The 10 best podcasts of the year, listed here in alphabetical order, represent a broad sampling of the medium’s many formats — chat shows, documentaries, storytelling, interviews, true crime. Whether cracking open one of the darkest cases in American military history, giving voice to members of a vast diaspora, or interrogating the craft of audio journalism itself, these shows make a strong argument for the vitality of the field.
Cement City
This 10-part documentary is simple in concept but formidable in execution. To find out what is ailing small towns in America’s onetime manufacturing hubs — the kinds of places politicians and pundits obsess over every four years — the veteran magazine journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas and the audio producer Erin Anderson picked one and moved there. Like, really moved, as in bought a house and made friends with the neighbors. Their dispatches — artfully woven together from over three years and innumerable hours of reporting from their adopted home of Donora, Pa. — create an extraordinarily immersive portrait of day-to-day life in a troubled but irreducibly vibrant community. (Listen to Cement City from Audacy and Cement City Productions.)
Critics at Large
The critics in question — Vinson Cunningham, Alexandra Schwartz and Naomi Fry — are not only companionable guides to the need-to-know cultural products and controversies du jour, but a credit to their profession itself. The hosts’ spirited and generous deconstructions of a wide range of modern texts — TikTok trends, Oscar movies, beach reads — demonstrate the difference between opinions (easy, ubiquitous) and insights (hard-won, rare). You’ll laugh, you’ll learn, you’ll impress your group chat. (Listen to Critics at Large from The New Yorker.)
Deep Cover: The Nameless Man
A cold case from 1989 is at the center of this surprisingly moving and sure-footed true crime podcast. Jake Halpern, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, tells the story of a puzzling murder and possible hate crime from two sides: that of the federal agents who grew convinced that they’d identified the murderer, and that of the victim’s family members, who had been waiting decades for answers. The twisty, novelistic narrative that unfolds never feels excessive or out-of-hand. Instead, Halpern uses the case — which eventually resulted in a criminal trial and a verdict — to reveal how people extract justice and meaning from a system that is ill-equipped to provide either. (Listen to Deep Cover: The Nameless Man from Pushkin Industries.)
Embedded: Tested
Rose Eveleth’s limited documentary series focuses on the history of sex testing female track and field athletes, from fascist pseudoscience in the 1930s to a contested classification system still in use in world competition today. But the panic it exposes — over the nature of womanhood and the elusive boundary between the sexes — is not limited to sports. At a time when debates over who is allowed to use what bathroom are once again headline news, Eveleth’s patient reporting provides a useful case study of what happens when deeply held beliefs are forced into contact with the messiness of reality. (Listen to Embedded: Tested from NPR and CBC.)
Empire City
The Peabody Award-winning reporter Chenjerai Kumanyika’s deeply researched and unabashedly polemical history of the New York Police Department blows past surface-level debates about good cops and bad cops. His curiosity about why high-profile episodes of police brutality seem to set off a predictable cycle of hopeful protests and meager reform leads him to fundamental questions about whom the nation’s largest police force is meant to serve — and why alternatives have proved so hard to actualize. (Listen to Empire City from Crooked Media, Wondery and PushBlack.)
In the Dark
Madeleine Baran and her colleagues set for themselves what seemed like an impossible task: find out not only what happened in Haditha, Iraq, on one afternoon in November 2005 — when U.S. Marines massacred 24 civilians, including women and multiple small children — but why no one has ever been held criminally accountable for the killings. Four years, dozens of on-the-ground interviews, multiple lawsuits against the federal government, and thousands of secret documents later, Baran’s team achieved that and much, much more. Their staggeringly ambitious account, filled with heartbreaking revelations and heroic acts of truth seeking, is an astonishing testament to the power of investigative journalism. (Listen to In the Dark from The New Yorker.)
Mind Your Own With Lupita Nyong’o
This storytelling podcast, hosted by the Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o, delivers funny, surprising and heart-rending tales from the modern African diaspora. Produced by Glynn Washington, creator of “Snap Judgment,” it would be worthwhile listening even without its celebrity patron. But Nyong’o does much more than present here, opening each episode with an unusually candid personal story that sets the table for the yarn to come. (Listen to Mind Your Own With Lupita Nyong’o from Lemonada Media and Snap Studios.)
Ripple
The reporter Dan Leone kept traveling to the Gulf of Mexico long after the catastrophic BP oil spill there in 2010 faded from nightly newscasts. The story he uncovers, about how the haste to move on from the accident obscured cascading public health and ecological crises that continue to this day, is a haunting and essential reframing of one of the most significant environmental calamities of the 21st century. (Listen to Ripple from Western Sound and APM Studios.)
Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative
Jess Shane’s dizzying and dazzling deconstruction of the documentary industrial complex is essentially a documentary about the making of a documentary. Disenchanted with her field’s traditional ethical practices, which she thinks lean exploitative, Shane sets out to reinvent the form, inviting the show’s “main characters” to take a more collaborative (and officially compensated) role in the telling of their own stories. Even when things inevitably go awry, the inside look at how narrative sausage is made — relayed with Shane’s sharp and ultimately self-lacerating wit — is never less than captivating. (Listen to Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative from Radiotopia.)
Wild Card With Rachel Martin
It’s hard to breathe new life into the celebrity promotional interview circuit, but Rachel Martin — a longtime political news reporter at NPR, set loose on a dream assignment — has done just that. Guests on “Wild Card” (Jeff Goldblum, David Lynch, Erykah Badu) pick from a deck of cards with thoughtfully probing questions that effectively eliminate the possibility of a canned response, i.e.: “What’s the emotion that you know better than any other?” “Has ambition ever led you astray?” If the cards kindle the conversations, it’s Martin’s follow-ups, reliably empathetic and astute, that provide the fuel. (Listen to Wild Card With Rachel Martin from NPR.)
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