5 great podcasts for a busy travel weekend
It’s safe to say that Thanksgiving is going to be a fraught holiday for millions of Americans this year (maybe even more so than usual). Some among us will be commuting on the busiest, most expensive travel days, hurtling toward a dinner table where, statistically, more than half of the attendees might have voted to install a far-right extremist as president—hardly a scenario that inspires festive vibes. The best we can do is recommend the entertainment that will get you there as serenely as possible.
Whether you’re trekking by plane, train, or automobile, here are five recommendations for breezy, crowd-pleasing podcasts that can keep you pleasantly distracted along the way. These selections can be listened to alone or alongside travel companions, and they can be picked up or put down at your leisure; that is, you can start with any random episode, picking and choosing the ones that sound interesting.
Perhaps most crucially, these picks have largely non-controversial and/or apolitical subject matter. There are plenty of great shows that tackle Big Subjects, but that’s not the move when you’re staring down the barrel of a long holiday weekend that’s already exhausting by design. Opt for this buffet of comfort foods instead.
Celebrity Memoir Book Club
There’s a trick to falling down the Celebrity Memoir Book Club rabbit hole: Start with an episode about a celebrity you’re not super familiar with, but suspect you might not like if you met them in real life. In each installment, comedian co-hosts Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton take listeners through these memoirs chapter by chapter, reading between the lines to parse everything celebrities can’t or won’t reveal about their lives, or are perhaps incapable of recognizing in themselves. Fame is, of course, an exercise in image curation, and these high-profile memoirs are often just extensions of that artifice—except for the rare occasions on which we hear more about a star than we ever thought we might, as is the case with Demi Moore and Jessica Simpson. With a podcast premise that could easily lapse into dunking on A-listers, Parker and Hamilton lend an impressive amount of insight and analysis.
Hit Parade
Since 2017, pop critic and chart analyst Chris Molanphy has hosted this Slate podcast about the history and dynamics of hit songs and songmakers, but that logline belies the exhaustive research that distinguishes this show from all others in its category. Even if Molanphy is discussing your favorite song of all time, there’s no way you know half of what he’s about to lay down about it. In an episode called “Smells Like Christmas Spirit,” for example, Molanphy doesn’t just talk about Nirvana’s biggest radio single, although he certainly gets into that. Instead, he unpacks how Nirvana’s Nevermind unseated Michael Jackson’s Dangerous in January 1992 by virtue of the rising trend of retail music gift cards, which, as a popular Christmas gift, gave young people the purchasing power to buy albums that wouldn’t have been placed under the tree by their more conservative elders. The history of the pop chart is the history of 20th-century America, and this series is densely packed with revelations about both.
What Went Wrong
This podcast is dedicated to the premise that so many things can go wrong in the moviemaking process that it’s a miracle any film ever makes it all the way to theaters. Hosts Chris Winterbauer and Lizzie Bassett drill down on one movie per episode, but sometimes stretch the story of a film’s production history across two or even three episodes if there are enough mishaps, disputes, or studio exec antics to enumerate. While Blank Check fans might live for the hosts’ digressive banter (which can send each episode north of the three-hour mark), Bassett and Winterbauer more or less stick to their script, meaning that you don’t need any particular affinity for these two to enjoy these behind-the-scenes tales from the making of your favorite movies—but after a few installments, you’ll have developed an affinity anyway.
How To Do Everything
This series is so pleasant, so broadly charming in that perfectly NPR fashion, that it’s almost as if it were pitched to the network as “the Platonic ideal of a podcast to share with family during the holidays.” Hosts Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag, producers on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, are at the helm of the series billed as “half advice show, half survival guide, half absurdity-fest,” with each episode seeking answers to listeners’ questions in the most over-the-top fashion imaginable. When a listener calls in about how to appear cooler, for example, Danforth and Chillag interview Henry Winkler on the topic, being that he originated TV’s coolest character, The Fonz. When someone calls to ask how cows “moo” in different countries, Sir Patrick Stewart provides a theatrical rundown of bovine dialects. Each ultra-digestible 20-minute episode is a quick-transitioning, deadpan revue that makes full use of NPR’s connections and the goodwill built up across a quarter-century of WWDTM.
Guys
If you were ever a weird Twitter devotee during its heyday, or you consider yourself at least half irony-brained, or the above series are simply too chirpy for you, it’s worth checking out Guys: A Podcast About Guys With Bryan Quinby. In each episode, Quinby, along with comedian Chris James and often a guest or two, investigates the phenomenon of one very specific type of guy: classic rock guys, comic book guys, guys who spent thousands on their backyard grill setup, etc. To discuss each varietal, Quinby comes armed with a dossier of Reddit threads, YouTube comments, Yelp reviews, and other primary source material that shows the Guy in his natural habitat; there’s even a subset of Seth MacFarlane Guys who argue on Rotten Tomatoes about the indisputable genius of their favorite creator. In the aggregate, this podcast shows the warped lenses through which modern masculinity is filtered online—and though the results are funny as hell, it’s maybe a little alarming to see just how endlessly refillable this series has proven to be. With nearly 100 episodes and counting, listeners are cursed to witness a new installment drop each week, check the title, and realize there are so, so many more types of guys out there than previously thought.