Gateway Episode: “Chapter 1: Not If, How”

More than a decade ago, Bill Simmons cross-pollinated sports and pop culture and launched The B.S. Report at ESPN, the predecessor of The Bill Simmons Podcast. Early on—The B.S. Report predates Marc Maron’s WTF by two years—Simmons grasped that an uninterrupted, long-form interview scarcely existed in the media wasteland. He took note of the diminishing returns of what celebrities and athletes were willing to say and the disgust fans had for sound bites and puff pieces. Now, he routinely books guests who won’t, or don’t always, open up elsewhere: Kevin Durant, an NBA champion and typically a man of few words, for instance, showed up this year for a series of fascinating, raw interviews. Simmons’s talk with The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates is also a must-listen. The host steers the conversation toward sports to get them chatting, and then everything you want to hear from America’s writer-in-residence comes out in unexpected, new ways.

Gateway Episode: “Ta-Nehisi Coates on Storytelling, Challenging Obama, and the Kaepernick Situation”

The Every Little Thing host Flora Lichtman will make her obsessions your obsessions. The show follows her train of thought, taking listeners through unexpected twists and turns where they find out flamingos can drink boiling-hot water, robust mite communities live on our faces, and why no one ever sees a living armadillo (it has to do with a phenomenon known as eye shine). Lichtman has a fantastic sense of humor and a charming curiosity that seduces listeners into the topic du jour. The show is perfect politically neutral entertainment for conversations with the in-laws or for work parties. While no one—maybe not even Lichtman—can predict what the next subject will be, after a few episodes, listeners get a sense for the quirky world she’s created and how she moves through it. Every Little Thing embodies the old maxim that the best ideas are the ones we can’t forget.

Gateway Episode: “Rapture Chasers”

The experience of This Is Actually Happening is different from most of what you’ll hear elsewhere. Every other week, people who have experienced a massive disturbance in their life tell their stories uninterrupted, no questions, no music. A male model becomes the target of the Japanese mafia in one show, and in the next, a victim of incest talks about how advocacy changed her life. They are all of the most articulate ilk, people who have done the hard work of thoughtful introspection and, without asking anything of the listener, they share themselves and what they’ve learned. This creates an intimate connection with the speaker, perhaps the closest thing listeners have to trying on another person’s consciousness. Each show title starts with “What if … ” (with titles like “What if you were a white supremacist?”) to tell the listener exactly what to expect, but others are more rhetorical (“What if you went to the dark side?”). Others still are so specific (like “What if you spent 15 hours on the edge of sanity?”) that you’ll want to know how exactly that question was posed in the first place.