Podcast Roundup March Edition

I feel like a broken record about how good the Code Switch podcast is.  It's just so good for my purposes. This will be the second semester I have done a unit in my racial politics class about sports activists.  The episode called "On the Shoulders of Giants" from Code Switch looks at three racial minorities who were athlete activists of their time - Jack Johnson, Wilma Rudolph (who I had never even heard of before), and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf - and really strips away all the BS to show that they while they stood up for what they believed, they never really were recognized or appreciated for it.

In light of the recent NFL national anthem/Colin Kaepernick controversy, I am seriously considering playing this in class to really nail the point that Kaep is not the first black athlete to try and create social change from a sports platform and he won't be the last.

I've talked about Hit Parade before. I don't always love music podcasts because, as it turns out, I don't always love music, but I do almost always love Hit Parade (there was a recent Lady Gaga ep I turned off because I noped out of Gaga a long time ago).  There was a recent episode called "The Bad Moon on the Rise Edition" that just made me so happy.  It's about how Creedance Clearwater Revival just never made it to the top spot on the Billboard Top 100, despite a succession of number two records. I mostly loved this because the snippets of CCR songs playing reminded me of driving around with my dad with "Travelin' Band," "Fortunate Son," and "Have You Ever Seen the Rain" playing. It was nostalgic and I made a vow to myself to play some old school rock music on our next road trip.

I don't listen to many daily podcasts, but I have a couple in my feed. I only download the episodes that are interesting to me. One of those dailies is Front Burner from the CBC. I like that it's focused on the Canadian POV and to an American like me, it's nice to look at things from a less polarizing place than most of our news podcasts.  There have been several episodes recently that were super interesting, including one on Michael Jackson's legacy and one on why it took so long for R. Kelly to face charges for his rampant and consistent sexual misconduct, but the episode that was a surprise hit for me was one called "Should Tech Companies Pay Us for Our Data?" that talks about the nuances of the arguments for and against tech companies that make money on huge amounts of information we give for free.  Surprise hit. I'm still weighing some of these arguments in my head weeks after I listened to the episode.

 I'm still catching up on Doughboys, which is to say, I just started the 2019 episodes so I'll be downloading them in real time soon, but the back catalog is one of my favorite places to be in the podcast world. There was a live episode with Mary Holland at the end of 2018 that, towards the end, actually had me laughing so hard that I had to put my head between my legs. The humor was crude, yes, but it was hilarious. I'm not sure this is the episode I'd suggest as a first listen, but it was simply the hardest I've laughed in months.

Much like I sometimes put Code Switch at the bottom of my list to listen to, but I usually regret it because the episodes are consistently solid, I sometimes put off The Moth episodes because they are consistently inconsistent. But the episode "Open Adoption, Tin Foil Dinosaurs, and the Imam" has four solid stories with four solid storytellers. If you've never listened to The Moth, this is a great place to start.