Podcast-wise, 2017 was arguably the year of “The Daily,” the beautifully produced, gently voiced narrative-news offering from the Times, hosted by Michael Barbaro, which started last January and quickly became indispensable. The show, which parses a different news story in each episode, through a conversation with a reporter or other guest, then delivers a brief news roundup, has sufficient perspective and empathy that it produces in its listeners an intoxicating, if temporary, feeling of sanity; by now, its theme song alone cues in me a Pavlovian calm. The show garners 4.5 million unique listeners each month; in April, it will expand to public-radio syndication. In September, at Third Coast, the audio-producers’ conference in Chicago, near-swooning occurred as Barbaro riffed on “The Daily” over breakfast. Though the show is expensive to produce, it’s been highly profitable, and its success seemed to portend that a competitor would eventually emerge. Shortly after Third Coast, one did: Vox announced a forthcoming daily narrative-news show, “Today, Explained,” hosted by one of public radio’s rising stars, Sean Rameswaram, thirty-three, of the excellent “Radiolab” spinoff “More Perfect.” At the conference, I’d been impressed by Rameswaram’s sharp, funny seminar on how to sound natural on tape (answer: by writing for your own voice, not for the way you think you should sound) and by his d.j.ing at the conference-closing dance party, which found a balance between challenging and inclusive. He seemed poised for big things. When I read the Vox announcement, I thought, Ooh—the plot thickens.

Vox, the news-and-opinion site co-founded in 2014, by Ezra Klein, Melissa Bell, and Matthew Yglesias, aims to explain the news. It does this via text, videos, and podcasts, to varying degrees of success. “Today, Explained,”a co-production of Vox and Stitcher, began in February and quickly distinguished itself in a few key ways. “The Daily” comes out in the morning, and has a mood of sober, even sombre, innocence; “Today, Explained” comes out in the afternoon, when we have been fully immersed in the world and its mayhem, have no illusions, and might need a laugh. It might be said to address our what-the-hell-just-happened feeling. Right out of the gate, the podcast sounded comfortable and confident; you heard it and thought, Maybe we do need an alternate version of “The Daily.”

In the trailer, Rameswaram explains, “We want to answer all those questions you’ve been asking yourself, like, Why doesn’t Puerto Rico have power yet? Or, What would a war with North Korea even look like? Or, If people keep walking out of the E.P.A., what happens if there’s another Deepwater Horizon?” He promises us answers to such questions, and context, and “radio drama, maybe even a song.” Then we hear a song in which a woman sings, “We’re gonna drop it for the dinner bell every afternoon”; a faux-scary voice says, “Not on weekends.” It rhymes the line “The news it comes fast, so we keep it spontaneous” with “Mother[boing] Matt Yglesias.” Over a pleasing groove, sound bites come in, such as James Comey saying, “Lordy, I hope there are tapes.” It feels funny, knowing, and energetic. In this news climate, that isn’t easy.

Twenty episodes in, “Today, Explained” has produced gratifying, intelligently produced shows on subjects we’d reasonably expect it to cover—Parkland teens, nuclear anxiety, the steel industry—and on subjects we might not expect but are grateful for, such as the water crisis in Cape Town and the West Virginia teachers’ strike. It’s serious but not self-serious. Episodes are fifteen to twenty minutes long, shorter if you skip the copious ads for mattresses and toothbrushes. Vox reporters talk to Rameswaram, who occasionally veers into what I think of as the Krulwich zone—exaggerated naïveté for our benefit—but generally he’s a sharp, curious proxy for the listener.

And he clearly knows his own voice. “This whole process sounds dusty as fuck,” Rameswaram says in the first episode, “Six Easy Steps to Nuclear War,” after the Vox reporter Alex Ward describes to him the United States’ nuclear-launch procedure. Basically, Ward explains, the procedure is, in order: Presidential decision, access the nuclear football, talk to advisers, access the nuclear “biscuit”—a laminated paper, with codes on it, that the President carries around—engage nuclear triad, missiles fly. Ward says that we have “a nuclear monarchy in the U.S.,” which is “completely dependent upon the President’s feelings” and the logistics of the location of the football and the biscuit. Carter accidentally sent the biscuit off with his dry cleaning; Clinton lost it for a few months and didn’t tell anyone; Reagan’s got mixed up with his hospital stuff after he got shot and disappeared for a while. “That’s the system,” Ward says, and we’re given synth music to let us ponder. As we do, we consider who our President is and what the biscuit might be going through. By the end of the episode, we’ve been made aware, yet again, of the awe and terror of national security as it intersects with the bumbling humanity of our leaders.

At other times, “Today, Explained” gets freewheeling. The show started its first meme (resulting in a Twitter Moment) in late February. The team was figuring out how to do its first piece on the Mueller investigation and wanted to provide a brief primer, Rameswaram told me recently. But how? The reporter they were talking to, Zack Beauchamp, said, “If we do the people one by one, it’ll start to sound a little ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire.’ ” “I said, ‘Oh yeah? That sounds great!’ ” Rameswaram told me, and he wrote a parody of the Billy Joel song. (“Meeting at the Trump Hotel / Then director Comey fell / Dutch attorney van der Zwaan / Holy shit this list is long.”) “We all drafted it,” Rameswaram said. “My version was the one we eventually went with, because I seem to have the most experience writing parody music.” (At WNYC, he’d written a song about the NPR newscaster Lakshmi Singh, which was performed at a live event, after he started a hat-related meme paying homage to her.) The producer-reporter Noam Hassenfeld, who “has a lot of musical chops,” did the production. In the episode about steel tariffs, they turned a bit of pre-interview tape in which Yglesias mumbled a song to himself—“da da da da da da, STEEL”—“into this, like, hardcore industrial breakdown,” Rameswaram said. “We kind of lean into who we are and what we find funny and trust our instincts.”

Vox, unlike the Times, has a “startuppy culture,” Rameswaram said. “We can be a bit salty with our language.” He and the rest of the six-person podcast team, all from public radio and podcasting, were new to Vox. He moved to D.C. from New York in November and hired the team; they spent a few months planning. “It’s a fuck ton of work, I guess is the Vox way of saying it,” he said. We were talking at 9 A.M. on a Sunday, and he was preparing to go to the office. The challenge isn’t necessarily being timely in delivering the news, he said—it’s in the production, making it distinctive. “We really do aspire to make something that’s fun to listen to, or at least an emotional experience in some way,” he said. “I mean, life’s hard enough, Sarah.”

On Tuesday afternoon, having focussed on work for several hours, I knew about the firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson but had not grasped the full meaning of it. After listening to “Today, Explained,” the repercussions began to sink in—that his replacement, the Frank Gaffney-affiliated, anti-Muslim former C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo, will now have an international diplomatic role, and that Pompeo’s replacement, Gina Haspel, has overseen torture. At that moment, I wondered if this podcast, which delivers both sobriety and funny songs, was where I wanted to be as I realized, yet again, that our country is in real, unfunny danger (and with a nuclear-launch system that’s run on emotions and is “dusty as fuck”). But then Rameswaram came back on and played a song parody, whose lyrics listed the people Trump has fired, to the tune of “Single Ladies.” I decided that I needed the laugh.

A previous version of this post misstated the year when Vox was founded.