Early episodes trace the origins of American Chinese food and Big Pizza, featuring anecdotes about portable pizza warmers and the jump in the popularity of Chinese restaurants after President Richard Nixon visited the country in the 1970s. The show covers both the pleasure of eating and the exploitation of gig workers by big tech companies. Once made up almost exclusively of pizza and General Tso’s chicken ordered over a landline, the landscape is now technologically sophisticated and morally complex. The new season of Dish City is a comprehensive study of the ballooning pandemic food-delivery marketplace. It’s also a call to arms for people with disabilities a story about power, sexism, and isolation and a reflection on who has the right to make bad decisions. Fueled by their Britney fandom and by Barker’s research chops, Toxic takes a look at Spears’s first and second marriages, her infamous 2007 public persona, and the absurdity of the media’s reaction to her shaved head. The women eventually gained a massive following. Tips explaining her silence came in and checked out: She’d been forced into a mental-health facility. But when Spears stopped posting, they started researching and showing up to her hearings. Comedians Tess Barker and Babs Gray’s first podcast, Britney’s Gram, analyzed the pop star’s Instagram feed. Instead, awareness of Spears’s recent triumph gives a hopeful sheen to the work by the two women who popularized the #FreeBritney movement. Knowing that Toxic: The Britney Spears Story has a happy ending isn’t a spoiler. (And a special shoutout to Dan Taberski, the first host to ever earn two of our top-five spots.) They pushed the form, helped us metabolize the world around us (or escape from it), and embodied the spirit of 2021. The 50 shows on this list outdid their competitors in both ambition and success.
Producers zeroed in on terrorism-both domestic and abroad-searching for patterns and reaching for hindsight. Others drew parallels between the pandemic and the AIDS crisis or the aftermath of 9/11. Some shows were hornier than ever before others sharply connected sex to gendered power dynamics. In other series, our houses themselves-and the attendant challenges around gentrification and homelessness- were the story. Memoirs also shone, allowing homebound producers to shout into the void. As the pandemic wore on and limited field reporting, archival tape became central to narratives. This year, makers played with structure in fresh ways, flirting with form and cadence.
As always, we’ve also recused ourselves from selecting The Atlantic’s podcasts.
#Strangeland podcast koreatown series#
True-crime shows and in-depth looks at government snafus remain available in droves, but we sought series that transcended their genre conventions. We’ve decided to eliminate anything that sounds like it’s always sounded, too. The requisites for inclusion on our list have evolved over time, and now we only consider new shows or shows that have a new focus. Ours is, as far as we know, the longest-running of the robust roundups, and we’ve been reviewing the medium longer than virtually any other critic in the space. This is our seventh list commemorating the year’s best podcasts, and deciding what makes the cut has only gotten harder each time. From there, each and every slot is labored over and debated. (Of course, with more than a million podcasts in existence, our extensive listening still makes only a tiny dent.) To track our impressions, we make a spreadsheet with legends, drop-down menus, color codes, formulas, and notes on the thousands of podcasts that we’ve discovered over the past decade. We seek shows anywhere we can find them-sometimes hearing about them directly from producers, other times from a friend of a friend’s mother’s uncle, or sometimes through our own secret methods of rooting out gems. Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2021” coverage here.
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