The Organist's Verbal Virtuosos

Erica Heilman’s show is a genre of podcast we might call the “wandering ear”: an omnivorously curious producer roaming the earth, interrogating whatever crosses her path, from lentil beans to the criminal justice system. She also has amazing guest contributors (don’t miss Scott Carrier’s occasional police blotters). This episode, featuring Joe Frank and Larry Massett arguing about cars, might be what an episode of Car Talk would sound like if it were recorded live at the Cabaret Voltaire and produced by Tristan Tzara.

In the NY Times Magazine, Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham are both weekly practitioners of the art of criticism, and their podcast, “Still Processing,” translates their intelligence (which is sharpened on the one side by outrage and deep humor on the other) into pod form. This episode, featuring the brilliant Margo Jefferson (a modern artist-critic par excellence), reflects their range, as they struggle not only to feel all the feels, but to think all the thoughts, too.

Our season four opener starts out as an album review, then decides to stop being an album review in order to tell an incredible story about the iconic novelist Paul Bowles driving around Morocco in a VW bug in the 1950s with a brick of hash and a suitcase-sized Ampex tape recorder in the backseat. Then it goes back to being a record review, but not before you’ve inadvertently learned about Moroccan independence, North African musical traditions, and the ethics of ethnography.

Anshuman Iddamsetty produced 51 episodes of “The Arcade” for the Canadian literary magazine Hazlitt before moving on in 2015. To call it a literary interview podcast is to miss the remarkable things Iddamsetty accomplishes with structure and sound. Each episode feels like a hand-crafted, oddly shaped shrine to the featured author. Ben Lerner, with his churning self-consciousness and preoccupation with the intersections between art and life, might have been Iddamsetty’s ideal guest.

I have a mild allergy to podcasts that begin with extended updates on the host’s personal life, but Robyn O’Neil, “an artist who just likes to read things out loud,” is so funny and self-deprecating and smart — and her taste in books is so good — that I’m into it.

Benjamen Walker works (with Erica Heilman’s Rumble Strip, above) in the “wandering ear” tradition. I think he might have even invented it — though I’m no podcast historian. So maybe I need to re-listen to this episode, which offers three parallel histories of podcasting, told in Walker’s peripatetic (and influential) style.

The film critic Karina Longworth laces her addictive essays on “Hollywood’s first century” with music, movie clips, reenactments, and other dramatic adornments, transforming them into absorbing, epic biopics for the ear.

You could argue that standup comedy is a form of criticism as art: the best comics riff on contemporary culture in elaborate, incisive verbal essays. Buress is in that class of comic, but I think the real reason I love his work is his deadpan. His deadpan just feels so… dead. But it still stays generous and warm. I’m saying he has a terminal, friendly deadpan.

Silverblatt’s approach to interviewing isn’t so much to ask his authors questions as to perform elaborate, incisive readings of their books and then watch them respond. And their responses are, more often than not, a version of astonished appreciation. “I’ve heard you were an acute reader,” David Foster Wallace remarked in quiet awe, after Silverblatt described the “fractal” structure of Infinite Jest in a classic 1996 interview. But there are moments like this in almost every one of Silverblatt’s interviews.

Podcasting was invented in the fourth century BCE, in Athens, by the Greek philosopher Socrates and his student Plato, who argued that philosophy was best understood not through books but in real-life dialogue, conducted with a fellow lover of knowledge, featuring occasional jokes about drinking and sex. Brittany and Eric are, to my ears, working firmly in this tradition, rationally examining and interrogating the often irrational (and “uncool”) world that surrounds them.

Rob Rosenthal is the dean of American radio, training an entire generation of producers at his Transom Storytelling Workshop, and his podcast is a master class in the art of audio storytelling. And, though it doesn’t present itself this way, the show is a paragon of radio criticism: Rob expertly dissects each piece under discussion, and he’s unafraid to tell producers where they’ve gone wrong. And the show has another unsung side-effect: it’s one of the best podcast discovery engines around. Each show more or less contains a full episode of the podcast under discussion, and I often finish HowSound with a new podcast to subscribe to.