ve found a little something to tide me over: Reading the World [iTunes], a podcast featuring nothing but literary translator interviews. One of the episodes even offers a conversation with Suzanne Jill Levine, translator of such writing luminaries as Manuel Puig, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Jorge Luis Borges, so it’s got good taste, too. Hey, I also interviewed Suzanne Jill Levine — so it’s got great taste!

I should probably fear for my soon-to-be-eaten lunch, given that, as a production of the University of Rochester’s translation-dedicated Three Percent — so named for the percentage of translations among all books published in the U.S. — Reading the World commands the power of specialization over my decidedly unlaserlike generalization. But I breathe easier knowing two things: first, that this podcast only releases interviews at a leisurely monthly pace, and second, that it tends to focus on more translators and translations of poetry than of novels. Perhaps that makes the show less immediately accessible — talking about poetry already puts up a bit of a wall, let alone talking about foreign poetry — but such a degree of specificity interests me.

The Japanese Germanophone author Yoko Tawada once remarked that “the interesting lies in the in-between.” I’ve come not only to believe that notion but to try, with occasional success, to convince friends of it as well. Content can make a thing interesting, sure, and form can make it much more so, but I find myself much more jazzed by the thing’s position on the countless overlaid maps of geography, culture, nationality, language, etc. At their best, these positions fall into liminal, between-the-cracks, neither-here-nor-there spaces belonging to no single country or tradition. Sure, maybe I like novels, movies, albums, and podcasts. Maybe I don’t read much poetry. But if a piece of poetry emerges from the in-between, I’m down.

Or I’ll get on board if a translator of poetry emerges from the in-between, for that matter. If someone has, like Bill Johnston, come from the U.K. to make a career out of recreating Polish poetry in American English, you’re pretty much guaranteed that you want to hear that person talk about their life and career in a way that you aren’t guaranteed by, say, the systems analyst you meet at your roommate’s office party. Same goes for someone like Forrest Gander, who, assuming I heard this right, translates from Spanish and Japanese. Here we have people who, safe to assume, made some strong choices along the way.

Regrettably, Reading the World doesn’t quite escape its origins as the product of an academic institution. Despite the excitement of these translators’ literary adventures in Mexico, Eastern Europe, Argentina, the Middle East, Russia, and beyond, these conversations still produce tooth-grinding phrases like “this work deals with the historical and its problematics” and “translation is an inherently political act” with dispiriting frequency. As contradictory as it seems, in this show I hear both the bumper-bowling academization that drains literature — poetry, novels, stories, what have you — of some vital essence and the aggressive engagement with the wider world that could counterbalance it.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

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Format: movie reviews, movie interviews, Brit banter
Episode duration: 40m-1h40m
Frequency: near-weekly

Okay, even as a cinema, criticism, podcasting, and broadcasting geek, I'll admit it: a couple of critics' voices trading opinions about what's in the theaters? Often no great shakes. Podcasting has let a million of these flowers bloom, and for every long-lived blossom of informative entertainment like, say, Battleship Pretension (Podthought about by my esteemed predecessor Ian Brill), vast fields wilt. Established radio programs about film have a better time of it, on average, in the podcasting arena. Having gone strong on the BBC's legitimate airwaves for about a decade now, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film Reviews [RSS] [iTunes] struck me right away as more promising than most. I almost wish I could make a dramatic flourish here and tell you that it went on to bitterly disappoint me with a salvo of pure state-bankrolled blandness, but nope; show's solid.

U.K. readers, so my impression says, probably know of Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo. Readers outside the U.K. may or may not, but probably don't, so here comes what I can cobble together by way of introduction. Mayo, a beloved BBC Radio presence since the early eighties, mainly hosts a drivetime talk show. Kermode has risen to the state of one of these all-around "cultural presenter" types who seem to exist everywhere outside of America but mainly in England and of whom I feel all-consuming jealousy. The man talks about movies on the radio, but he also writes about them for papers and magazines, blogs about them, publishes books about them, and hosts other programs in various media about them. If you live outside the U.K., you may well know him as the guy who couducted the interview during which someone shot Werner Herzog with an air rifle.

Kermode's ongoing journalistic relationships with Herzog and other intriguing filmmakers ensure that we hear not only assessments of their projects on this show but rapport-y conversations with they themselves. Kermode and Mayo put on the rare show that combines reviewing and interviewing without inflicting much compromise upon either. Part of this has to do with Kermode's apparent willingness to speak his critical mind directly to the creators, as when he tells Herzog straight up that his new 3-D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams plays better in 2-D. Variously respected and disrespected — known, let's say — for his contrarian positions, Kermode displays a deep, unvarnished suspicion of the ascendant style of 3-D, and I find that refreshing. He also goes short on acts of big-budget spectacle and does not reflexively go easy on "popcorn" movies. He'll occasionally let a movie off the hook due to its low ambitions, but at least he doesn't do it with the kind of pathological regularity you see in other critics of his media profile.

So what part does Mayo play in all this? First and foremost, and like the veteran broadcaster he is, he keeps the program moving through all its usual segments. These include the running down of of the U.K. box offices' current top ten and the real-time addressing of listener e-mails, texts, and tweets. Not to say that he appears merely as a facilitator; even if he doesn't make the theatrical rounds with the same dedication as Kermode does — he's not the film critic, after all — he matches him comment-for-comment with surprising gusto. But Mayo makes his most critical contribution to the show's entertainment value as a sparring partner in what I understand to be an age-old tradition of British friendship: taking unending amounts of lighthearted abuse from your buddies and manfully responding right back in kind. American broadcasters and podcasters do this too, or at least they attempt it; something about the English manner of speaking renders this type of banter infinitely more amusing. I suspect it has to do with how absolutely everything they say sounds, even if just faintly, like a question.

Like any long-standing comedio-cultural partnership, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film Reviews's has developed a certain suite of tics. Some of those tics I enjoy, especially the one that urges them to compare most films to Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. Less felicitious tendencies have them dancing nervously around plot details for fear of divulging "spoilers" — surely a cinephile as experienced as Kermode realizes that, if knowing a picture's events truly "spoils" it, then that picture sucks? — and inexplicably fixating upon the "age advisories" (like MPAA ratings in the States) the British Board of Film Classification issues each film.

But, as ever, the details matter less than the overall vibe the hosts put forth, and nearly without fail, Kermode and Mayo — but especially Kermode — summon the kind of energetic enthusiasm about film, good and bad, that makes you believe they've discovered a vaccine for critical burnout. I mean, I love film; I love film more than most things. But could I look myself in the mirror and honestly claim to be able to talk about Red Riding Hood — or the crushing grind of its week-to-week bretheren in mediocrity — with all the vim and zing that flows from a faith that what I'm discussing genuinely matters? Jeez, I don't know if I even want to think about that.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

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Format: episodic discussion of some of the most vital questions of human existence
Episode duration: 1h-1h30m
Frequency: near-weekly

I thought I’d hold off on writing about Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin’s new podcast Back to Work [RSS] [iTunes] until I could hammer together a sentence saying what it’s about. Then I thought, screw that — I admit defeat. I don’t know what Mann’s spookily popular, sporadically updated other show You Look Nice Today is “about” either, but that hasn’t stopped me from developing a hearty addiction to it. Benjamin, of course, we know from The Pipeline, an interview podcast with people who make internet stuff. So we’ve got Mann’s aggressively wandering yet intensely self-critical sense of humor combined with Benjamin’s becalmed inquisitiveness about technological creation. The original peanut butter and chocolate, right?

Okay, so maybe I don’t shoot entirely straight when, after over ten hours of Back to Work, I claim ignorance of its subject matter. But here, in some sense, subject matter doesn’t; if you like, you can enjoy the show simply for the level of verbal interplay between its hosts. They tell stories about the crappier, foodier jobs in their pasts; they remark upon what they see going right and wrong in the creative world; and they give their opinions on films written and/or directed by Charlie Kaufman. They make jokes aplenty. If you’ve listened to the show yourself, you might insist that Mann does all this, while Benjamin only stokes the Merlin-fires by tossing in occasional questions, prompts, and concerns. Sure, one of these guys racks up way fewer talking minutes than the other, I’ll grant you that, but I insist the dynamic runs much deeper.

I say that because, to my mind, this show takes no simple form: not a super-extended interview of Merlin Mann, not banter-based comedy, not two dudes yammering. As an enterprise, it actually faces the most vital questions of human existence, so vital that I can under no circumstances spell them out directly, for free, in a Podthought. Clap me into irons for crimes of grandiosity if you must, but I would argue that Mann and Benjamin’s conversations on Back to Work deal with no less urgent a matter than how to live an actual life. That is to say, a life where you create things, where you contribute, where you connect — where you have an effect. These lives turn out to be rarer than you’d think.

But oh, the obstacles in the way. According to this podcast, they include fear, lack of care, jittery attention spans, quarterlife crises, “tip” dependency, pathological inspiration-seeking, and the temptation to buy a new beret instead of doing your life’s work. Our many squirrely, irrational tendencies toward pathetic self-preservation, inbuilt by evolution, make it hard enough to do anything meaningful; figure in 21st century’s the veritable Horn of Plenty of distractions, and I’m surprised any of us can even fold a paper airplane. The question of how best to work on what matters remains a hard problem — possibly the hard problem — and I haven’t yet deluded myself into believing that Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin have it solved. But they do know that we can only hope to get our hands moving and muddle through our cycles of ever-improving failure, and they know how to remind us of that, almost weekly, in a terribly entertaining way.

Great, hairy issues naturally lurk underneath all this: even given the above, does it still make sense to have to depend on a podcast to urge us to pursue our crafts? Given both Mann and Benjamin’s horn-rimmed, smartphone-wielding, font-kerning-knowing, nine-keystroke-Mac-command-using audiences, might they anyway waste all this insight on a depressing, ephemeral grind like iPad app production? And considering that I always listen to new episodes of Back to Work on something-ahead-of-first priority moments after downloading, do these lingering questions mean a damn thing?

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

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Vital stats:
Format: comedian, author, filmmaker, etc. interviews
Episode duration: 35m-1h
Frequency: once or twice a month

If you have any investment in the internet’s literary world, you’ll have encountered The Rumpus, which offers all kinds of stuff above and beyond its distinctive old-timey-guy-in-a-basketball-hoop logo: interviews, reviews, columns, links, and goofy-type pieces. The site contains, from what I can tell, an imposingly huge amount of content, much of it to do with books and writing, but a decent-sized chunk to do with non-book forms of culture that I assume I would know about if I lived in Brooklyn. Yet The Rumpus, masterminded by San Francisco-living writer Stephen Elliott, does not quite fall under the usual, ever-expanding category of “Brooklyn-y internet things.” I think of it as... something else, but not something easily described.

I have enjoyed The Rumpus’ sensibility enough to want to contribute to it, but every time I check their writers’ guidelines, they say that “we don’t have any money and can’t pay for writing.” This would keep me with the burgeoning Gen-Y norm of working my eyeballs out on non-remunerative projects, but I have grown tired. So very tired. (I foresee most of my generation dying young, of starvation, especially if they live in the first world.) Still, when I learned that The Rumpus had extended its non-moneymaking brand to the even more non-moneymaking medium of podcasting with Rumpus Radio, I had to check it out. I downloaded all its episodes with extra speed when I saw that they fell right into my personal wheelhouse by being long-form interviews.

Max Funsters, I return from my listening excursion bearing news of talks with comedians — Kyle Kinane! [MP3] W. Kamau Bell! [MP3] Marc Maron! [MP3] — and pretty meaty talks at that, ranging between 35 minutes and an hour. This might come as a surprise from the offshoot of an ostensibly literary site, but, as I learned from listening to this podcast, The Rumpus puts on live events in San Francisco which get comedy in your literature and literature in your comedy. Given the recent-ish rise of more cerebral stand-up comics with more unusual material — aided, I rush to assume, by podcasting itself — this mixture seems to nail a certain sub-sub-zeitgeist right on. As a writer I like once said, the interesting lies in the in-between; I don’t know about you, but I want few things more than comedians with a literary sensibility and literati with a comedic sensibility.

Though sometimes joined by a sidekick, Stephen Elliott does most of the interviewing himself. I’d thought of him as less the interviewing type than the gritty novel- and confessional memoir-writing type, but his conversational style actually sounds like it springs straight from his authorial persona. What a relief, given that, when some writers take up the microphone, they wrongheadedly ditch exactly what makes their books so compelling — themselves — and camp it up with their idea of what an “objective journalist” sounds like. Elliott makes himself, to whip out a vague term but the only suitable one, present. This sometimes results in his guests ribbing him about his troubled sexual life, but I call that a small price to pay. It makes perfect sense that Elliott talked with Maron so early in the show’s run: neither of these guys come from an interviewing background, but both succeed at it by being so very actual.

When not interviewing comedians, Elliott splits his time between authors like Steve Almond [MP3] (who has, shall we say, choice words about publishing and book reviewing), filmmakers like Blue Valentine’s Derek Cianfrance [MP3], and other cultural types of whom you may or may not have heard like “female hip-hop artist” (a say what now?) K. Flay [MP3]. All these conversations make me feel good about what we’ll all have to read, watch, and listen to in the next few decades. I wonder if anybody’s getting paid. Should we all form a 7-11 robbery collective?

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]