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Here are some of the most interesting conversations currently going on in our forums. The ones that make us do the pygmy goat happy dance:


Thoughts on where to find great music by female rappers (with input from our resident expert, Jesse);


Discussion of the the funniest non-comedy podcasts (led by Podthoughts author Colin Marshall);


Lively ongoing exchange about the show Community; and


Folks are still sharing their favorite moments from the recent JJGo! episode "Cool Papa Bell with Rob Huebel". Including lots of great suggestions for the official MaxFun hand signal.

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Format: interviews with an angle (the angle of travel)
Episode duration: ~1h
Frequency: weekly

Did you ever have that moment where you stopped, looked around, and realized that literally all your friends have traveled more than you? Across ages, nationalities and SES categories, my friends share something in common: they have stories about Bulgaria, Japan, Italy, the Philippines, France, Kenya, Finland, Chile, Morocco, Belgium, China, Great Britain, Singapore and other, lesser-known countries that it's too demoralizing even to name. I have stories of precisely dick. That line actually comes from "Trav’lin Man", a blog post I wrote in order to lamenting just how much lost traveling time I now have to make up.

Mike Siegel, coincidentally enough, references the very same song on his podcast Travel Tales [RSS] [iTunes], but he’s so far into travel that he uses it as his theme song. You might know Siegel from his appearances on the old Southern California Comedian Podcast Circuit, though I get the sense than he hasn’t played the podcast guest role quite as often as some of his colleagues. That, and he didn’t have a podcast himself until this past June, so he stuck it out as semi-outsider in podcasting for quite a while. But if waiting to fully join the fray allowed Siegel the opportunity to think carefully over his show’s concept, then I deem it time well spent. Rather than launching yet another podcast of freeform comedic yammering, he’s opted for a far richer genre I call the “interview with an angle” (IWA).

I know, off the top of my head, two sterling exemplars of the IWA. On one, The Mental Illness Happy Hour, Paul Gilmartin interviews friends and colleagues about their psychological health but winds up touching on a whole range of subjects through that context. On the other, the very show under review today, Mike Siegel interviews friends and colleagues about where they’ve traveled and where they’d like to travel but winds up touching on a whole range of subjects through that context. Sure, he and his guests go on the occasional digression and they comment on plenty of issues not directly related to travel, but Siegel’s focus on that particular (if broad) topic keeps the conversations driven and focused.

The show also scores many a point by having a guest roster made up of more than just other comedians. Though we podcast-listeners know that comics talking to comics have produced much pure conversational joy, I always feel a slightly richer interaction between two people who don’t come from exactly the same professional sphere. So while Siegel does indeed elicit seriously entertaining (and useful and informative!) travel tales from the likes of Jackie Kashian [MP3], Graham Ellwood [MP3], and the freakishly well-traveled Dwayne Perkins [MP3], he does just as well with guests whose careers don’t revolve around stand-up: writers, producers, filmmakers. He’s even got Battleship Pretension host Tyler Smith talking about Mexico, Colombia, American road trips, and how to travel despite having a distaste for most foods.

The whole “if you like x, listen to y” thing being the last place I want to go (as it were) with Podthoughts, I hesitate to say that, if you’re interested in the world, you’re interested in Travel Tales. But you probably are. Don’t sweat it if you haven’t heard of a particular episode’s guest; that never really matters on well-crafted interview programs anyway. They all come with fascinating memories and observations about Japanese baseball, Spanish gay bars, Indian meditation retreats, the fear of talking to Ice Cube on a flight, the fear of being three women alone in Riyadh, and Holocaust museums. I don’t know about you, but I need all the motivating stories I can get.

[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: freeform conversation among Koreatown people, plus Korean pop music news
Episode duration: ~1h
Frequency: twice a week

After the years of Podthinking, I thought I’d tried every method of finding new podcasts: word of mouth, browsing of the iTunes store, and, uh... further browsing of the iTunes store. But only last week did I discover a new podcast geographically. See, I’ve just moved to Los Angeles. Specifically, I’ve just moved to Koreatown, my favorite neighborhood here, a 2.7-square mile region of the central city filled with many Koreans and almost as many Oaxacans. Hence all its delicious food, which I should really wait to get an income first before gorging myself on, but hey.

When my non-culinary explorations of Koreatown kept taking me past the Radio Korea building, I couldn’t fight the intrigue. I’m into radio, obviously, and I wouldn’t have moved to Koreatown if I wasn’t into Korea. Tuning into the station at home to hone my Korean-language listening skills, I soon realized that it airs an English program too, and, what’s more, one all about Koreatown. When I found out that K-Town Tonight [RSS] [iTunes] also comes as a podcast, I knew I had a Podthinker’s mandate to investigate.

Podcasting has, to my mind, become one of the great non-local forms; I still almost can’t believe how much fun it is to regularly listen to radio/audio entertainment from every country in the world. But if you’ve never felt the weird thrill of listening to a podcast that makes frequent mention of places mere yards from your home, do seek one out. K-Town Tonight co-hosts Mike and Elli keep their show firmly rooted in Koreatown not just by discussing their lives here but by bringing on guests who all have some connection to the neighborhood: locally based comics and rappers, a movie producer who knows a lot about what you do at all these Korean spas, an L.A. club promoter.

Yeah, I felt a little dirty typing “club promoter,” the same type of dirty I feel when I typing “SEO consultant.” I’ve had the luck not to run into any SEO consultants in Koreatown, but the fact remains that a great many people do seem to approach this place as little more than 2.7 square miles in which to get their drank on. K-Town Tonight tends to veer back to this sensibility over and over again too, perhaps not without reason, but I get the sense that Mike and Elli don’t quite have their hearts in talking about this particular brand of hedonism 100 percent of the time. They do seem to enjoy their respective roles, Mike playing the occasional buffoon with stories about passing out after drinking home alone or turning out to be too fat to play a policeman in a music video and Elli playing the okay-let’s-get-back-to-the-point faux-naïf, but they do their best radio in the moments they step away from the broad and/or base.

One of these moments comes when a second guest doesn’t show up, so they improvise a discussion about the validity of plastic surgery in beauty contests. Others come when they get into the quirker ways that Korean culture operates when transplanted into Los Angeles, or, even better, when they explore the sort of cross-culturality and hybridization that drew me to Koreatown in the first place. You hear this when they talk about the differences between Koreatown and actual Korea, the viability of Korean phở joints,and the variegated origins of guests like the Korean rapper born in Argentina but in the States by way of Mexico or the half-Korean-half-black guw with the half-Korean-half-white girlfriend. There’s something to be said for gorging oneself on barbecue, singing at a noraebang, getting tremendously sloshed, and falling asleep in a booth somewhere, but each episode of K-Town Tonight comes closer to taking full advantage of the much more interesting conversational material Koreatown provides.

(Elli talks a lot about Korean pop music, too, if you’re into 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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Vital stats:
Format: a bunch of comedians talk about their careers (and lives)
Episode duration: 15m-1h15m
Frequency: erratic

Getting familiar with and laughing at the jokes of all sorts of comedians on all sorts of comedy podcasts, I've grown curious about the nauture of their, y'know, actual careers. Podcasting's great and all — nay, the greatest form of media in our time — but it doesn't tend to pay the bills. So what do all these funny folks who host the podcasts and/or loop around the podcast guest circuit actually do?

Turns out that most of them do just what you'd expect them to do: straight-up stand-up comedy. Even though the late-eighties stand-up bubble burst long ago and most podcasting comedians seem to take a lot of roles on movies and television shows (that sometimes see the light of day and sometimes don't), comedians still seem to earn their bread and butter by getting in front of the old brick wall (actual brick or no), taking to people, and — if the stars align — making those people laugh. I learned a little more about that bursting stand-up bubble and all those supplementary media appearances from Road Stories [RSS] [iTunes], but oh, how much more it's taught me about the comedian's life.

Specifically, it's taught me that the comedian's life often just totally sucks. Don't take that the wrong way; I admire the craft of comedy more every day, and most comedians I hear on podcasts seem like dedicated, hardworking, freakishly intelligent — or, at the very least, freakishly fascinating — people. But man, the crap they deal with. I cringe even now at the memory of some of the road stories told on Road Stories: performing at county fairs under the beating afternoon sun, consignment to anonymous midwestern hotel rooms for weeks at a time, dealing with hecklers as the audience slowly tilts over the tipping point to the hecklers' side, the bitter spite of colleagues, crowds who can't grasp the existence of more than one comedic sensibility, grabby swarms of fans-who-aren't-really-fans. I remember once working alongside a smooth jazz radio announcer and former comedian. One day, I asked him about his old career telling jokes. He set his cigar down, fell into a thousand-yard stare, and muttered only, "The road'll kill ya."

Yet for all the grimy, car-crash appeal hosts Murray Valeriano and Joe Wilson draw out of their podcasting-favorite guests like Jackie Kashian, Chris Hardwick, Graham Ellwood, Chris Fairbanks, Maria Bamford (who offers a particularly trenchant criticism of the women's events she works [MP3]), and Matt Braunger, an even more enduring appeal lies at the show's core. At their best, the panels confront one of the ultimate questions: "What makes it good?" In this case, "it" could mean "comic's performance," but it could also mean "audience," "venue," "tour," "midwestern hotel room," or even "heckler." And the discussion spends as much or more time on the all-important "What makes it bad?" (Not always happy people, these comics. Don't know if you knew that.)

In these conversations, I find the participants' occupations almost irrelevant; I'd listen to a table of firemen talk about what makes a good or bad kitten retrieval, a good or bad farmhouse-burning exercise, or a good or bad pole slide just as readily as I listen to a table of comics talk about what makes a good or bad joke, a good or bad set, or a good or bad hellish morning radio appearance. Maybe you can chalk this up to the fact that I spend to many hours a week thinking and writing about what makes a good or bad podcast. The practice has generated dispiritingly few solid conclusions, but I can say this: any podcast that goes deep into the workings of an unusual pursuit may well be a good podcast. Even more so if the podcasters can make a few good cracks about having to fly to Poughkeepsie so often.

[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: stories of Old Timey Americana with music
Episode duration: 1m-15m
Frequency: erratic

Almost every episode of The Memory Palace [RSS] [iTunes] will send you to straight to Wikipedia, not because they drop pallets full of unexplained references but because they cover subjects you kind of already know about, topics you feel so sure you’ve heard, read, or seen something about before. Hey, a young man raised to be a genius who wound up obsessed with streetcar systems [MP3] — haven’t I seen an article about him? Wait, an elderly woman P.T. Barnum hired to act like she’d been young George Washington’s nanny before planted newspaper stories suspecting her of being a robot [MP3] — didn’t I read a comic book about that?

This podcast, you see, covers people, places, things, and events of great importance to the burgeoning field of Old Timey Americana Studies. One actual description calls it a show of “short, surprising stories of the past, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hysterical, always super-great,” but I prefer mine. Listen to The Memory Palace for an hour or two and you get stories about Waldorf-Astoria Halley’s Comet viewing parties, Ben Franklin, Navy-officer impostors, elephant shows, Egdar Allen Poe as a tool of voter fraud, heists, the Chicago World’s Fair, spiritualist hucksters, the CIA spy cats, James K. Polk, and even the Sony Walkman. I haven’t gone all the way back in the archive, but I feel reasonably safe insisting that it has an episode about flagpole sitting.

What is it about Old Timey Americana, anyway? All the best non-Walkman-related stories in United States history seem to have happened between about 1870 and 1935. As Jordan and Jesse speculated on one JJGO!, that era saw the explosion of an unprecedented science-’n-progress fervor, but also a willingness to believe just about anything, no matter how fantastical — a time, in other words, of a lot of mechanical Turks and rejuvenation serums (“sera”?). Radio documentarian Nate DiMeo must understand this, since he’s staked out the territory so aggressively on The Memory Palace. But he doesn’t produce aggressively, or at least not with an aggressive sound. He’s turned out one of the most subdued-feeling shows I can remember listening to — and I mean that in a good way.

I’ll call his format, one more aesthetically of the public radio realm than the podcast realm, “stories with music”: DiMeo tells a story of Old Timey Americana, then cuts it together with atmospheric music. He connects his stories and his music more distantly, abstractly, or maybe “metaphorically” than you’d hear on a show like, say, This American Life, and I like that he does it that way; it keeps the music from hitting too emotionally on the nose, and it must help him resist the temptation to use recorded sounds and in too “documentary” a fashion. Besides, the classic Public Radio Ambient Barrio Noises have little relevance to his project; and I don’t know whose library, if anyone’s, holds the classic Public Radio Ambient Columbian Exposition Noises.

But if we’re making This American Life comparisons, I should point out the relevant one: cadence. DiMeo does indeed speak like a TAL correspondent. I don’t know if the style has a name, but it involves talking as if sentences often don’t end with periods. But he doesn’t leave off periods in exactly the same way. So, while Ira Glass says,

It’s This American Life, I’m Ira Glass

DiMeo says,

This is The Memory Palace. I’m nate DiMeo

World of difference!

If, like me, you get a kick out of this kind of public radio craft minutia, do read DiMeo’s article on making The Memory Palace at Transom.org. Among other astounding revelations such as the reason why so many public radio programs are so skittish, choppy, and/or nonexistent, he admits that, despite working crazy hard and achieving what counts as wild success in the podcast world, he’s only earned a few hundred dollars from at this (by rattling the cup and shilling for Audible and such). I am going to walk into the sea now.

[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: half-interview, half-goofaround with (primarily) Southern California comedians
Episode duration: 30m-1h
Frequency: weekly

Jen Kirkman. Patton Oswalt. Paul Scheer. Kyle Kinane. Jackie Kashian. Marc Maron. Paul F. Tompkins. These are just some of the names that, in my years of Podthinking, I’ve grown so very weary of typing — but not of hearing the voices that come out of the human beings with whom we associate those names! Despite my near-total ignorance of these comedians’ actual performances on stage and screen, I encounter them all the time through their appearances and productions in the comedy podcast world, which draws like a hopeless addict from the pool of personalities based or often found in Southern California. This familiarity certainly made it easy for me to plunder the archives of Totally Laime [RSS] [iTunes], one of the most Southern California comedian-having podcasts going.

If you want to start a Southern California comedian-having podcast — I’ll resist making up an awful abbreviation, for now — you can play it a few different ways. You might grab a buddy and simply goof around, maybe in segments, with a new Southern California comedian each week — but, let me assure you, you’ll be entering a damned crowded, damned top-of-the-bell-curve field. On the spectrum’s other end, you might bring your Southern California comedians on for straight-up one-on-one interviews — but, let me assure you, you do not want to go up against Marc Maron, the acknowledged master of that subform. A bunch of shows instead split the difference between those two extremes, and Totally Laime hits it just about dead center.

Elizabeth Laime, the program’s host, its namesake, and a young L.A. comedy-doer, shares the cockpit with her boyfriend. Or maybe they’re married; I haven’t quite figured that out yet. (You can help by leaving a comment telling me to “do my homework.”) Whatever their legal status, this couple most definitely likes puppies. They also rent what sounds like an awfully nice house in Silver Lake, since guests call attention to its niceness and Silver-Lakeiness with strange frequency. (I can understand it, though I’m a Koreatown man myself; too few mandu shacks in Silver Lake.) The Southern California comedians drive to Silver Lake — or, sure, already live there — drop by their home, and spend an hour or so discussing their careers, having some laughs, and talking about Oprah.

While by no means a super-segmented show — and, so my Podthinking experience has taught me, wisely not a super-segmented show — Totally Laime wields a secret weapon in the form of its “Oprah game.” Laime and her man ask the Southern California comedian of the week to pick a number between one and however many episodes of Oprah exist, and they they all discuss whatever subject Oprah and her guests did on the episode of Oprah that corresponds to the number. I actually really like this idea, but I can’t begin tell you why. Some Southern California comedians display a startling familiarity with Oprah’s oeuvre, but I guess that falls in line with the vast knowledge of reality and other “people with problems” television with which comics tend to keep surprising me. Did you know there’s even an animal channel now? I think it’s called “Animal Planet”.

Reflecting on it, I think I was slightly disingenuous in claiming such a lack of familiarity with the careers of Totally Laime’s guests. One of my very favorite of the show’s interviews features a certain Mr. Jesse Thorn [MP3], whose work I’d like to think I know quite well indeed. In that conversation, Jesse gets to reminiscing about his undergraduate days at UC Santa Cruz. This prompts Laime to mention her alma mater, UC Santa Barbara. Hey, I’m a Gaucho too! I hereby close this educational loop by reviewing her podcast. Us middle-tier University of California students gotta stick together.

[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: conversations about the comedy business and Jay Mohr’s life in it
Episode duration: 1h30m-2h
Frequency: weekly

It must speak to the weirdness of celebrity in our time that I’ve long known of Jay Mohr without knowing him from anything. Saturday Night Live claimed him as a performer for a little while, but I’ve never watched it. I remember seeing him in promos for a show called Action back in I think 1999 which looked neat, but mostly because Illeana Douglas’ eyes seem to follow you no matter where you stand in the room. But the dude’s got a mile-long IMDb page! He had his own big-time sitcom recently! He played some sort of sleazy fellow in Jerry Maguire!

I’ve learned a lot about all these elements of Jay Mohr’s career — and heard the promise of learning much more — from listening to the first five episodes of his joyfully conducted new podcast Mohr Stories [RSS] [iTunes]. Something tells me I wouldn’t have if I’d been following Jay Mohr-related buzz just a little more closely. He’s taken a beating lately, or so I gather from the talk on his show, for everything from his newly chunky weight to JPEGs of his wife’s oddly plastic-surgerized lips. No matter the work he puts into his comedy, a lot of comedy fans seem to write him off. Not long ago, Adam Carolla asked him the million-dollar-preventing question point-blank: why doesn’t anybody want to admit Jay Mohr is funny?

“I used to be a huge asshole,” Mohr said, and he says it again and again on Mohr Stories. If you believe his claims, he’s dedicated his show to pure honesty about his life and career, and even if I don’t know his career, I can always get down to hear anyone being completely upfront about anything. Mohr drops this honesty in the comfort of his own garage, surrounded by friends, fellow comics, his wife, his baby, and even his longtime manager. I won’t pretend they don’t spend lengthy stretches of the hour-and-a-half to two-hour episodes goofing around, but when they get into the nuts and bolts of the business of making people laugh — and the wider business of working with people who make people laugh — they reveal details I’ve heard nowhere else.

Sure, some of these details amount to nothing more than ways to trick the opener traveling the road with you to unsuspectingly gaze upon your exposed anus. (Mohr explains it better than I can.) Other times, he and his coterie talk about the intricate dynamics between a performer, his management, and the wider world, or the complicated and chancy means by which a young comic rises in The Industry. Still other times, he discusses how he came into possession of a story about smoking PCP with Tracy Morgan, how he gained that weight, what it’s like to work with Tom Cruise (“the sun,” Mohr calls him, though he also calls Chris Farley that), or how, exactly, Bobcat Goldthwait broke up with Mohr’s wife before she was Mohr’s wife. (Still no word on those lip injections, though.)

Given my lack of experience in the realm of comedy, I found special fascination in Mohr and co.’s disquisition on the specific joys of performing for black audiences [MP3]. They even go over all the intricate levels of black-people applause, some of which involve grabbing and shaking anyone close at hand, and others of which involve getting out of their seats and doing laps around the theater. Wait, should I call this racist? Should I call Mohr’s impressions of Tracy Morgan racist, even though I laugh at all of them? (But I assure you I laugh at the satire of Morgan’s spacily emphatic manner of speech, not his race.) Should I call the oft-recurring joke about what Florida black families sound like at the beach racist? (But I laugh reflexively at every joke containing the word “kingfish!”) Even Mohr himself has instituted a Mohr Stories drinking game whose sole rule dictates that you drink whenever a white guy does an impression of a black guy. I can’t actually tell what, if any racism all this involves, but I feel a little bad about how I feel bad about how I don’t feel all that bad about it.

(Man, all those cultural studies classes in college messed me up.)

[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: everyman and comedian interviews
Episode duration: 1h-1h15m
Frequency: 2-4 per month

We’ll have to dig our way out of a veritable labyrinth of Maximum Fun connections with this one. If you keep up with the offworld appearances of Max Fun personalities (like this forum thread does) you’ll have noticed that both Jordan and Jesse recently took the guest seat on something called The Anytime Show [RSS] [iTunes]. The truly astute Max Funster will realize that Dominic Dierkes, the program’s host, pulled up a similarly temporary chair on a JJGO in the not-too-distant past. On their Anytime sessions, Jordan discussed his theories about ass-stuffing parties in the approach of the Rapture and Jesse discussed his disappointment with his Alan Alda-free birthing classes — both of which they also cover on separate JJGO episodes. On his JJGO session, Dierkes gets involved in a conversation about “black Bart Simpson,” a subject which arises independently on his Anytime chat with Donald Glover [MP3] — who came on The Sound in 2009!

Before we’ve officially started shooting an Oliver Stone movie about this (a phenomenon I think I remember hearing come up on Dierkes’ JJGO), let me give you the basics on what goes on with The Anytime Show: Dierkes, one-third of the sketch group Derrick, gets up live onstage at Kevin Smith’s SModcastle and talks to people. These people include, of course, the aforementioned Jordan, the aforementioned Jesse, and the aforementioned Donald Glover, but also other comedic and/or podcast-y types you can find around L.A.: his fellow Derricker D.C. Pierson [MP3], say, or the Upright Citizens Brigade’s Matt Walsh [MP3]. Hence the promise of a heapin’ helpin’ of laffs every time.

If you don’t believe me, well, it’s a live show — just listen for the chortles in the background! You’ll hear about a dozen. I wouldn’t normally comment on a thing like low turnout — on a podcast, the relevant audience unit numbers exactly one — but I feel like every other episode I hear references the audience’s thinness. I can’t quite tell what’s going wrong, but maybe Dierkes just hasn’t built up quite the name recognition needed to fill 50 seats on the regular, a task I’m sure turns out to be far stiffer than it sounds. Still, he brings his interviewing and joke-cracking game in full, no matter the attendance, displaying a work ethic that, yes, he talked about on JJGO. And speaking of, man, do Jordan and Dierkes have moments where they sound alike. You wouldn’t mistake one for the other purely on tone, and you wouldn’t mistake one for the other purely on cadence, but their speech resembles each other’s just enough in both dimensions to make me periodically think, hey, these guys related? Comedically, perhaps.

I’m sure only time separates The Anytime Show from a regularly packed SModcastle, especially if its guests stay well-known. Paradoxically, minimizing the well-knownness of certain guests might help too. For the show’s first segment, Dierkes often brings up a member of the audience and interviews them, figuring out on the fly what might prove interesting to ask them about: their tuba-playing, the origami they’ve folded and then burnt, their opinion on the Kobe Bryant rape case. I quite like the idea of pairing interviews with non-well-known non-comedians with interviews with well-known comedians. In fact, I don’t even need Dierkes to make actual jokes during the former; I take all the amusement I need from the contrast.

[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: writing-related interviews, panel discussions, and word games
Episode duration: 45m-1h30m
Frequency: unpredictable, but often enough

The U.K. has really gotten on board with this podcasting thing. Not only do I usually find the U.K.-based guests on my own show Skype-ready and raring to go, but most of the U.K.-based podcasts I’ve listened to lately have an uncommonly polished, “professional” feel. I still don’t know what to call the form of podcasting where you connect a bunch of panelists from all over the world, talk in defined segments with actual recorded bumpers (as they say in, to bust out the scare quotes again, “real” radio), stream it all live, and incorporate synchronous feedback from listeners, but if you like that sort of thing and also have an interest in writing and publishing, then hey, check out Litopia [RSS] [iTunes].

I admit to a slight confusion about what to call this podcast: iTunes calls it Litopia, the web site calls it Radio Litopia, and something called the “Litopia Writers’ Colony” produces the whole shebang. Not only that, but the podcast feed actually contains episodes of distinct shows, each with a different title. You’ve got Between the Lines, an interview program featuring authors like sci-fi eminence Ben Bova [MP3], intellectual gatecrasher Geoff Dyer [MP3], and guru-of-human-endeavor Seth Godin [MP3]. (Having interviewed those latter two myself, I had to scope out the competition.) You’ve got The Debriefer, an ongoing discussion about writing-relevant legal matters such as (U.K.) copyright and libel law. You’ve got Open House, which seems to involve a lot of word games. And finally, you’ve got Litopia After Dark, recommendations of which brought me here in the first place.

In the host or co-host seat of all these programs sits Peter Cox, literary agent, prominent vegan, and thread uniting all corners of the Litopian world. Having held a fairly high media profile on the other side of the pond for decades, he displays an impressive suite of hosting skills, and Litopia After Dark finds him at his most host-ish. Bear in mind, though, that he still presides over a British show, which means that all its moments of highly articulate perceptiveness must ultimately be balanced out by the kind of lazy penile humo(u)r that wouldn’t have flown in third grade. People will feel varying comfort levels with this traditional union of the refined and the sophomoric, but Cox adroitly rides his panels’ highest moments and suffers their lowest with grumblingly good nature.

Though Litopia’s broad scope of content would seem to cast it as one of those programs “for everyone who reads,” I’ve come to think of that as, for all the hand-wringing about the reader’s imminent extinction, a hopelessly large audience to actually satisfy. You’d do much better to think of these shows as intended partially for readers, but mostly for writers. This sensibility provides both an injection of specificity, which keeps things interesting, but also an injection of a certain sourness. I say this as someone who does much with the written word myself, but you’ll find few people as unhappy as writers, especially now that the internet has Chicken Littled so many of them into a permanent mode of bitter, amorphous head-clutching grievance. I periodically sense this feeling of the world having failed writers arising on Litopia After Dark discussions, but because they at least take the relevant industrial questions head-on, they don’t just feel like whinefests. It helps that you also get publishing gallows humor, word games, and — sure, they have some value — a dash of penile joking along the way.

[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: comedic-scientific interviews within scientific-comedic studio banter
Episode duration: 47m
Frequency: 2-4 per month

I’ve somehow heard Neil deGrasse Tyson’s name pop up for years without directly experiencing any of his media projects. In addition to directing the Hayden Planetarium (a planetarium I have certainly heard of) and doing research at the American Museum of Natural History, he hosts a newsy version of PBS’ NOVA (so that is still running!), turns up on numerous talk shows, does a lot of public speaking, says things about atheism and wine, and helms Startalk [iTunes].

Not until I knew about the wine thing did I start paying attention to Tyson’s doings. Here we have a celebrated astrophysicist, a man who can educate us about the secrets of the cosmos, and only his oenophilia turns my head? Back on the playground, I did find myself the only kid who looked up to the stars and failed to feel raptures of wonder. At all my friends who couldn’t stop yammering about space colonies and terraforming and lunar probes, I looked askance; “But guys,” I kept insisting, “all the video games are down here. (As, later, were the girls.) Needless to say, I never really pursued astronomy in school, let alone astrophysics, so I can benefit from exposure to the enthusiasm of someone who did.

You might expect Startalk to operate under an all-astronomy-all-the-time mandate, but no; its selection of topics swerves all around the scientific map, from pursuits highly related to outer space to pursuits that present... more of a reach. Of course Tyson and his guests talk about what astronauts eat [MP3], the Mars Exploration Rover [MP3, and even the aesthetic design of shows like Star Trek [MP3], but they also get around to human self-destruction [MP3], the heart [MP3] — and, yes, wine [MP3].

And Startalk knows you like talk; that’s why they put talk in their talk, so you can hear talk while you hear talk. On most episodes, Tyson not only interviews an expert about the subject of the day — an architect, an astronaut currently on the International Space Station, John Hodgman — but simultaneously talks about the interview with a comedic co-host or two. So you hear a few minutes of Tyson with Jon Stewart or Joan Rivers or Bill Nye or whomever, then you hear a few minutes of commentary back in the studio from Tyson and a comedic scientist or Tyson and a scientific comedian. As a hybrid of the interview and the two-hosts-bantering format, it works surprisingly well.

Much of the pulling-off of this trick owes to Tyson’s personality, which he must have spent all these years honing into advanced media-versatility. Not to say he’s bland — he isn’t — but he seems able to move smoothly between the worlds of science and comedy without sacrificing one to the other, kind of like Elvis Mitchell of The Treatment can move between film and other types of popular culture (which, in fact, I’d like to hear him do that more often!). The similarities between Tyson and Mitchell’s on-air style don’t end there, actually; they also both sometimes extend the last syllables of their sentences for two or three seconds longer than normal. A controversial vocal technique, perhaps, but I’m a big fan.

[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.]