New york magazine TruePDF 18 march 2019

They are also a welcome distraction, a link to his old life in Trump Tower, when concepts such as “executive time,” a term used by aides to make it seem like the president is doing some-

TV Streaming On Demand.

Learn to exercise your ear, and other teeny-tiny workouts.

here

H

By Adam Sternbergh and Boris Kachka

street tell us how the

presidency will end

14

Politics

Ta-Nehisi Coates on

race relations and the

Dems in the Trump era

pant-suits, and Cathy Horyn

on Karl’s swan song

strategist

47

Best Bets

Rocking chairs for a

younger crowd; a store

designed for big boobs

What to eat at Hudson

Yards; Platt on Rocco

DiSpirito’s second act;

elevated hot pockets

the culture pages

Paul Cadmus’s atlas

to go shopping with

By Allison P Davis

74

The Hunter Becomes the Hunted

A former critic, and co-creator

of Beetlejuice

on Broadway, can’t shake the fear

By Scott Brown

76

Critics

movies by David Edelstein With Us,

Jordan Peele’s horror syntax keeps growing

theater by Sara Holdren Be More

Chill does high

school with knowing

wickedness

tv by Matt Zoller Seitz Kingdom

is resonant and disturbing

80

To Do

Twenty-five picks for the next two weeks

this page:

Terry Gilliam Photograph by Jim Naughten for New York Magazine.

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46 n e w y o r k| m a r c h 4 1 7 2 0 1 9 Photograph by Robert Maxwell

peter bogdanovich is often held up as a cautionary ta e of Holly wood arrogance, Icarus with big frames and a nec ief In a hurry since adolescence, at 16 he talked his way into a g classes with Stella A ler; at 20, he persuaded C ifford Odets to him direct one

of his p ays Off Broadway; and he went on to b end and write about the golden age movie directors he idolized, like Orson Welles, director in his own right, his assurance didn t endear him to some of the towns young aute old egends I don t judge myself

on the basis of my contempo s, he told the New York Times

in 1971 I judge myself against the directors I admire Hawks, Lubitsch, Buster Keaton, Welles, Ford, Renoir, Hitchcock I cer tain y don t think I m anywhere near as good as they are, but I think

with the h t screwball comedy What s Up, Doc?, only to see his career

run aground after a ser es of flops But contrary to the legend, Bog danovich never disappeared or stewed in defeat for long, and he as

Jack (1979), Mask (1985), and Cat s Meow (2002), as well as signifi

cant late career success as a documentarian, as with 2007 s Tom

Sopr nos shrink to the shrink, Dr Ell ot Kupferberg, and Netflix recent y released a comp eted version of We less long unfinished The Other Side of the Wind, in which Bogdanovich, n the th ck of his 70s

relationship Now 79, Bogdanovich s noticeably frail as he recovers from a fa l he suffered while at a French film festival, where he col lected a lifetime achievement award; he shattered his emur

We talk at a cluttered dining room tab e n the modest gr floor

To uca Lake apartment he shares with his ex w fe Loui ratten and her mother Mid interview, a diminutive, grandmotherly woman with a Dutch accent sneaks behind him through the tight dini oom on her way to t itchen Bogdanovich mot at my

copy he Killing of the Un n, the book he wrote abo e 1980

mur of his then girlfrien layboy Playmate Doroth ratten,

Lou s ster Hide that bo ill you? he requests Th Doro thy s mother Nelly Hoogstraten appears several more times to de liver h m pi ls, to ask if he d like her to make coffee, to see when he d like h s dinner Thank you, darl ng, he answers every time

he didn’t mourn

Comments

4–17) Susan Simon responded, “The

answer to your cover question … resides on

the cover of your [Hudson Yards] issue,”

which featured stories that portrayed the

new development as a gilded community

for the one percent Of the socialism feature,

Armin Rosen wrote, “Man, this is good

Really illustrates the weirdness of

environ-ments where everyone more or less thinks

the same.” Others took exception to the

focus of the story, which opened at a party

Maya Kosoff tweeted, “A more honest and

incisive and less decadent story would have

been one about organizers in New York and

not media people at a party.” Emily Cameron

wrote, “The stereotypes of ‘the nearly

all-Caucasian DSA left’ depicted in this piece

give the wrong view of socialism As a

25-year-old queer Latina and co-chair of

DSA Fresno in California’s rural Central

is not a circus of ‘white, 21-to-36-year-old

Tecate drinkers’ on dating apps, listening

to podcasts, obsessed with BernieSanders

I wish DSA chapters outside the media

pre-cisely because the left as a whole is growing

The American left is complex, diverse, and

beautiful That’s why we’re winning.” In the

story, van Zuylen-Wood explains that when

social theorist Michael Harrington founded

DSA in 1982, the “group occupied the ‘left

wing of the possible,’ a sensible enough

mantra that excited nobody and helped the

organization stay minuscule for decades.”

Harrington’s biographer and DSA charter

member Maurice Isserman, challenged

that assessment: “Harrington’s DSA was

founded in the midst of the Reagan olution, not exactly a propitious moment forany left-wing group—reformist, revolution-

little credit for creating what proved to bethe institutional base for today’s much-expanded DSA Moreover, what is behindDSA’s recent growth, if not a variant ofoperating as the ‘left wing of the possi-

repre-sents? And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

They are working within the DemocraticParty to push it leftward.”

revisited a murder that exemplifieswhy so many violent crimes go unsolved in

“amazing read … on an unsolved murder inChicago and why the witnesses won’t tes-tify It’s not some code of the streets; it’sfear,” and Gus Christensen added, “This is

a solvable problem in the richest country

in the world!” UCLA law professor Adam

account of gun violence in Chicago lights the absurdity of the NRA’s favoriteshibboleths, like ‘A good guy with a gun isthe only thing that can stop a bad guywith a gun.’ By using guns to silence andintimidate crime victims and witnesses,the bad guys ensure that lawlessness rules

tar-geted if they testify in court and, as a result,only one in four murders in the murdercapital of the country is prosecuted Policeknow who most of the killers are But with-out cooperating witnesses, the wheels ofjustice simply don’t turn The communityprofiled by Kotlowitz’s insightful and reveal-

ing article may best be described by another adage about guns, this one from the Wild West: ‘The only law that matters is the law you carry on your hips.’”

director of Hollywood’s last golden age, held nothing back in his interview with

tweeted, “This you gotta read Cher can’t

act Burt Reynolds is a prick The list goes

on Really terrific And sad in a few spots.” Channing Thomson said, “This is fascinat-ing He made a handful of great movies

in the 1970s, but he strikes me as being an odd personality who hindered his own suc-cess through word and deed.” And Philip

style sitcom to be made about the time Orson Welles spent living in Peter

less charmed @TheIndieHandbk tweeted,

“Bogdanovich comes across as something of

a scumbag in this interview, as do at least half the people he talks about And all I

can think is, Man, maybe the people of

Holly wood deserve each other.” Susan

Braudy took issue with the director’s acterization of his ex-wife and collaborator Polly Platt: “I arranged to meet Platt in the late 1980s partly because so many of my Hollywood friends told me she was instru-mental in the making of Bogdanovich’s

him, she would be much kinder about their collaboration The record speaks for itself: Bogdanovich did his best films working

LET IT MOVE YOU

THE PRIDE

OF BROADWAY

m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9 | n e w y o r k 9

Olivia Nuzzi

Trump’s Rolodex

His phone friends

may be more important

than his staff

What’s that about?

inside: How will the Trump presidency end? / Ta-Nehisi Coates on reparations and 2020

Trump abides by what I call the “Groucho Marx Law of zation,” meaning anyone choosing to be near him is suspect, while everyone else gets points simply for existing elsewhere “He always kind of wants what he doesn’t completely have,” the New York

Fraterni-Times’ Maggie Haberman once said “You are never more valuable

to Donald Trump than when you’re walking away from him.” What explains this social idiosyncrasy? Obvious answers, like

self-loathing, don’t quite feel complete But whatever the

psychological cause, the effect is manifest in at least one

thing: his compulsive phone habits His Rolodex is a

Great-est Hits and Deep Cuts composed of (mostly) friends,

associ-ates, media figures, and tycoons Although Trump is known

to call senior members of his staff at all hours, his informal

advisers share a common attribute: They’re not there and,

therefore, they can’t be blamed when things are falling apart

Their praise sounds less sycophantic and, therefore, more

compelling; the president seems to grant the calls coming

from outside the White House an inherent credibility They

are also a welcome distraction, a link to his old life in Trump

Tower, when concepts such as “executive time,” a term used

by aides to make it seem like the president is doing

some-thing productive when he’s fucking around and calling

TV-show hosts to gossip about ratings (a subject of intense

inter-est for him, even now), were irrelevant

Over the last two years, current and former officials from

his campaign and White House, as well as his friends and

acquaintances, have provided information about Trump’s

Rolodex to New York One source almost literally provided

a Rolodex, sharing an internal document from the Trump

Organization with contact information for 145 employees

and 26 individual departments within Trump Tower In the

White House, a similar document exists: The switchboard

operators maintain a list of cleared callers, a few dozen

out-siders whose contact with the president was sanctioned by

Trump’s second chief of staff, John Kelly The list includes

Eric Trump, Don Jr., Sean Hannity, Stephen Schwarzman,

Rupert Murdoch, Tom Barrack, and Robert Kraft

And then there are the unsanctioned callers Outgoing

calls from the Oval Office or the residence are unregulated,

learned of only after the fact from the call logs kept by

switchboard operators, while those to and from Trump’s

cell phone are unknown—a mystery to the official staffers,

who long ago abandoned any hope of controlling who the

president speaks to when they’re not around And mostly

they’re not around Those who couldn’t call the president

directly often went through Hope Hicks, Trump’s trusted

communications director, until she resigned last year

Often, information has come through Rhona Graff, the

longtime gatekeeper of Trump Tower, who has served as a

channel for those seeking to quickly get a message to the

president outside the official communications structures

As Roger Stone told the journalist Tara Palmeri in 2017,

Graff was the route for “anyone who thinks the system in

Washington will block their access.” Others to endorse this

plan? Gristedes’ John Catsimatidis

Last month, Trump’s former personal attorney Michael

Cohen testified before Congress and confirmed that “Mr

Trump” doesn’t email or text In 2014, the journalist McKay

Coppins wrote that Trump still used a flip phone “because

he likes how the shape places the speaker closer to his

mouth.” But by the time he was running for president, he

possessed both an Android and an iPhone, from which he

lobbed countless tweets and instigated international news

cycles In Team of Vipers, Cliff Sims, a staffer on Trump’s

campaign and in his West Wing, described how, on

Elec-tion Night 2016, as everyone else anxiously watched the

returns, Trump was “casually” accepting calls from random

numbers and, at one point, yelled out for someone to “get

Rupert on the phone” (Murdoch later called to congratulate

Trump, who told him, “Not yet, Rupy,” according to Sims)

The first time I walked through the West Wing, a few weeks

after Inauguration Day, I was confronted by a large photo

of Trump talking on his unsecure Android hanging in a stairwell He continued using unsecure personal devices, allowing Russia and China to spy on his calls, according to

the New York Times (In response to the report, Trump

tweeted, “I only use Government Phones, and have only one

seldom used government cell phone Story is soooo wrong!”)

Most profiles of Trump since the 1980s have featured a description of him making a phone call or a phone conver-sation between the writer and the chatty subject Marie Brenner, in her seminal portrait of Trump’s Chumbawamba

era, “After the Gold Rush,” said one such conversation went

on for two hours My first interview with Trump, in 2014, was by phone, which isn’t in itself unusual; lots of inter-views happen that way What was unusual was how much

of Trump came through the receiver, a level of comfort that suggested he was picking up a conversation with someone he’d known for years rather than not at all Normally, dis-tance can create a barrier, but with Trump, it’s almost like,

by removing the distraction of his physical being, he can become something approaching human I wrote then that his voice conveyed a surprising sadness

In February, Axios obtained three months of Trump’s unofficial daily schedules, revealing that for a staggering average of 60 percent of each workday, or the period between 8 a.m and 5 p.m., the president engages in “execu-tive time.” But what happens after 5 p.m.? The president usually leaves the Oval Office around seven His dinners rarely take place “off campus,” meaning off the White House grounds By eight, he’s watching Fox News in the residence,

and by the time Hannity ends, at ten, he’s on the phone,

often with Hannity himself, or with one of the other bers of his external cabinet, or with just anybody else he feels like talking to Politicians in Washington—and their family members—have spoken about receiving calls from the president with almost alarming frequency So many calls that they interrupt woodchopping or interactions with constituents or, in the case of one call between Trump and Mitch McConnell, a Nationals baseball game Trump will call if he sees you on TV and likes something you said Or if

mem-he sees you on TV and hates something you said He’ll also call to try to change your mind or to try to get you to change someone else’s mind Or to chitchat about golf “I just feel comfort in calling President Trump,” Senator John Barrasso

said to the Washington Post Lindsey Graham told Mark

Leibovich this is the most contact he’s had with any dent And Graham is still answering the calls, even though, during an antagonistic period, the president once read Gra-ham’s private cell number aloud onstage at a rally, forcing Graham to change his number

presi-Former staffers, whom Trump rarely banishes completely

from the outermost sphere of his orbit, have told New York

about receiving unexpected evening calls from their old boss One former campaign official said that, after not hear-ing from him for months, the president rang to ask if it was

a good idea to send a certain tweet The ex-official said he had the impression everyone else had told Trump no and he was searching for someone who might tell him yes

One person who has received late-night calls from the president told me this: “If you’re Trump, the last thing you want is a moment of self-reflection That’s why he’s con-stantly on the phone at night Everybody’s afraid of them-selves People fear silence because they don’t want to hear

The President’s Party Line

“The vast majority, he just picks up,” a GOP senator who regularly cold-called the president told the Washington

Post “If he

doesn’t … he’ll return them within an hour.”

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AmericanU niversity

professor

|

In aW ashington

Post

intervie won September23,

2016, Ipredic tedDonald

Trump

’s victor y,using m

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CecileRichar ds

Former PlannedP

poli-I think poli-I underestimated the left’s response to Trump I definitely under-estimated the Democratic Party’s response

I get this rap for being pessimistic, but it’s inspiring to see It’s really inspiring to see

You can certainly see that movement in how mainstream Democrats talk about race and ns of criminal justice

Tha oe Biden and Kamala Harris are two of the leading contenders for the party’s 2020 nomination—both

politicians who embraced some version of

“tough-on-crime liberalism” earlier in their careers Is it possible for them to earn the votes of those who value racial justice?

Let me start by stipulating that I’m always gonna be the guy that did not think

we would have a black president in my lifetime You need to take that into consid-eration when you hear any sort of prognos-tication from me

That said, Biden and Kamala are ent Biden is really popular right now among black voters, but it’s worth remembering that Hillary Clinton was really popular

differ-By Eric Levitz

m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9 | n e w y o r k 15

among black voters early in ’08, too And I

think Biden has more than just

criminal-justice baggage when it comes to race

I do think the implicit point you made

about there being a separation between

American voters and

African-American activists is a real thing I was very

concerned about how Obama addressed

black audiences during his time as

presi-dent But I don’t think it ever hurt him in

any sort of demonstrable way And I think

there’s a similar thing with Kamala: The

idea of threatening mothers of kids who

miss school with jail, under the notion that

you ultimately want to help them? That’s

really, really chilling

But whether black voters will be

cerned about it, though—I am not yet

con-vinced that voters are gonna be as concerned

about it as I would like them to be But then

I never thought reparations would be on the

Democratic Party’s discussion table, either

On that point: Democratic presidential

candidate Julián Castro has come out in

support of reparations and promised a

com-mission to study the best approach Many

progressive commentators have insisted

that that doesn’t count.

When I say I am for reparations, I’m

say-ing I am for the idea that this country and

its major institutions have had an extractive

relationship with black people for much of

our history, that this fact explains basically

all of the socioeconomic gap between black

and white America, and that, thus, the way

to close the gap is to pay it back In terms of

political candidates and how this should be

talked about and how this should be dealt

with, it seems like it would be a very easy

solution It’s actually the policy

recommen-dation I gave in “The Case for Reparations,”

and that is to support HR 40 That’s the bill

that says you form a commission; you study

what damage was done from slavery and

the legacy of slavery, and then you try to

figure out the best ways to remedy it It’s

pretty simple I think that’s Nancy Pelosi’s

position at this point

There’s a whole line of thinking that says

the recommendation for a study is

some-how like a cop-out or weak I don’t really

understand why that would be the case

Look, if you have a sickness, you probably

start with a diagnosis

White supremacy is a suite of harms

operating on multiple levels across the

board In the piece, I was dealing with

redlining Criminal-justice questions come

to mind There are education questions,

years of damage And there are small-d

democratic reasons for why you should be

starting with a study instead of a plan Have you talked to the community? Has the com-munity thought much about it? Has there been much interaction with the community

about how they would like to be paid back?

Allow me to play white moderates’

advocate The strongest version of their argument, in my view, goes something like this: It is very difficult to pass laws that mas- sively redistribute resources from those who have a lot to those who have little

The first thing I would say is that the spective you just outlined—it’s not new It’s basically been the white liberal approach to race and to black America literally since emancipation People forget, for instance, that the Freedmen’s Bureau was not just some sort of racial set-aside; they actually had to do it for poor whites also So my basic answer to that is quite simple: When I look

per-at the track record of programs enacted in that way, it is not heartening to me

What I’ve found, particularly in studying New Deal policy—but not just New Deal policy—is that people are not fooled by the fact that you’re trying to close the racial gap

by including more people or doing it in such

a way as to not explicitly say “black.” They know your motive, they know your aims, and they oppose it exactly in that manner I mean, that was Obama’s approach for eight years The folks who voted for Trump weren’t fooled by it They weren’t fooled by the fact that Obama employed this “rising tide lifts all boats” rhetoric

That’s the one part of your argument I’m not sure about Without question, reactionary forces have leveraged racism

to try to defeat, undermine, or racially circumscribe universal programs—and they’ve often had success Yet in 2017, Social Security single- handedly lifted 1.5 million African- American seniors out of poverty, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Without these bene- fits, the black elderly poverty rate would have been 51.7 percent; instead it was 19 percent And Donald Trump can’t touch it

George W Bush tried and failed.

Right But the case for reparations is not

a case against universal programs It’s a case against universal programs as the sole, total solution to this matter of white supremacy

It’s not a case against the social safety net;

that should exist no matter what, right?

Race aside, that stuff should exist But I think about my great- grandparents: It’s nice that, at this point, we have a Social Security program we would support, but the price of that was my great-grandparents not being

to close the wealth gap, to ameliorate the broad socioeconomic disparity in almost every field between blacks and whites in this country that avoids talking about why those disparities are there to begin with

I take it you’re not 100 percent satisfied with the way Democrats are talking about it.

You know, I am not shocked or even appointed when those moderates basically use “rising tide lifts all boats” rhetoric to address race But part of why I always con-sidered myself a product of the left was because that was the place where you could try to reimagine society And in 2016, we had the most serious left- leaning presiden-tial candidate I’d seen since I was a kid and Jesse [Jackson] ran But I have to say, unlike in Jesse’s campaign—which sup-ported reparations—there isn’t the same level of consciousness of that history in Bernie Sanders’s

dis-And to see a candidate like Senator Sanders just hand-wave reparations away like it’s nothing, who says, “I think there are better ways of dealing with this than writ-ing a check.” There’s nothing wrong with writing people checks! Especially to those who have had their checks taken from them Let’s start there So it’s hard to have

a left-wing candidate who is pushing the boundaries on almost everything else, but when it comes to race—I have a hard time distinguishing his policies from Obama’s.None of this makes Bernie a racist, and none of it is an endorsement of the unspe-cific, vague reparations talk I’ve heard from Kamala Harris But I think it’s fair to ques-tion whether Bernie, and more importantly the people around him, even understand the illness they think they can treat through class-exclusive solutions

There are left-wing critiques of tions that I appreciate But the point of reparations is to destroy white suprem-acy, not displace its emphasis, not inte-grate black people into its most acquisi-tive functions It’s to question and assault the entire paradigm

repara-It seems to me that what might set you apart from both moderate and Marxist crit- ics of reparations is actually your optimism— about what’s possible in a democracy or what storytelling can make possible.

I just don’t have another choice I just don’t have another choice I don’t know how

I go and look my mom in the face I don’t know how I go and look my son in the face and ask him to accept permanent second-

Governor (The job she wanted most.)

Veep (The job another white guy might want her for.)

The Georgian who is usually sure about everything

finds herself conflicted about her future.

Stacey

Abrams,

podcast Why Is This Happening?, sold

out immediately after it was announced,

and in the hours before it starts, tickets

are going for hundreds of dollars on the

resale market Abrams can see her excited

fans, but they can’t see her

The hush isn’t unfriendly—she pulled

me off the street into the car, after all—

but it is disconcerting, simultaneously

intimate and slightly awkward I’m dying

to ask some questions in these extra,

unscheduled minutes I’ve been granted

with my subject, whose time these days

is extremely limited But I’ve known

Abrams for a few years; I’ve been in her

company often in recent months; I’m

familiar enough with the vibe in the car—

the “We’re being quiet now” vibe—that I

know better than to break the silence

This is the same Stacey Abrams who, a

few weeks earlier, had deployed her

win-ning gap-toothed smile and rousing

rhet-oric to break the curse of wretched State

of the Union responses Her speech

fol-lowing the president’s was so effective

that even Fox News analyst Brit Hume

grumbled that she was “a person with a

lot of presence, [who] certainly speaks

very ably and well,” while his colleague

Chris Wallace noted that, in contrast to

seemed to get more to what peop

are like in the reality.”

Since concluding her 2018 campaign to

be Georgia’s governor— refusing to

con-cede in a race marred by voter-suppressiontactics and won by Republican BrianKemp, Georgia’s former secretary of State,who’d held on to his job managing theelection despite being a candidate in it—

Abrams has been busier than ever Sheand her team have filed a federal lawsuitand launched an organization calledFair Fight to challenge Georgia’s entireelectoral system; Lauren Groh-Wargo,Abrams’s former campaign manager andthe CEO of Fair Fight, has compared the

suit to Brown v Board of Education in the

scope of the injustice it aims to remedy

Abrams has also recently published awidely circulated essay about identity

politics for Foreign Affairs; shared a

stage with Ava DuVernay in California;

appeared in an ad touting Fair Fight ing the Super Bowl; and been a guest on

dur-Late Night With Seth Meyers, BuzzFeed’s AM2DM, and NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! On March 26, Picador will pub-

lish a new edition of her memoir–slash–

advice book, Lead From the Outside.

Everywhere she goes, she is surrounded

by people pulling at her sleeve, asking forselfies, some trembling with nervousness,some hollering “You’re my governor!”

across airport waiting areas I heard one

woman exclaim, backstage at Late Night,

“I can’t wait to vote for you for president!”

Then there are the instances, as at thePower Rising Summit for black women inNew Orleans in February, when a large

audience simply begins chanting, withoutspecificity, “Run, Stacey, run!”

Back in the car, Abrams takes an ble breath before opening the door andgreeting the whooping crowd with asmile That wordless transition betweenprivate and public existence distills one ofAbrams’s many contradictions: She is aserious introvert, yet her work requiresglad-handing extroversion; she is excru-ciatingly aware of the electoral challengesthat face her as a black woman who grew

audi-up what she calls “genteel poor” in ruralMississippi, yet she pushes forward politi-cally with the drive and confidence of awhite man; she devours romance novelsand soap operas, yet she is also a science-fiction, math, and tax-law geek; she cancome off as one of the most relatable poli-ticians out there, yet she is a total eggheadwho drops million-dollar vocabularywords, once sending me to the dictionary

to confirm what panegyric means (I

mostly got it through context!) And she

is a woman who, having just run in a toric election that many of her fellowDemocrats expected her to lose, is now

his-being counted on to win, and perhaps

save her party, by prevailing in an equallydifficult Senate contest, or maybe the racefor the presidency The deepest irony, ofcourse, is that what Abrams wants to do

is fundamentally rebuild the electoral tem that failed her, just as the system

m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9 | n e w y o r k 19

abrams’s penchant for silence may

occasionally make her seem sphinxlike,

but she is mischievous and wry with those

close to her Once, one of her staffers and

I were marveling at the vast menagerie of

taxidermied animals at a gas station we’d

just left, when Abrams interjected, “They

stuff everything, including what you hit

with your car Welcome to southern

Geor-gia: Waste not, want not.” Backstage at

Late Night, I watch her fussing with her

special assistant, Chelsey Hall, about

what to wear on-air Hall, whom

col-leagues describe as “basically Huma,”

presses her boss, 16 years her senior:

“Sta-cey Yvonne Abrams Put It On.” Abrams

grumps off to change

Many have used the phrase “real deal”

the warm-up act for the real deal: Stacey

Abrams,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck

Schumer told the press in advance of her

State of the Union response Afterward,

billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer

picked up the thread, tweeting, “Stacey

Abrams is the real deal

Now everyone in America

knows it.”

The suggestion that

there is something

inher-ently real about Abrams is

worth its weight in

politi-cal gold in a media

envi-ronment where the murky

assessment of authenticity

has become a precious

commodity that few

female candidates are

thought to possess As a

45-year-old black woman,

she’s certainly part of the

real Democratic base:

African-American women

have long been the most

reliable Democratic voters

and organizers, though

you wouldn’t know it from

how rarely their priorities have been

addressed by party leadership, let alone

how rarely they’ve been provided the

financial and institutional

encourage-ment to, you know, lead the party.

But when pundits, and even regular

people, talk realness, they’re talking

optics as much as anything And some of

Abrams’s traits—her occasional social

stiltedness, her insistence on keeping her

natural hair, her self-described “sturdy”

body type—make her simultaneously

stand out and blend in, at least among

those Americans who aren’t used to

see-ing anyone who looks and sounds like

them up on the podium “I’m not tive,” Abrams likes to say about herself, citing her “race and gender and physical structure, the way I approach things.”

norma-Nonnormative as she may be, Abrams is

an almost old-fashioned Democrat, with her ideological (and personal) roots in the civil-rights, labor, and women’s move-ments Her parents, a librarian and a dockworker, both of whom would later get divinity degrees and become pastors, werecivil-rights activists from Hattiesburg,Mississippi As an undergraduate, she wastrained as an organizer at the A Philip Randolph Institute of the AFL-CIO; she gave her State of the Union rebuttal in an Atlanta union hall

A graduate of Spelman College, with a master’s in public policy from the Univer-sity of Texas and a law degree from Yale, Abrams worked as a tax attorney and deputy city attorney for Atlanta before being elected, in 2006, to the Georgia statehouse She assumed the minority leadership position—becoming the first

black woman to lead either party there—

in 2011 In the midst of her legal andpolitical career, Abrams has publishedromance novels (under the name SelenaMontgomery) and founded several busi-nesses, including one that madeformula-ready bottles for babies andanother that helps small companies getpaid more quickly by buying their invoices

Abrams ran on unapologetically for-Georgia stances on gun control, criminal-justice reform, health care, and education But her progressivism isn’t completely in sync with today’s cutting-edge policy ideas—she’s not a socialist or

left-even a democratic socialist Yes, she talks forcefully about the chasm of economic inequality in the United States, the moral bankruptcy of a system that treats poor people as if they don’t deserve the dignity

of health care or a functional social safety net During a Q&A after a Fair Fight rally

in Albany, Georgia, Abrams tore into what she says is the underlying message

of state Republicans’ opposition to icaid expansion: “If you’re too poor to get health insurance, it’s your fault That is not true, and that is not right … We live in

Med-a stMed-ate thMed-at hMed-as Med-a minimum wMed-age of $5.15

an hour.”

But while Abrams supports raising the minimum wage to about $15 an hour in cit-ies like Atlanta, she’d stop short of a state-wide increase, explaining that Georgia’s history of resistance to unions has kept wages so low that a blanket hike would be too much of a shock to the economy

“I’m not going to do class warfare; I want to be wealthy,” she tells the far-from-wealthy crowd at the Fair Fight rally

“You’ve probably got aspirations about that too.” Many in the room nod in recognition

Where Abrams is the most passionate

is in her willingness to rumble over remaking electoral systems that are rigged to deny the country’s most vulner-able their only real route to civic power It may not be as sexy as free college, but it’s definitely radical— and as Abrams likes to point out, without full enfranchisement, we’ll never get elected officials who’ll back policies that materially improve the lives

of people who aren’t well off and/or white.Even before voter suppression (argu-

The irony is that Abrams wants to fundamentally rebuild the electoral system that failed her, just as the system wants to pull her in.

ably) kept her from the governor’s

man-sion, Abrams was obsessed with the

ques-tion of who was being counted

In 2013, she founded the New Georgia

Project, a nonpartisan group whose goal

was to reach into the state’s poorest

cor-ners to register its more than 800,000

qualified-but-unregistered voters And it

is those long-overlooked new voters who

get at least part of the credit for her

path-breaking performance in November:

Abrams won more votes than any

Demo-crat in Georgia history

The success of her long game—despite

her failure to gain the office she sought—

is what has prompted everyone from

Schumer to assorted passersby to offer

their view of what she should do next

Schumer is pressuring her hard to run

against the vulnerable Republican

sena-tor from Georgia David Perdue (she jokes

about the daily calls she’s been fielding

from “friends of Chuck”), assuming that

she has the best chance of nudging the

party along the precarious path to taking

back the Senate

Meanwhile, activists and commentators

are imagining her role in the 2020

presi-dential race During her SOTU response,

former Obama adviser and Pod Save

America dude Dan Pfeiffer tweeted,

“Sta-cey Abrams should run for president.”

There’s also been online rustling about

how Abrams would make the perfect

not-a-white-guy vice-presidential foil for any

one of the white-guy presidential

hopefuls Biden-Abrams? Or

how about Sanders- Abrams? On

the Intercept, Sanders

enthusi-ast Mehdi Hasan wrestled with

his guy’s relative senescence by

sketching out a scenario in which

Sanders would agree to serve

only one term and pick as his

running mate Abrams, who,

Hasan pointed out, “is black

(check), a woman (check),

pro-gressive (check), and unites the

various wings of the Democratic

Party like no other politician in

the United States.” Check!

Many who’ve known Abrams for years

aren’t surprised by her ascent The Times

journalist Emily Bazelon, who attended

Yale Law School with Abrams, remembers

one class in which they were “two of the

only women who raised our hands with any

-son we all thought had a future i

… Her magnetism and ability were that

evident.” Ben Jealous, the former president

of the NAACP and himself a recent—and

unsuccessful— gubernatorial candidate, in Maryland, met Abrams when they were training to be youth organizers Last year,

he posted a photo of them together at 18, recalling that back then “she told me … she would be the first black governor of Geor-gia I told her I believed her.”

That is the job Abrams wanted more than anything But it’s the one she can’t run for right now, which leaves her with some major decisions to make: Should she risk the four-year wait for another shot at the Georgia governor’s mansion?

Try for a Senate seat that was never part

of her plan? Or maybe take a bigger, lier leap for the presidency, which she’s unashamed to admit she’s long set her sights on … just nowhere near this soon

ear-abrams is the second of six children

Her elder sister, Andrea, is an ogy professor in Kentucky; Leslie, just 11 months Stacey’s junior, was appointed in

anthropol-2014 by President Obama as a U.S District Court judge in Georgia; Richard is a social worker in Atlanta; Walter, who attended Morehouse, struggles with drug addiction and has been incarcerated; and her young-est sibling, Jeanine, is an evolutionary bi-ologist who has been working at the Cen-ters for Disease Control and Prevention

Stacey taught herself to read chapter books by age 4, according to her family, after Andrea got sick of reading to her

She counts among her childhood favorites

books by the Brontës and all of Dickens;

she read Silas Marner at age 10.

“Basically, what kids were forced toread when we got to high school, I’d read,”

she recalls Later, she attended aperforming-arts school where she gravi-tated to chemistry, physics, and math

(She also took guitar, but retains only theability to strum “anything by Van Halen.”)After a high-school friend gave her anovel by the black feminist writer Octavia

E Butler, Abrams developed a passion for science fiction She’s a Trekkie who will

authoritatively rank series—“The Next

Generation and Voyager are about even; I

think Voyager is mildly superior, although

Picard is the quintessential captain Then

I would do Discovery, Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise I don’t understand why

Enterprise was a show.” These days, she’s

into Doctor Who, having grown up on the

Tom Baker version “Right before this

Abrams says the spreadsheet

of goals she started 25 years ago allowed her to “dare to want.”

m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9 | n e w y o r k 21

campaign started, I was sick and ended

up watching the Doctor,” she says “Then,

over New Year’s, there was a marathon

Now I’m watching all the new ones I’ve

seen seasons three, four, five, six, and I’m

in the second half of seven.” Abrams

watched three episodes of Doctor Who to

chill out the afternoon before she gave her

State of the Union response

Abrams’s precocity, and her impatience

with the less advanced, wasn’t always

greeted warmly “I had a tendency to try

to help other children move faster, which

you’re not supposed to do You’re not

sup-posed to tell them the answers.”

With Abrams I’m reminded, as I have

been in encounters with several other

female politicians in recent years, of the

painful scene from Broadcast News in

which a crotchety old news executivetaunts Holly Hunter’s type-A heroine, “Itmust be nice to always think you’re thesmartest person in the room!”

No, Hunter replies with despair: “It’sawful.”

It was, perhaps, particularly awful for ablack girl in a predominantly white ele-mentary school in Mississippi “Staceymay have read on the same level as theteachers,” her sister Leslie recalls “And shewasn’t shy about correcting you She wasnever rude, but she’d say, ‘This is silly.’ Itwas: ‘What is the purpose of this fingerpaint? When I go home I’m reading Nancy

Drew So why am I reading Dick and

Jane at school?’ ” Leslie laughs “But you

couldn’t punish her for being smart! Andshe wasn’t a bad child So the teacherswere like: ‘Will you go do something use-ful then? Go make copies!’ Stacey made alot of copies.” That meant she spent a lot oftime with adults, like her principal, andless time with her peers, whom she stud-ied with a kind of distant curiosity

“I was born trying to figure out whyother kids were just playing in a circle,”

Abrams says “What are you doing in the

circle? Duck, Duck, Goose? What is the goose supposed to do? You could be orga- nizing; you could be producing products that are for sale You have a circle, but how are you utilizing it?”

As an adult, Abrams made a consciousdecision not to hide

Abrams meets with supporters

at the Sonesta Gwinnett Place in Georgia in February.

(Continued on page 84)

when you first heard about

pod-casts, do you remember how excited you

weren’t? Do you recall the first person

who said, “Did you know you can now

download audio files of people talking?”

To which you might have replied, “Talking

about … what?” To which they might have

replied, “About … anything!”—at which point you realized that podcasts seemedlike radio but more amateurish, whichwasn’t the most compelling sales pitch

I’m going to guess you’ve listened to apodcast since then, maybe even a few AndI’m going to guess that you’ve even become obsessed with one or two There are now

an estimated 660,000 podcasts in tion (that’s a real number, not some comi-cally inflated figure I invented to commu-nicate “a lot”), offering up roughly

produc-28 million individual episodes for yourlistening enjoyment (again, a real number;

yes, someone counted) The first two sons of the most popular podcast of all

sea-time, Serial, have been downloaded 340

million times In podcast lore, the formwas born in 2004, when the MTV VJAdam Curry and the software developer

Dave Winer distributed their shows Daily

Source Code and Morning Coffee Notes via

RSS feed Or maybe it was really born in

2005, when the New Oxford American

Dictionary declared podcast the Word of

the Year Or maybe it was born in 2009, when abrasive stand-up Marc Maron started his podcast, on which he interviews fellow comedians and other celebrities in his California garage, debuting a disarm-ingly intimate and bracing style that cul-minated in a conversation with Louis C.K.,named by Slate four years later as the bestpodcast episode of all time Or maybe itwas born in 2015, when people realizedthat Joe Rogan, a former sitcom star and

MMA enthusiast, had a podcast, The Joe

Rogan Experience, which started, in his

description, as “sitting in front of laptopsbullshitting” and was now being listened to

by 11 million people every week Or maybepodcasts were born way back in 1938,when Orson Welles proved that a seduc-tive voice could convince you of anything,

With 660,000 shows and 62 million listeners already,

the century’s first new art form is about to enter its corporate stage

Male chimp

ticular business There are fully fictional

podcasts, such as Homecoming (adapted

into an Amazon TV show starring Julia Roberts), that offer the pleasures of—and occasionally struggle to escape the stilted sound of—old-time radio dramas (Voice acting is hard, kids.) There are podcasts that drill down on one simple question, such as

Vulture’s own Good One, in which each

epi-sode is devoted to a different comedian detailing how he or she wrote his or her very best joke And, of course, there are true-crime podcasts—so many true-crime pod-casts So, so many true-crime podcasts

The most instructive examples of the state of the art, though, are those delight-fully unclassifiable podcasts, the ones that represent the medium’s potential to grow beyond simply digital talk radio These are

shows like Everything Is Alive, an

unscripted interview program produced by Ian Chillag, in which the subject of each interview is an inanimate object (a preg-

nancy test, a can of generic cola) Or

Jon Mooallem’s Walking, which is

part podcast, part performance-art project, and consists of hour-long recordings of his walking in the woods (No talking, just walking For real.)

Whatever your personal ence, it’s become clear that podcastsare particularly well suited to cater

prefer-to personal preferences The form,which once seemed like it mightnot be particularly good at any-thing, now seems to be good at nearlyeverything And podcasts increasingly arelearning to do things no medium has donebefore If podcasts sprang forth from radio,then started to borrow from written essays,novels, movies, and TV, they are nowlearning to be podcasts in all that entails

To understand where they’re headed, ever, it helps to start with how they ended

how-up sounding the way they do right now

there’s an episode of the podcast

Without Fail that’s titled “The Man Who

Launched a Thousand Podcasts.” The show

is hosted by Alex Blumberg, an ex–This

American Life producer and co-founder of

Gimlet Media, and he’s interviewing IraGlass, his ex-boss and, of course, the creator

and host of This American Life The two of

them personify two distinct eras in podcast

evolution When Blumberg left This

Ameri-can Life in 2014 to start Gimlet, he bet on a

future in which podcasts were not just acuriosity but a popular and increasingly lu-crative emerging cultural form And Glass,

There are no editors to convince, no ducers to pitch, no green lights to be green-lit To make a podcast, all you have to do is buy a mic, install a recording program on your laptop, and start talking

pro-As for what people talk about—well, thing they’re obsessing over, from classic board games to the state of our political dis-course to organic-farming tips to D-list

any-celebrities to every single episode of Buffy

the Vampire Slayer Your favorite subgenre

of podcast likely depends on your ity and how exactly you prefer to spend those moments when you can’t do anything else Maybe you favor the talk-show pod-

personal-cast, such as Pod Save America, in which

people interview each other (or, less quently, one person talks directly to you) about contemporary events Or maybe you prefer narrative podcasts, which methodi-cally explore a single story over a full season,

fre-such as the Watergate scandal in Slow Burn

Perhaps you’re more of a

talk-radio-style-podcast fan, drawn to shows in whichstrong personalities, people like Ben Sha-

piro, Preet Bharara of Stay Tuned, or natou Sow and Ann Friedman of Call Your

Ami-Girlfriend, advance a worldview through

unbridled commentary and occasionalinterviews with like-minded guests Ormaybe you’re drawn to the roundtable pod-

cast, shows like Slate’s Culture Gabfest or

Extra Hot Great, in which smart people

chatter about smart things (and, just asdelightfully, dumb things) while you get toride shotgun There are useful industry-

expert podcasts like Scriptnotes (hosted by

two successful Hollywood screenwriters)that provide an unfiltered view into a par-

even the impending arrival of aliens Or

maybe they weren’t born until February

of this year, when the music-streaming

company Spotify bought the podcast-

production company Gimlet Media for a

reported $230 million, enough money that

even the most skeptical observers had to

acknowledge that targeted nuggets of radio

on demand might be the future of media

and not just a quaint variation on its past

Perhaps it’s tricky to pinpoint the exact

arrival of podcasts because they’ve spent a

decade in a state of perpetual arrival In

any case: They’re here What’s more, these

humble chunks of audio have emerged as

the most significant and exciting cultural

innovation of the new century In an age

when we were promised jet packs, or at

least augmented-reality goggles, it turns

out what we’ve really been craving is the

companionship of human voices nestled in

our ears These voices provide us with

information, yes, but also inspiration,

entertainment, enlightenment,

emotional engagement,

compan-ionship, and, above all, a sense that,

in even our most arcane obsessions,

we are not alone

that made the podcast

revolu-tion inevitable (they’re cheap to

make and easy to distribute) are

the exact ones that made them seem

the opposite of revolutionary when

they first appeared The

portman-teau podcast, a mash-up of iPod and

broad-cast coined by the journalist Ben

Ham-mersley in The Guardian in 2004, suggests

that podcasts rode in on the coattails of the

digital-music revolution Their

develop-ment since has been a case study in sheer,

unfettered experimentation—the gleeful

result of the kind of widespread,

wiki-sourced evolution that can happen only

when no one is paying attention or, at least,

no one with enormous bags of money is

paying attention Podcasts have one very

obvious progenitor—radio, to a surprising

degree the public-radio program This

American Life—while being the

brainchil-dren of thousands of disparate inventors

FULL DISCLOSURE New York has also joined the world of podcasting From 2015 to 2017,

we partnered with Panoply to create three shows on television, food, and sex On Vulture, we currently have two shows made in partnership with HeadGum: the long-

collabo-ration with Gimlet Media, we launched a weekly show, The Cut on Tuesdays And in the spring

we will debut a new show—Tabloid—in partnership with Luminary.

The Voice That Launched 1,000 Podcasts

Ira Glass in sound-wave form from episode 317

of This American Life (Of course,

anybody’s sound wave would look like this.)

m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9 | n e w y o r k 25

Big Pod’s Big Players

A guide to a few of the medium’s interconnections.

B Y N I C K TA B O R A N D B O R I S K A C H K A

2

Simmons signed up to make a show for Luminary.

Luminary recruited the

to launch

a new podcast,

Against the Rules.

WBEZ gave the

world both This

in 2018.

PRODUCTION SHOWS

MAX LINSKY

Longform founder co-founded Pineapple Street Media in 2016.

LEON NEYFAKH

CreatedSlow Burn in 2017;

left Slate for Luminary

in 2018.

JACOB WEISBERG

Left Slate Group

to co-found Pushkin with Malcolm Gladwell

JESSE THORN

Runs Maximum Fun, which makes

Bullseye for WNYC; helped Marc Maron start

WTF in 2009.

JENNA WEISS-BERMAN

Of The Moth and WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money;

co-founded Pineapple Street Media in 2016.

BILL SIMMONS Created the Ringer in 2016.

ADAM DAVIDSON

Of Planet Money; now making a show for Luminary.

ALEX BLUMBERG

SPOTIFY

WNYC REPLY ALL

THE RINGER

SLATE SLOW BURN

AGAINST THE RULES BULLSEYE

BINGE MODE

RADIOTOPIA

THIS AMERICAN LIFE

ATLANTIC PUBLIC MEDIA

THE MOTH

SERIAL

LONGFORM WBEZ

JULIE SNYDER

TAL producer behind Serial

and S-Town.

LOVE + RADIO

Moving to Luminary this year.

Some PopularOnes Like what you’re hearing?

Go here for more

to the secrets of responsible personal finance.

A deep dive into huge pop-culture staples, including an

episode-by-episode recap of Game of Thrones and a chapter-by-chapter look at the

Harry Potter books.

This ten-year-old podcast might be the hub of the entire comedy universe

as host Scott Aukerman and famous funny guests workshop new bits.

Former Obama staffers Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Dan Pfeiffer, and Jon Lovett grouse about the crazy thing Trump just did and then interview their neoliberal friends.

One of the most successful podcasts ever, featuring season-long investigations into things like whether Adnan Syed was guilty of the

1999 murder he was convicted of, and what really happened to Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl.

A whodunit for the politically inclined, this series has revisited the unfolding of Watergate and the Monica Lewinsky scandal using archival audio and interviews.

Host “Dearest Scooter” (in reality, Drew Ackerman) tells rambling, often bizarre bedtime stories designed to distract and help lull you to sleep It … works?

This is basically activist and writer Dan Savage’s “Savage Love”

sex-and- relationship column in audio form

m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9 | n e w y o r k 27

before or are just looking for your next obsession, here are 100 good ones to entertain you, edify you, or just help you understand the medium

B Y N I C H O L A S Q U A H

2 Dope Queens

Comedians Jessica

Williams and Phoebe

Robinson talk about

pretty much every topic

under the sun The

podcast officially ended

last year but lives on

Funny Canadians goof

around with other

funny Canadians (and

The ESPN escapee

(and founder of The

Ringer) offers

high-information takes on

all four major sports,

as well as pop lingua

francas like the Oscars

and Game of Thrones.

Desus Nice and the

Kid Mero rambled

their way to their

own Showtime show

on the basis of this largely improvised, generally hilarious podcast on which they run down current events and explain the genesis

of their favorite adopted nicknames, such as the Curried G.O.A.T., the Fashion Nova Casanova, and Barmelo Xanthony.

No Such Thing

Friday, the highly knowledgeable and chatty researchers from the BBC game show QI (which stands for “quite interesting”) get together to discuss the most fascinating, entertaining, and strange facts they’ve learned that week—

everything from flirty cuttlefish to

“incorrectly formatted declarations of war.”

LasCulturistas

Comedians Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang (now a writer for

SNL) dish on their

latest cultural obsessions and bêtes noires with weekly guests like Padma Lakshmi, Janeane Garofalo, and Natalie Walker.

Men

in Blazers

They wear blazers and talk about soccer, which they believe is, was, and will continue

to be America’s sport

of the future.

Pop CultureHappy Hour NPR’s twice-weekly show about books, movies, music, comics, TV, and more.

Bitch Sesh: AReal HousewivesBreakdownCasey Wilson and Danielle Schneider's delightful Bravo recap show has spawned tons of private Facebook groups and sold-out live shows.

DenzelWashington

Is the GreatestActor of AllTime Period

Like the title says.

Prove them (hosts

W Kamau Bell and Kevin Avery) wrong.

OneHeat Minute

A superfan of the Robert

De Niro Al Pacino

crime classic Heat

discusses the movie with guests, devoting each episode to one minute

of the movie.

Scriptnotes

Screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin explain their process, which is fascinating even

if you’ve never opened Final Draft.

DissectHost Cole Cuchna obsesses over one classic (or new classic) album per season—so far: Kendrick

Lamar’s To Pimp a

Butterfly, Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Channel Orange, and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill—picking apart a

single track per episode.

I OnlyListen to theMountain Goats

Welcome to Night Vale

co-creator Joseph Fink discusses the band’s

2002 album All Hail

West Texas with head

Goat John Darnielle, breaking down fandom and the creative process.

Each episode focuses on one track and ends with a cover of the song.

Still Processing

The New York Times’ Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris work through their feelings on big cultural moments, with an eye on issues surrounding race and queer identity.

The Read

Kid Fury and Crissle West talk about hip-hop, pop, black achievement, celebrity culture, mental health, and more in

a free-ranging emotional roller coaster of a podcast.

Song Exploder

Dying to know the origin story of your favorite song? This podcast has probably had the band in the studio to explain it.

Have we mentioned

it has a Fleetwood Mac episode? (Okay, it’s just Lindsey Buckingham, but still.)

Gilmore Guys

Two men, Kevin T Porter and Demi Adejuyigbe, team up

to watch every episode of Gilmore Girls Will they

be Team Dean, Team Jess, or Team Logan? (Trick question: No one is Team Logan.) They also watch The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, so all of your Amy Sherman- Palladino needs will

be met.

Switched on Pop

Musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding talk the craft and business of pop music—how it’s written, how it’s Auto-Tuned, how it’s streamed— with rigor and charm.

U Talkin’ U2 to

look at U2 albums, tours, and side gigs from

Comedy Bang! Bang!’s

Scott Aukerman and

Parks and Rec’s Adam

Scott Somehow this is entertaining even if you don’t like U2.

Food 4 Thot

Four queer writers drink rosé and digress through topics smart and silly: Ta-Nehisi Coates and identity politics, Mariah Carey and bad hookup stories.

CoinTalk

Hosts Jay Caspian Kang and Aaron Lammer discuss bitcoin and the even sketchier cryptocurrencies they’ve lost money on.

Entertaining even if you were smart enough not to buy bitcoin.

Who? Weekly

Want to keep abreast of Z-list celebrity gossip but have no idea what

a Bella Thorne is?

Let hosts Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber be your guides.

The Joe RoganExperience

The former host of Fear

Factor’s megasuccessful

talk show with guests from the intellectual dark web and beyond.

SlatePolitical Gabfest

Free-flowing chat and in-depth political analysis from writers Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz.

The Gist

A little more structured

than the Political

Gabfest, this daily Slate

show, hosted by Mike Pesca, revolves around topical interviews with experts.

Caliphate

This ten-episode New York Times series from Pulitzer finalist Rukmini Callimachi explores ISIS through interviews with recruits and victims.

Women Rule

Politico’s Anna Palmer talks to successful women—Jane Fonda, Meghan McCain, Stacey Abrams, and more—

about current events and their personal journeys.

Can He

Do That?

The Washington Post’s

Allison Michaels hosts this show, on which experts debate whether Trump is allowed

to do the thing he’s probably already gotten away with.

ChapoTrap House

Hosts Will Menaker, Matt Christman, Felix Biederman, Amber A’Lee Frost, and Virgil Texas offer inside jokes and sweary political analysis on the official podcast home of the liberal-bashing dirtbag left (Conservatives are also occasionally criticized.)

The Daily

The New York Times’

Michael Barbaro explains how the paper’s biggest stories came together and more.

Crimetown

An absorbing dive into how organized crime has shaped modern American cities; each season is devoted to one town.

Criminal

With each episode dedicated to a different case, this pod offers one

of the most expansive, compassionate portraits

of the lives of real people caught up in crime.

S-Town

After eccentric maker John B.

clock-McLemore reached out to This American Life producer

Brian Reed to investigate a murder

in his hometown of Woodstock, Alabama, Reed went to the so-called shit town and discovered McLemore was a compelling story in his own right Tragic

in scope, flawed in its ethics, the hit podcast was downloaded

a record 10 million times in four days.

Dirty John

A wealthy interior designer meets a handsome doctor and

falls in love L.A Times

writer Christopher Goffard teases out this binge-worthy thriller to

its violent end If you can’t get enough of this psychological saga, check out Bravo’s recent TV adaptation with Connie Britton and Eric Bana.

Someone Knows

journeys into grisly cold cases from Canadian writer David Ridgen.

In the Dark

Season-long investigative stories focused on one grisly crime, looking at the victims, the accused, and the authorities

attempting to bring the case to justice.

Missing

& Murdered

Another Canadian podcast, this one hosted

by Cree journalist Connie Walker, has so far examined cold cases involving the deaths of Indigenous women.

Undisclosed

You may have heard

of a certain extremely popular show with

a season dedicated to the Adnan Syed saga This one started off arguing the case for him It has since moved on to other crimes.

The Dropout

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire before it all came crashing down, resulting in criminal charges and one of the most spectacular corporate collapses

in history This podcast from ABC News offers

a jaw-dropping investigative account

Anna Faris

Is Unqualified

If you don’t have enough incapable friends of your own to ask for relationship advice, Mom star Anna Faris can be your stand-in on this pod

as she dishes out some maybe useful but potentially questionable love- life wisdom with help from her famous guests.

Heavyweight

Humorist and unlicensed therapist Jonathan Goldstein helps guests resolve old feuds, like the one between his father and uncle, who haven’t spoken in years; a pedestrian and the driver who hit him;

and Moby and the guy whose CDs he once stole and then sampled

on the album that made him a superstar.

Personal Best

Two self-proclaimed average guys help people tackle the tiny problems they can’t seem to get

a handle on From the chronic snooze-

button abuser

to the terrible text messager, the most mundane and vexing challenges are debated and solved.

The LongestShortest Time

An O.G mommy podcast hosted by Hillary Frank that will both comfort and horrify (and then hopefully comfort again) new and expecting parents.

WhereShould WeBegin? For the extremely nosy, there might be no better guilty pleasure than these recordings of real-life couples in counseling with therapist Esther Perel, whose keen takes on her patients’ conflicts never disappoint.

Nancy

On this produced podcast, best friends Kathy

WNYC-Tu and Tobin Low discuss the important LGBTQ issues of the day, like wage gaps, health insurance, and adoption, but also cutoff shorts and if it’s okay that J.K.

Rowling retroactively made Dumbledore gay.

Yo, IsThis Racist?

Once called “the Dear Abby for Racists,”

this show from creator Andrew Ti and

a rotating panel of guests takes listener questions on the finer points of racism.

Think Star Trek meets

the Upright Citizens

Brigade An improv

show about a group of

interstellar ambassadors

making their way

around the galaxy.

Hello From the

Magic Tavern

Improv comedian Arnie

Niekamp falls through

a dimensional portal

behind a Burger King

and into a magical,

Middle-earth-style

realm Using the

restaurant’s weak Wi-Fi,

he tells us all about this

fantasyland.

My Dad Wrote

a PornoHost Jamie

Morton reads erotic

novels written by his

father out loud, while

co-hosts James Cooper

and Alice Levine react—

with usually

cringe-worthy but occasionally

heartwarming results.

You Made It

WeirdPete Holmes of

Crashing fame gets

comedians to divulge the

secrets of their personal

weirdness.

How Did

This Get Made?

Paul Scheer, Jason

Bredouw and Demi

Adejuyigbe go nuts trying

to take apart and “fix”

popular songs, resulting

and other stuff

…life

coaching

…LAUGHS

m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9 | n e w y o r k 29

Homecoming

A caseworker at a mysterious facility deals with an enigmatic new patient and surreal office politics Featuring the voices of Oscar Isaac, Catherine Keener, and David Schwimmer, this is the podcast that inspired the Amazon show starring Julia Roberts and Bobby Cannavale.

ImaginaryAdvicePoet and filmmaker Ross Sutherland blends fact and surrealist fiction, like the story of his trying to buy beer without an ID as told in seven different genres.

The Adventure

thought listening to someone else play

Dungeons & Dragons

style games could be fun?

The BlackTapes Investigating the paranormal in the Pacific Northwest.

Gripping and creepy.

LeVarBurton Reads

It’s essentially Reading Rainbow for adults.

LimetownLike

Serial if Sarah Koenig

had made the whole thing up A reporter investigates the disappearance of 300 people from a research facility in Tennessee.

Watch for Facebook’s upcoming adaptation starring Jessica Biel as the intrepid journalist.

Longform

Journalists like Gay Talese, Buzz Bissinger, Michael Lewis, and Tina Brown have been guests on this show, divulging the stories behind their best works, their processes, and their careers.

The RacistSandwichFigures from the culinary world come together to talk about food, race, gender, and class The show started with Portland, Oregon, then expanded

to the rest of the country.

Armchair Expert

Actor Dax Shepard sits down with celebrity guests—

David Sedaris, Ashton Kutcher, Chelsea Peretti—

to discuss their lives and work.

ConversationsWith PeopleWho Hate Me

Host Dylan Marron has accumulated a small army of haters over the course of his career as

a writer and producer.

Here, he lets them dish

on why they dislike him so much.

Death,Sex & Money

Host Anna Sale explores topics we

“think about a lot and need to talk about more,”

including porn, death experiences, and paralyzing student debt, with

near-help from big names such as Katie Couric and Mahershala Ali.

Lies WithSara Schaefer

It’s a celebrity-interview show, with one big publicist-friendly catch:

Guests (like Jenny Slate and Colin Quinn) are allowed to lie about everything.

The Tim Ferriss

author of The 4-Hour

Workweek talks to

successful artists, businesspeople, and athletes about the secrets

to their success.

Beautiful StoriesFrom AnonymousPeople Anonymous individuals call comedian Chris Gethard and talk to him for

an hour about what’s

on their minds Their stories are often fascinating.

Getting CuriousWith JonathanVan Ness

Everyone’s favorite Queer Eye guy sits down to interview guests ranging from celebs to academics

in typical JVN fashion Expect equal parts interview and how-the-hell-did- we-get-here tangents, okay, henny?

The MomentWith BrianKoppelman

Screenwriter and Billions

co-showrunner Koppelman interviews figures from various professions—actors, businesspeople, chefs—

to explore crucial decision points in their careers.

Beef andDairy NetworkPodcast

A surreal and surprisingly funny discussion of all things pertaining to

on Game of Thrones are

created, and whether

nother is really a word.

10 Things ThatScare MeCelebrity guests tell us what they’re afraid of, usually

in five minutes or less.

Who would have guessed Anthony Scaramucci was afraid of the dark (and divorce lawyers)?

TheAnthropoceneReviewedJohn Green discusses facets

of the planetary experience—from the Lascaux paintings to velociraptors—and rates them on a five-star scale.

Flash Forward

What will life be like in the future? Each episode explores a different scenario—some likely, some not so much.

Invisibilia

Unseen forces—ideas, assumptions, beliefs, emotions—have an enormous impact on our lives Whether they’re

studying smiles at a Russian McDonald’s or watching oil-rig workers hug each other, Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin reveal how the things we don’t see can often determine the things that we do— and are done to us.

Dr Gameshow

The premise: Listeners send in original games they’ve created and hosts

Jo Firestone and Manolo Moreno try to play them, often with disastrous results.

Here BeMonsters

Tales of individuals pursuing and facing down their greatest fears, plus other stories mixing the macabre and human psychology.

MissingRichard Simmons

Why did the ubiquitous fitness guru vanish from the public eye? This controversial podcast from 2017 aims to find out.

once-WhateverHappened to Pizza

at McDonald’s?

Once upon a time, very briefly, McDonald’s

served pizza Why did it

stop, and how deep does the conspiracy go?

Brian Thompson is determined to find out.

WalkingJournalist Jon Mooallem takes walks in the woods

of the Pacific Northwest That’s it That’s the whole podcast.

Hardcore History

Carve out some time for

this podcast Lengthy

episodes walk listeners

through the rise and fall

of the Achaemenid

Persian empire and the

devolution of the Roman

researched tales from

Hollywood’s sordid past,

host Karina Longworth

combines showbiz

history with elements of

true crime and cultural

criticism.

30 for 30If you get

choked up watching

ESPN’s 30 for 30 docs,

get ready to do the same

here The storytelling will

suck you in even if you

don’t know what a

triple-double is.

Stuff You

Should Know

Chuck Bryant and Josh

Clark break down the

complicated answers to

questions you probably

didn’t even have,

including “Are elephants

the best animals?” and

“How do breakups

impact the brain?”

Maybe you’ve never

thought much about

the Panama Canal, but

listen to this podcast

and you’ll understand

Refuge, from the Bundy

family’s roots to the

effects of the

Endangered Species Act.

of hauntings and other

terrifying occurrences.

Memory Palace

A long-running show

on which Nate DiMeo

walks his listeners

through mostly forgotten

And don’t forget to check out these New York Media podcasts:

2038, The Cut on Tuesdays, Good One, and What the Tuck.

“I wasn’t necessarily happy about inserting myself into it But at one point we were doing edits and my producer looked at me and said, ‘Taberski, you realize this is about you?’ And I was like, ‘Goddamit.’ ”

A similar moment marked the

develop-ment of Serial When it debuted in 2014,

even its makers weren’t sure exactly what kind of show it would become Both came

from TAL, but they had to reorient their

thinking around an extended story told week to week, in chapters, in real time Koenig first thought of it as an audiobook But producer Snyder recalls listening to an edit of the second episode—after the first had already been released—with Koenig

and another TAL producer, Nancy Updike,

and being dismayed that the installment, which focused mainly on the relationship between two characters, felt so flat At one point, Updike asked, “Where’s the hunt?”From that question, Snyder and Koenig

realized that Serial was not about the

mur-der victim or the accused murmur-derer but Koenig herself “That was the aha moment,” says Snyder “No one’s doing anything in this story except for Sarah Sarah is the pro-tagonist.” From then on, they began to think

of the show not as a radio documentary or

an audiobook but an episodic TV show, in which the audience follows one person’s quest through a series of encounters This, not incidentally, is when they decided on another podcast innovation: borrowing the convention of a “Previously On” roundup to start each episode

When Snyder moved on to S-Town, she

and her co-producer and host, Brian Reed, had a different revelation This show wasn’t radio or TV It was a novel Or atleast it should

Are Podcasts

Already

Selling Out?

Two podcast critics

bemoan Big Podcast.

Wil Williams

and Gavin Gaddis

host Tuned In, Dialed Up, an

indie podcast about podcasts.

W I L W I L L I A M S :

The best work is almost always coming from the most marginalized voices Those are not necessarily the

o are being to

networks like Gimlet The indies get to be really weird

because they’re not beholden to any big- money opinions So

we get things like

What’s the Frequency? that

break apart what the medium was

originally supposed

to do and go completely away from that to make things that are innovative and gorgeous.

W W : I don’t think they could’ve made

Horse with ESPN

breathing down their necks

G G : You have to be able to say, “This thing with 15 ads for electric toothbrushes

is maybe not the best podcast in this genre.” There are 15 other shows that are

being made with Patreon [a Venmo- like service that allows anyone to be a patron] that make about $50 a month, but they’re not to be missed.

W W : Paying creators who you love

his mentor, is arguably (or, you could say,

inarguably) the spiritual godfather of

pod-casts, even though he and his show remain

tethered to public radio (TAL has been

available in podcast form since 2006.)

Not every current podcast sounds like a

TAL spinoff—some sound like drive-time

radio shows, or audition reels for aspiring

shock jocks, or lively arguments among

friends over beers at a favorite local bar, or

the monologues of rambling relatives at

endless family dinners, or the mumbled

and strangely compelling musings of people

confined to padded cells—but the

distinc-tive TAL aesthetic, which has proved both

adaptable and resilient, has emerged as the

sound of the podcast revolution You know

the style: the charming, earnestly

inquisi-tive host; the narrainquisi-tive eddies and

switch-backs; the hems and haws; the “tape

every-thing” credo (by which you air not only the

interview and the interview outtakes but

the producer and the host discussing the

interview outtakes and why they out-took

them); the jangly musical interludes; the

welcoming fireside tone It’s a style that

prizes authenticity over authority, a

pur-poseful antidote to the traditional

news-caster’s drone It suggests a wide-open eye

avidly searching the world for wonder

under an ever-so-slightly arched eyebrow

It’s the sound we’ve come to think of when

we think of how a podcast sounds

The most obvious reason TAL casts such

a long shadow over the podcast landscape

is that so many of its distinguished alumni

(and current practitioners) produce the

most innovative podcasts This includes

Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder at Serial,

Brian Reed (and Julie Snyder) at S-Town,

Blumberg at Gimlet, and a diaspora of on-

and off-air talent spread across several influential companies It’s not surprising that a decade spent crafting audio stories for radio should pay off in this new medium

But this tone, as it exists now in podcasts, did not arrive instantaneously or fully formed It’s the product of hundreds of small revelations people had as they figured out what exactly podcasts could do that radio could not

The most popular current podcasts often bear the imprint of their distinctive origins

2 Dope Queens, with Phoebe Robinson and

Jessica Williams, went from a live show to a podcast to an HBO television show and was born from the pair hosting a comedy night,

so their podcast has the loose, jocular, the-room feel of a sprawling, two-headed stand-up set Marc Maron had two failed radio shows at Air America, and another

in-scuttled online show, when WTF was born:

He and a producer would sneak into the Air America studios after-hours, smuggling their guests upstairs aboard the freight elevator No wonder the show sounds like a mash-up of pirate radio and personal diary—its origin story contains a bit of both

Dan Taberski’s breakout podcast, Missing

Richard Simmons—which follows his

per-sonal quest to determine whether Simmons has in fact disappeared and, if so, why—

started as a film documentary When ski was well into the project, a podcast- production company convinced him that his tale was perfectly suited to a podcast, partly because it would benefit from an epi-sodic structure and partly because his story was, in essence, about his own obsession, which is excellent podcast fodder “It was super- personal and partially about me and why I couldn’t let it go,” says Taberski

Taber-“ The Capitalists Are Here! ”

Is this all just a bubble? B Y B O R I S K A C H K A

one february morning, more than 160 people took their seats in the fashionably distressed brick-walled event space of Williamsburg’s Wythe Hotel In the back was a bar, in the front a riser with couches and a large floating light box reading on air in

an angular block font It was hour one of the Hot Pod Summit, a business-focused podcasting conference that had begun way back in

2014 with a gathering of around 30 people in a Silicon Valley

confer-ence room That was the year of Serial, podcasting’s first blockbuster,

which quickly spawned an army of imitators It was also the year NPR refugee Alex Blumberg founded a start-up podcast company called Gimlet Media Days before the 2019 summit, Spotify had acquired Gimlet for $230 million, a number that far exceeded its internal valuation of $75 million and, as anyone in this room would tell you, “validated the space.”

“It shows to a lot of people that this is

a real business, there’s real opportunity here,” says Jacob Weisberg, the former Slate Group CEO who left last fall to launch his own podcast studio, Pushkin Industries, with Malcolm Gladwell

“What I’m worried about,” he adds, “is that if you start to get these exaggerated valuations that are not justified—and it’s not necessarily the case at Gimlet—you set yourselves up for a fall later.”

Four days after the summit, a start-up called Luminary, with $100 million in venture capital, announced a lineup of more than 40 shows hosted exclusively behind a paywall—an unprecedented effort to build a podcast empire on sub-scriptions rather than ads Luminary aims

to become “the Netflix of podcasting.” In other words, podcasting is suddenly more than a mission; it’s an industry

At the Wythe, four talent agents were spotted huddling in a corner, presumably plotting Pitches were flying in the hall-ways, along with fevered descriptions of

“killer features” and sidelong glances at competitors angling for market share An intellectual-property lawyer roamed the lobby One podcasting rep could be seen and smelled in the vicinity of the bar, Bellini in hand, at 11 a.m., rhapsodizing about last night’s parties He worked for

a Chinese-backed start-up that was throwing $100 million into podcasting with no discernible business plan

The story of podcasting’s journey so far would be a good fit for the secret- history genre: how a folksy art form with deep roots in public radio, built as almost an afterthought, became a medium that underwrites the passion projects of jour-nalists, comics, and celebrities (never mind radio producers) and attracts the interest of billionaires But the story explored at the summit was from a more speculative genre: What will this look like

in five years? Will listeners be willing to dole out monthly payments as they do for streaming video? Will advertising rates, some of the highest in media, crash? Will the audience grow fast enough to lift all boats—not just Joe Rogan but also inves-tigative journalism, fiction series, and some 660,000 others? Amid the excite-ment at the Wythe, a giddy hormonal cocktail of the anxiety and elation of an industry in the grip of puberty, one thing was clear: As a digital-audio executive put

it, “The capitalists are here!”

what distinguishes a boom from a blip—the beginning of a golden age from

a spike of irrational exuberance? In dia, it depends on the audience New

me-The

Anonymous

podcast producers

1 “ Vocal filler —um

and ah sounds—makes

a recording sound

natural You have to cut

some ums, though, to

help things flow Doing

it too much can make a

speaker sound clipped

or robotic, so I cut

maybe 65 percent.”

2 “A lot of technical

problems can get in the

way when you’re

recording: bad mics or

loud air conditioners

Sometimes you’re

working that out in

front of a VIP who

doesn’t have much time

to give you I once held

a mic up to Trevor

Noah for an hour and

a half.” 3 “With

media-trained interviewees

who talk in complete,

polished sentences, I

rarely cut actual words

But with off-the-street

interviews, I sometimes

cut whole tangents ”

4 “A recording has a lot

of pauses or hesitation

I adhere to the Roman

Mars rule : If you cut a

useless minute and

100,000 people listen,

you’ve saved 100,000

minutes for people.

You’re a hero.” 5 “This

might be too specific to

the show I work on, but

one day I saw a bunch

of dead bodies and it

changed the way I think

about my own.”—n q

investors are building podcast factories

on the premise that the masses will soon

come or that, by developing better

tech-nology or marketing or (last but not least)

content, they can help pull them in The

fact is that podcasting has always done

decent business Even in its early years,

the medium was punching well above its

weight, thanks to a form of advertising

that peaked 70 years ago during the

gold-en age of radio

Podcasting’s pioneers—the narrative

story tellers of WBEZ Radio, This

Ameri-can Life’s Ira Glass, and 99% Invisible host

Roman Mars, along with Jesse Thorn, who

sold his Dodge Dart to afford a

sound-board before founding his podcast

net-work Maximum Fun—all relied on some

form of fund- raising, but most quickly

realized that direct advertising read by the

host was tailor-made for the medium

“The reason they’ve been successful is their

deep connection to listeners,” says David

Raphael, president of Public Media

Mar-keting and the main reason you’ve heard of

Serial advertiser MailChimp He likes to

cite a focus group in which listeners were

asked why they went to hotels.com “They

said, ‘Because Ira Glass told me to.’”

In 2010, Marshall Williams, the CEO

of Ad Results, read in Fast Company

that Adam Carolla was running a

pod-cast out of his garage Williams, who

used to place ads on Carolla’s drive-time

radio show, tracked down the host via a

friend of the podcaster’s wife and gave

him the hard sell

“Proflowers.com, Mother’s Day 2010,”

Williams told me proudly over a beer at

the summit with the flush of a football

star remembering his first touchdown

“$19.99 if you use my code, plus for $10

more I’ll double the order.” Williams

found that direct-offer-code advertising

worked 30 percent better on podcasts

than radio The magic of podcasting—the

“intimacy” everyone mentions with the

disclaimer “that old cliché”—was also its

financial saving grace

The demonstrably strong connections

drove up rates Podcasts can charge

any-thing from $15 per thousand impressions

to five times that; the most successful

shows earn well over $50,000 for a single

host-read ad Those high returns

effec-tively provided podcasting with its first

round of seed funding, but the fledgling

medium kept growing and there’s only so

much disintermediated underwear you

can sell The Great Recession helped push

along the next funding phase, albeit

National Public Media Listeners andadvertisers alike wanted the next addictive

binge-listen Longform founder Max

Lin-sky started Pineapple Street Media, a tique studio whose first big hit was Dan

bou-Taberski’s Finding Richard Simmons.

In 2016, Hernan Lopez, former head ofFox International Channels, launchedpodcast studio Wondery, which struck

gold with the true-crime shows Dirty

John and Dr Death Those shows piqued

the interest of Hollywood Now a sizableportion of Wondery’s revenue comes from

TV and movie deals, according to Lopez.Adam Sachs, COO for Conan O’Brien’sTeam Coco, calls podcasts “profitablepilots,” adding, “You could do the wholething for what it would cost to option it.You have proof of concept.”

Yet the whole medium still felt like aconcept—an experiment—until Spotifyput down its stake “All of a sudden, VCsare like, ‘Okay, now we get it,’ ” says LeahCulver, the young and very enthusiastic co-founder of a platform named Breaker Twoyears ago, she pitched potential investors

on starting up “the Netflix of podcasts” andhad few takers Today funders are finallyreturning Breaker’s calls “In the past twoweeks, everything has changed.”

After True Crime

What comes next, according to Creative Artists Agency’s Josh Lindgren.

1 “We’ll see a lot more Spanish listeners coming

to podcasting.” 2 “I expect to see more episodic fictional podcasts, and I expect more consumers to be looking for them.” 3 “ Shows that tell a story and feel like TV will be big, now that there’s actual money in podcasts I work with

a really clever show called Bubble It’s a scripted sci-fi series set in an alternate universe in which 20-somethings live inside a literal bubble similar to Brooklyn or Portland, Oregon They live in the gig economy, but rather than driving for Uber, their gig is fighting monsters.” 4 “The stereotype is that podcasting is something that’s created by white men for white men I think that’s less and less the case.” 5 “ Older generations of people are coming to the medium, and there are new generations of listeners being born every day We’re seeing some great kids’ programming now, and a big part of the future will be reaching younger people ” —m k

indirectly: It inspired Blumberg to

co-create the NPR show Planet Money, which

helped explain the subprime crisis He soon grew frustrated with NPR’s limitations—its slow decision-making, its strict rules around advertising “We should

be making more; people want more,” he remembers thinking “There should be the

Planet Money of technology! Of cars!”

So he became, like his sources, an preneur In the grand tradition of podcast logrolling, he decided to promote his new podcast company with a podcast “It was

entre-my best marketing stunt,” he says Startup

became Gimlet’s flagship show Funded by

$20 million in venture capital, Gimlet exceeded expectations, and within four years it became something like a factory of precision content (some of it sponsored)

The best thing that happened to Gimlet

was Serial, the spinoff of This American

Life that shattered the audience ceiling

After Sarah Koenig’s murder

reinvestiga-tion became SNL-parody famous, it was

suddenly not only conceivable but expected that a popular podcast would draw well over a million listeners “It was the first time you went to the watercooler and asked

if people had heard a podcast and someone said, ‘Yes,’ ” says Bryan Moffett, the COO of

pH levels, now that’s what’s up.

© 2019 glacéau glacéau ® , smartwater ® and label are registered trademarks of glacéau.

At Hot Pod’s Spotify-Gimlet panel,

Courtney Holt, the generously bearded

man in charge of Spotify’s podcast push,

argued that “the golden age of audio is

happening” and he just wants to help He

touted a recent study showing that the

growth in Spotify’s podcast audience last

year was mainly from new listeners—

particularly in the podcast-averse middle

of the country That is to say, it didn’t take

away from other platforms

The next panel starred Luminary CEO

Matt Sacks Lean, boyish, and

preternatu-rally confident, Sacks, who was about to

turn 28, described Luminary in simple

terms It would roll out premium content

behind a paywall, offering creators up-front

production costs and customers a curated

experience for $8 a month Four days after

the talk, Luminary announced its opening

lineup, which includes podcasts by Lena

Dunham, Trevor Noah, and Russell Brand;

hits poached from other networks, like

Fiasco (formerly known as Slow Burn) and

Love + Radio; journalistic series in

collabo-ration with Alex Gibney and others

(includ-ing New York); and new shows by

estab-lished talents like Planet Money’s Adam

Davidson The first podcast wouldn’t debut

until late spring, allowing time for

market-ing campaigns in major metro areas In an

article announcing the lineup, the New

York Times reported that Luminary had so

far raised nearly $100 million

If Spotify’s acquisition showed the

industry that an established service was

willing to make an informed bet,

Lumi-nary showed that it could be a springboard

for gravity-defying gambles Last year,

with money from several venture-capital

and private-equity firms and a chunk from

Sacks’s father, financier Michael Sacks,

Luminary went on a buying spree It has

made multiple seven-figure offers, which

the creators won’t divulge but rivals were

eager to share: Two people told me the

comedy duo behind the raunchy feminist

podcast Guys We Fucked got more than

$4 million to leave Stitcher despite fewer

than 300,000 subscribers Asked about it

by phone, hosts Krystyna Hutchinson and

Corinne Fisher let out a raucous laugh and

an “I wish!” (They added that they had well

over a million listeners on all platforms.) In

the early stages, Sacks went out to 160

pod-casters, sometimes offering even more

(and eventually making deals with 54)

Last spring, according to Glass, Luminary

floated a proposal via his agents to pay up

to $45 million in return for three years of

keeping This American Life.

“I said to the agent, ‘But what do I get out of it?’ ” Glass recalls “He said, ‘Well, money.’ But I don’t want the same thing to happen to me that happened to Howard Stern”—who famously signed with Sirius XM—“where he made a lot of money and his work was just not out there for as many people.” (A spokesperson for Lumi-nary says the company never made or prepared an offer.)

For podcasters like Glass who hope to keep their content free, the biggest worry

is that advertising rates might collapse

“Everyone assumes that rates will go down, and how will people make their payrolls?” asks Glass “People assume that

at some point the big aggregators, Apple and Amazon and others, will basically start putting their own ads on.” In light of those fears, the recent infusion of cash from paywall platforms looks more like a hedge than a crazy bet “I think what’s going on is kind of a land grab,” says Glass “Building life rafts and getting ready to set up walls.”

to divide podcasters according to their biggest concerns: Purists worry that the medium will be-come mechanized and corrupted, while pragmatists worry it won’t be profitable enough to justify the investments In fact, those two fears are intertwined Podcast-ing is outgrowing the direct-ad era but still hasn’t gained enough listeners (or devel-oped enough data tracking) to sell to huge brands And even if it does, that shift might devalue the very intimacy—that monetiz-able magic—that fed its impressive growth

in the first place The premium model might be the best alternative they’ve got if listeners are willing to go there

When nine-figure bets are placed on a market worth roughly $500 million in an-nual revenue, people start using the word

bubble “My sense is there’s a content

bub-ble,” says Roman Mars There’s a glut of content, but that doesn’t mean every Wic-can D&D podcast is making money “The reason why I don’t think it’s an economic bubble is that a million people download an episode of my show every week,” he says

“That’s more than most cable-TV shows, and I don’t make cable-TV money.”

But what is proper compensation in a field with no exact parallels or benchmarks, which no one believes has reached its full potential? The simple fact, obscured by all the very new money, is that podcasting is barely even a household word, much less a

mass medium That came into focus on the afternoon of the summit, when Tom Web-ster took the stage to offer a sneak preview

of Edison Research’s 2019 “Infinite Dial” report Webster displayed pie charts show-ing hours of listening time among Ameri-cans 12 and older Between 2014 and 2018, the share devoted to podcasts increased

122 percent The less-good news: That trend was from 1.7 percent to 3.9 percent of total time Even today, Americans spend as much time listening to music channels at the end of the cable-TV spectrum as they do

to podcasts Webster said it was all gravy

“Imagine I had all the moneys,” he explained,

“and I said you can have 1.7 percent of all the moneys That’s a lot of moneys.”

The “Infinite Dial” report came out a week after the summit, showing that, for the first time ever, more than 50 percent of Americans report having listened to a pod-cast Webster called it “a true milestone.” The rate of Americans listening monthly was 32 percent, more than twice what it

was in the Serial year of 2014 Overall,

70 percent of Americans are familiar with

the term podcast Of course, you need

more than familiarity to make money, and you need people listening to a lot more than one show

“It’s never been hockey-stick growth,” Webster explained, and there are several reasons for that The largest barrier is sim-ple inconvenience, especially for older, less adaptive listeners (The audience listening

to a show on NPR is 20 years older than the one downloading it as a podcast.) New cars increasingly come preloaded with podcasts, but cars turn over slowly “When

we get in cars, man, that is the killer,” says Panoply podcast guru Andy Bowers Smart speakers have yet to be fully integrated

“People dipping their toe in at the edge, they’re confused,” says Blumberg, refer-encing focus groups in which people think

“subscribing” means paying for podcasts

“There is this insider image.”

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THE PASTRIES FELT LIKE A DARE. They sat there

be-tween us: four rugelach; four miniature chocolate scones;

and three glossy, heart-shaped palmiers on a teal ceramic

plate, like adorable buttered Valentines And neither of us

touched them Sitting across from Cathy Guisewite, the

68-year-old creator of “Cathy,” the wildly successful comic

strip that ran in newspapers every day from late 1976 to

2010, I felt strangely incapable of knowing how to handle

myself around baked goods

You see, Cathy, the character, had a notoriously tortured

relationship with delicious treats She wanted them all the

time, a cookie monster in shoulder pads whose saucer eyes

were always bigger than her stomach, a worker-bee drudge

who trudged around her office in sensible heels looking for

stray brownies, a brunette with a sixth sense for rooting out

caramel truffles But for all her hunger, Cathy never eased into

her appetite; she never approached her cravings with

any-thing but shame, followed by nervous one-liners that made

herself the punch line

In one strip from 1990, Cathy, forever vaguely

30-some-thing, enters into a rhetorical tussle with her mother (a

per-petual sexagenarian in wire spectacles and a frilly kitchen

apron, a loose analogue of Guisewite’s own mother, Anna, who

is 97 and still spry) about the logic of eating pie “I’m sure your

stomach wants more pie, but what is your brain telling you,

Cathy?” the mother asks “My brain wants the pie, too,” Cathy

answers Her body and her brain and her heart are all crying

out for pie! Pie! Pie! Pie! But, licking her plate clean by the

fourth frame, Cathy looks miserable “Mother made me eat a

pie,” she tells her father, glumly shifting the caloric blame And

that’s the whole joke: Cathy ate an entire pie because someone

told her she couldn’t It’s a tangled web of mindfuckery all

packed into a few inches of squiggly line drawing: food issues,

mother issues, control issues, self-love and self- punishment,

the desire to please authority, the gumption to rebel

I didn’t eat the pastry, and neither did Guisewite Later, I

called her from New York and joked about how we had allowed

a perfectly good plate of sweets to go to waste She told me she

had felt anxious about that “After you left,” she said, “I saw

them sitting there, and I thought, Did I not offer Rachel any?”

I assured her that she had been a consummate hostess

I also told her that, as we sat in her country-chic breakfast

nook in Studio City, California, discussing the legacy of

“Cathy” and the world Guisewite created, I could not stop

thinking about my own mother, a highly functional and

accomplished professional who nevertheless spent most of the

CK! Cathy Guisewite made a wildly

successful, nationally syndicated comic strip by and for women But to her critics, she’s just another example

of the compromised feminism

of their mothers’ generation.

B Y R A C H E L S Y M E

Cathy and Cathy.