On Point with Tom Ashbrook isn't as on point as To the Point. Ashbrook is a good interviewer, but he's less laserlike than Olney. That's partly because his show features listener call in, a format that isn't laser-friendly. He handles the challenge with aplomb, but if you're not a fan of listener call-in, there's only so far aplomb can go. I listen to his opening conversations with experts but sometimes bail out when the listeners start calling in, depending on whether the ratio of passion to reason gets offputtingly high.

Best High-Brow Podcasts

In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg. This BBC product is the closest podcast I've found to a college seminar run by an Oxford don. But instead of students being seated around the table, there are several professors--new ones each week, depending on the subject--and the don isn't a professor but rather a broadly curious radio guy who prepares well for each conversation and deftly orchestrates the exposition. Bragg does mainly history, including a fair amount of intellectual history. So episodes might focus on, say, an appraisal of Bertrand Russell or Maimonides, or an exploration of Minoan Civilization or of Martin Luther's experience at the Diet of Worms. (And the people doing the discussing are so sophisticated that it doesn't even occur to them to make a pun about the Diet of Worms!) The podcast is weekly, but because its subjects are timeless, you can make it effectively daily by plundering the archives.

Partially Examined Life. This podcast faces some self-imposed obstacles: (1) It features four, sometimes five, people, and since the regulars are all American males without distinctive regional accents, it's not immediately easy to tell them apart, so their personalities take a while to crystallize. (2) It's about philosophy! And I mean real philosophy. Most of the regulars did graduate work in philosophy and were headed for academia before they "thought better of it," as their web site puts it. So their idea of a good time is an in-depth, sometimes even technical, discussion of Wittgenstein or Quine. If that doesn't scare you off, this is your podcast.

Best Tech Podcasts

The Vergecast. I have my complaints about this weekly conversation among 3 or 4 tech writers from The Verge, but what the show has in spades is chemistry. The three mainstays--Josh Topolsky, Nilay Patel, and Paul Miller--have distinctive personas and perspectives, and there is the right amount of playful tension among them, and they're funny and smart. Do they spend too much time on jokey tangents with no relevance to the tech world? Occasionally. Do they sometimes, in their diatribes against tech companies, exhibit a youthful disregard for pragmatic constraint? Yes. But it's their unconstrained imaginations that make this podcast a good stimulus for thinking about the future of digital technology. Their conversations can be engrossing even if you have no interest in buying the products they're talking about.