Entertainment

This Week in Podcasts: 9/21/2015-9/25/2015

This week at Inverse we're listening to 'This American Life' and Ira Glass, when not on 'This American Life'. 

by David Turner
Gonzalo Arroyo Moreno, Getty Images 

Not to jinx this little feature, but this is our fourth week in a row! Thanks for listening to these pods along with us.

Geekscape was one of the first nerd-centric podcasts that hit the web almost 10 years ago and because of that, founder and filmmaker Jonathan London isn’t ashamed to get inside baseball about the more obscure corners of dork culture. This week he featured Roger Lay Jr. and Corey Landis, the directors of The Toy Masters, a documentary on the ‘80s He-Man: Masters of the Universe franchise that dealt with its controversial origin and mysterious erasure from larger pop culture. As Jonathan puts it, the movie answers questions you didn’t even know you were asking about He-Man. - Eric Francisco

Episode Link

The Brooklyn-based dudes at the Longform podcast posted this week their interview with Ira Glass on his home turf in Chicago, as the This American Life creator recalled how he wasn’t a great boss when the show first started. Glass tells interviewer Max Linksy that the idea of being a dick to your employees is OK — “because only the work matters” — is a corny one.

“I was much more of a selfish person,” Glass says. He also recalls some of his favorite TAL episodes, including the Katrina show and the one about the Long Island car dealership’s mission to sell 129 cars in a month. And of course, there’s talk of how a lot of radio storytellers — consciously or not — just end up mimicking his distinctive voice. “I’m doing it because I actually sound like this, really,” Glass says, before offering this trick to make yourself sound better: Simply lower the pitch of your voice. - Nick Lucchesi

Episode Link

This American Life doesn’t really need much extra plugging, but this week they had a pretty incredible story reported by a teenage girl about her abusive relationship with an older man. It’s gripping and honest and unexpected. - Jacqueline Ronson

I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I’ve been trying to do better about checking out newer shows. The New Republic Senior Editor Jamil Smith’s Intersection is one in particular I’ve been meaning to dive into throughout the summer. On this episode, he invites Michael Eric Dyson and a number of other young black intellectuals to discuss the state of being a young black intellectual. The generation divide in the conversation with Dyson on boards helps create an interesting dialogue about what it means to be a black intellectual over the decades and what role it’s taken in 2015. - David Turner