Podcast recommendations

Science and medicine

• Well There’s Your Problem: A Catholic, a Muslim, and a Jew walk into a bar and talk about engineering disaaters from a leftist perspective with an abundance of millennial humor and irreverence for capitalists’ feelings. A podcast with slides!
• This Podcast Will Kill You is about diseases. Every episode is a deep dive into the biology, history and epidemiology of one disease, with first-person accounts of the disease.
• Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine is about the history of bad ways to treat diseases, as told by a family doctor to her husband.
• Scishow Tangents is like the science communication Youtube show SciShow, but with more butt facts and after-dark humor.
• Let’s Learn Everything is three people infodumping to each other and loving it.
• Superduperstitious is about enjoying the stories of paranormal experiences while exploring scientific explanations for them.
• It’s Probably Not Aliens critically examines the evidence for claims made by the History Channel show Ancient Aliens, and in the process reveals that ancient peoples in fact figured out engineering feats like Move Big Rock in way more interesting ways than “aliens helped.”
• Maintenance Phase deconstructs weight-loss claims made by wellness culture and health claims made by diet culture.

History and Culture

• Conspirituality investigates the intersection of far-right conspiracism and New Age movements.
• Lions Led By Donkeys is military history from a leftist perspective that focuses on incidents where military leadership just shoots itself in the foot and makes everything worse. The kind of critical military history that does the opposite of exonerating fascism and imperialism.
• Hell of a Way to Dad is two leftist dads commenting on past experiences in the military, talking about military culture, and telling delightful stories about their kids.
• MurderHobos is about the history of masculinity as constructed through violence, by way of critical biographical deep dives into historical figures who were known for being good at Masculine™ things like swords, guns, fighting, or murder.
• Behind the Bastards is an entertaining way to learn the origin stories of various villains from history and current events.
• If Books Could Kill reads and analyzes reactionary bestsellers so you don’t have to, and breaks down their main arguments.
• Secretly Incredibly Fascinating is a delightful show that does deep dives into topics suggested and decided-on by listeners.
• Oh no, Ross and Carrie! involved Ross and Carrie undercover-investigating various cults, pseudoscience communities and wellness trends, and reporting on their experiences. This is the kind of debunking podcast that doesn’t take the position that people who believe in pseudoscience and pseudomedicine deserve mockery, which is a level of compassion I need when I listen to episodes about wellness trends that I once believed in. I highly recommend their investigative series about Scientology.
• The Yeerky Boys is what happened when two of my friends re-read Animorphs. They’ve finished all the books, and have moved on to doing episodes about other Animorphs media like the TV show and fanfiction.

Linguistics

• Because Language is an entertaining and irreverent romp through current events pertaining to linguistics.
• Lingthusiasm is the first linguistics podcast I ever listened to and it sparks so much joy in me.

Jewish

• Judaism Unbound explores Jewish life, practice and history from a perspective that embraces pluralism.
• On the Nose is Jewish leftist commentary on global geopolitics and current events.
• Wayward Children: Jewish Monsters, Magic, and the Stories We Tell is about all kinds of fantastical elements in Jewish folklore and midrash, and why modern Judaism is deeply enriched by them.

Unsorted

• The Ace Couple is commentary by two aces on current events and other topics pertinent to asexual communities.
• Some More News is leftist-oriented commentary on current events in the U.S. with a hearty dose of millennial humor to keep you from just screaming.
• What The Fuck Just Happened Today? is the audio version of the eponymous website, that presents U.S. politics news matter-of-factly. It is the only way I could handle the daily damage reports of the first Trump administration, and it is the only way I can handle daily news about the second.