Podcasts

Sometimes the mind needs to take a break. And I can’t think of a better stopping-off place than the soothing, gloriously bonkers discussions on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, hosted by the British fashion designer Bella Freud. Its premise is that Freud, daughter of Lucian and great-granddaughter of Sigmund, encourages guests to recline on her couch and talk over any and every aspect of their relationship to fashion. Her mellifluous, affirming manner is much more soft soap than steel wool, but this is not territory that requires a serious broadcaster, and the concept proves a surprisingly fruitful route into family history, personal stories and high-grade gossip.

By now we know that there are creeps and abusers in pretty much any industry that exists today. In the world of podcasts, the question appears to be: are we really going to create an investigatory series detailing the horrors lurking within every single one? Yes — of course — seems like the resounding answer. New York magazine has launched a new podcast, Cover Story: Power Trip, and its first season is devoted to rooting out the predators and boundary-crossers of one extremely minor occupational field: the psychedelic therapeutic community.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that America isn’t holding it together very well. Every airplane seems to have a middle-aged man throwing a temper tantrum about his facemask, every state house has some woman with artificial hair coloring and too much facial filler screaming about some imagined threat to “the children,” and every time I think I have found a normal person on Twitter it only takes twenty seconds of browsing their timeline to find a post that compares the Covid-19 vaccine to the Holocaust. It would be easy to dismiss this as just a particularly nasty lull in our collective sanity, but it’s time to be real. We have always been like this. Our nation wasn’t founded when the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock, as they taught us in kindergarten.

You feel a weird twinge, and your doctor doesn’t have an opening for four months, so it’s almost inevitable you’ll go looking for more information on the internet. You know it’s not a good idea, that it can’t possibly end anywhere good, and yet you feel compelled. The result is usually the same: WebMD and Yahoo Answers will tell you it’s cancer, YouTube will tell you your bowels need flushing, some guy calling himself a fitness guru with very white teeth will try to sell you capsules of some exotic sounding herb for $125, and soon your Google ads are filled with prescription medication designed to fight Alzheimer’s or lymphoma.

In blows the dark of winter, bringing with it partially estranged family members, seemingly endless nights and all those television movies about a big boss lady who gets stranded in a small town for the holidays and learns the true meaning of Christmas by falling in love with a lumberjack. It is not a great time of year. But as every sullen teenager knows, headphones are a great way to escape the gathering and retreat inward. There is an abundance of podcasts about how great the holiday season is — how festive, how rich with tradition and meaning. I get through the holidays with day-drinking and bingeing French television shows while shoving cheese into my face, so these don’t really speak to me.

It’s really quite difficult to keep up with all of the new ways technological ‘advancements’ are ruining things. We’re beginning to live out the 2009 film The Box, in which characters are presented a device with a button that, when pushed, grants them a million dollars — the only catch being that someone they’ll never meet will immediately perish. The dire unseen consequences of smart- phone conveniences aren’t quite as drastic, but they’re there nonetheless, and we rarely consider the moral quandary they present. Enjoying the long lifespan of your lithium-ion battery? A Congolese child might’ve mined the cobalt it contains. You want the new Róisín Murphy LP delivered to your doorstep?