The 13 Best New Podcasts of 2022
Reading Time: 7 minutesNormal Gossip, Alabama Astronaut, Bone Valley, and more of the most addictive podcasts of the year.
It was a big year for podcasts—another in a long string of them. These days, it takes a lot to stand out in the medium’s sea of fantastic storytelling, original reporting, and comedy delights…and I should know; I just received my Pocket Casts year-in-review report—I listened to 97 days and 17 hours of podcasts in 27 different categories. I sampled 1,176 shows, and listened to 4,347 individual episodes. I can safely say that without podcasts, my life would be meaningless (podcasts are basically my job these days), and I definitely listened to enough of them to report back on what’s worth checking out.
In all those days of podcast listening, in no particular order, here are the ones I advise, nay, demand you listen to as well. These babies made every one of those minutes worth spending.
Mother Country Radicals tells the story of the far-left militant organization The Weather Underground, and the war it waged on the U.S. government. The host is playwright Zayd Dohrn, son of Weather Underground leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayer. Zayd was born underground, his mom and dad on the run from the FBI. The podcast recounts Zayd’s memories of the 1970s, including his recollections of the bombings of the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, brawling with Chicago cops, prison breaks, a partnership with the Black Panthers, and, ultimately, the birth of a revolution. Zayd is the perfect storyteller to offer us real stakes insight into the history and politics of his parents’ movement.
In 1989, Leo Schofield was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for killing his wife Michelle, who was found dead in Florida at age 18. Pulitzer Prize winner-Gilbert King and his steady producer Kelsey Decker are sure he didn’t do it—and the investigation they undertake for Bone Valley is the explosive, perfectly constructed story about how they hunted for answers to questions nobody asked, on a quest to confirm their hunch is almost certainly right. They seem to have thrown out the ‘true crime podcast’ rule book for this one—you’re along for the ride as the team follows their own instincts, does their own dirty work, and brings themselves emotionally into the story of Leo and Michelle. This podcast isn’t only entertaining; Gilbert and Kelsey do what other true crime podcasters wish they could do—they solve the murder, and get a confession on tape. It’s yet to be decided if the truths they expose in Bone Valley will have any impact on Leo’s case, but it’s something to listen out for.
Sometimes Jan. 6, 2021 seems like a fever dream, a dystopian fantasy we never thought could happen in the United States, never saw coming, and quickly forgot. On Will Be Wild, Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz (of Trump, Inc.) interview people who warned officials about the attack, people who were there (and would go back again in a second), and even a guy who turned in his own father for participating. It’s a multi-perspective look at the Capital attacks that is smart enough to be taught in schools but exciting enough to keep you listening into the night. It not only reveals what we should have known but didn’t, but everything that went on behind the scenes leading up to the events on Jan. 6 and beyond.
Award-winning investigative journalist Connie Walker followed up her fantastic season of Stolen (The Search for Jermain) with Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s, a podcast that blows the lid off of the history of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. It’s a personal journey—at the beginning of the series, Connie discovers details about her own father’s abuse at one of the schools that sets her on a heart-breaking mission to connect with her past, pulling uncomfortable questions from ex-school administrators and the priest who abused her dad. Connie commits to not only telling her own story, but the stories of other people who endured torture and abuse at Residential Schools, and their decedents who are now dealing with the resulting generational trauma. Residential Schools were a blip in the news cycle, but this is the dive that goes so deep you feel the pain in your bones.
In the summer of 2003, two boys who went by the names William and Tom Green emerged from the woods and into the town of Vernon in British Columbia with quite a story. They claimed to have run away from their parents, who were living off the grid. And they appeared to be starving. (Fifteen-year-old Tom was 6’1 and 84 pounds at the time.) The community took them in with open arms, providing them with shelter, care, and food. This was a story known by everyone in the community, and on the podcast Chameleon: Wild Boys, host Sam Mullins returns to his hometown of Vernon to interview people about their memories of the boys and their plight, which turned out to be an absolute lie. Who were these boys, and why did they seek to deceive an entire town about where they came from? What’s up with one of the brother’s fruit-only diet? Sam Mullins has a personal connection to this story, and delivers an investigation almost too wild to be true.
On Alabama Astronaut, Alabama songwriter Abe Partridge and podcast producer Ferrill Gibbs tell a spellbinding story about the deadly practice of serpent handling, but the show is about music, and the search for the never-before heard songs of the Appalachians, which are as wild and unchained as the handling of snakes themselves. The storytelling follows no playbook. It’s packed with the history, science, philosophy, and religion of serpent handling, plus travel, interviews, and audio of serpent handling services that seems so intimate, it’s like we shouldn’t be allowed to hear it. It’s Abe’s journey to better understand the music and the people and places it came from, covering a taboo subject (Abe never sits in judgement of believers) with a story that will surprise you every minute, and some great music (maybe the most punk rock music of all time) that has never been heard before.
On Lizzy Cooperman’s In Your Hands, comedian Lizzy Cooperman has done something no one has ever done before—she’s created a choose her own adventure podcast, where every week, she gives listeners two options for things she should do with her own life (get a piercing, get a job at Victoria’s Secret, text all the guys in her phone and ask them to assemble a cabinet for her) and lets them vote on what she’ll do on her Instagram account. And then she does whatever wins. But that’s not all: She interviews experts in fields related to her wild activities (a professional organizer, an Uber driver, a hair artist) and asks her extremely funny friends to weigh in (folks like John Early and Jamie Loftus). But in the end, it’s all up to you, and that’s the best part. We don’t know where this is going. Join the movement.
I don’t think you can write about the best podcasts of 2022 without mentioning Normal Gossip, a show that has swept the United States with its comedic storytelling and unique premise—the gossip stories told here don’t include celebrities or people in the news, but everyday people who live average lives in small towns. It’s the story about the cross-stitching grifter or serial-cheating fitness trainer your mom told you that she overheard someone else talking about at the beauty salon in Hudson, Ohio. Host Kelsey McKinney brings on hilarious guests to go through the stories with such detail it feels like we are there, asking along the way…what would you do? It’s proof that we are all more interesting than celebrities, and the local, low-stakes goss being whispered and texted all across America is more compelling than fiction.
On Things Fell Apart, Jon Ronson (author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and the host of The Butterly Effect and The Last Days of August) investigates some of American’s longest-waged culture wars, from legal abortion to school curricula. With curiosity and a sly sense of humor, he delicately unfolds the stories behind the things we’re all be arguing about with our families about over the holiday dinner table, tracing things back to one person, one misunderstanding, one accident, or one spark that set a fiery cultural movement into motion. If there is beauty to be found in the most polarizing topics we face, you’ll find it here.
Rewatch podcasts are in the zeitgeist (there are versions for The Office, Parks & Rec, New Girl, Always Sunny, and Saved By the Bell, to name a few) but audio legends Ian Chillag and Mike Danforth (Ian’s the guy behind Everything Is Alive, and they are the co-creators of How to Do Everything) are putting a twist on the genre with a hilarious fake rewatch show, based on a fake television show (Behind Plain Sight, which purportedly followed a man in hiding at a nudist colony in Florida) that they were not on because it does not and never did exist. The unique format allows Ian and Mike to spoof the genre that’s a wink to rewatch shows and podcasting in general. At the end, when podcasters usually read the credits, they tell us that the production team has actually asked not to be named. (They’re truly committed to the bit.) It’s a meta improv comedy project only true podcast nerds will fully appreciate.
National Geographic explorer Tara Roberts quit her job and upended her life to became a certified scuba diver so she could join forces with the Black divers of Diving With a Purpose (DWP) and make Into the Depths, a show that quite literally brings us to the depths of the ocean to document the wreckage of a few of the thousands of slave ships that wrecked in the Atlantic Ocean during the transatlantic slave trade. In discovering ships such as the São José Paquete d’Africa in South Africa, the Fredericus Quartus and Christianus Quintus in Costa Rica, and the Clotilda in the United States, Tara and the DWP team find bricks, anchors, bottles, and pipes—objects that serve as missing pieces to the puzzle that is the history of slavery. More than 1.8 million Africans died en route when forced to make the Middle Passage, and Into the Depths serves as an audio memorial, and a personal documentary of Roberts’ own family history, and the stories that have been sunken deep underwater for hundreds of years.
Leah Sotille is known for reporting on right-wing extremism, and Burn Wild is her chance to expose extremism on the left by telling the story of two of America’s most wanted environmental activist fugitives, Joseph Mahmoud Dibee and Josephine Sunshine Overaker. The podcast is full of original reporting and interviews with people across the spectrum, including Joseph, who has been sentenced to prison and was ordered to pay a portion of the $1.3 million in restitution. His crimes? Setting fire to a slaughterhouse in central Oregon and a wild horse corral in Litchfield, California. Josephine is still on the run. Burn Wild is the story of present-day eco-activism and will twist your belief system into knots. How far is too far when it comes to protecting the environment?
There are at least 18 gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department—organized gangs that have been demonizing the community in plain sight for 50 years. Cerise Castle adopted a piece she wrote for Knock LA into the podcast A Tradition of Violence, which investigates these gangs in a way nobody has done before, identifying murders, gang members, and lawsuits related to the department that cost Los Angeles County more than $100 million over a 30-year period, exposing a kind of police brutality rarely reported on in the mainstream media. This is dangerous territory, but the show is fearless. You’ll meet the real and broken members of the LASD, which is full of villains who paint a picture of the anger that fuels policing in the U.S. The reporting is thorough, and the stories are almost too unbelievable to be true. Castle’s reporting led to an investigation into the LASD, and the series earned her a Courage in Journalism Award issued by the International Women’s Media Foundation.
Editor’s note: Due to an editing oversight, the original version of this post (published on Dec. 15) excluded Mother Country Radicals.