Each month, Podcast Review’s staff offers recommendations on the best new podcasts to listen to. Here are our favorites for July:
Hosted by audio documentarian Mitra Kaboli, Welcome to Provincetown is a breezy and colorful new podcast from Rococo Punch and Room Tone. The show immerses listeners in the fantastically fun (and funny) world of summertime Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is more affectionately known by locals as “Ptown.” The host is particularly interested in the queer creatives and workers who make up the swell of Ptown’s summer denizens. Kaboli, who is herself queer, weaves the story through atmospheric clips of the town’s nightlife and a series of punchy interviews with charismatic guests. With playful episode titles like “Sassy” and “Dumb Slut Summer,” Welcome to Provincetown is at once vibrant and soothing, like auditory comfort food.
Zayd Ayers Dohrn grew up on-the-run with his Weather Underground parents, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Mother Country Radicals is Dohrn’s exploration into his mother’s radicalization, grounded by interviews with Bernadine herself. As Dohrn explains in the series premiere, he takes a psychoanalytic approach to understanding his mother’s decisions, while his mother speaks in the language of structures, and removes her own thinking as much as possible from the story of the movement. The podcast strikes a balance between Bernadine’s first-person recollections and Dohrn’s narration of the history.
The latest Apple Original-Pineapple Street Studios collaboration remembers the chase for Ted Kaczynski. The first episode heavily relies on the perspectives of the FBI and the Washington Post publisher who received Kaczynski’s manifesto. Host Eric Benson aims for a straight retelling of the events of 1995, featuring a wealth of archival audio from the news clips of the moment.
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