THE JOURNAL
I don’t know about you, but during the UK’s third lockdown I retreated into the intellectual equivalent of joggers and a hoodie: Mr Bob Ross, Premier League Years, Pointless. While it was better than the “Shakespeare wrote four masterpieces during a plague, actually” discourse from lockdown one, it was sludgy and strange.
I suspect I’m not alone. So, how to remedy it? There is a simple way of taking time to yourself and feeding your curiosity and wellbeing, without berating yourself for not turning out a King Lear. These podcasts are a form of self-improvement happy to meet you halfway, gently but firmly arm wrestling your brain into expanding itself – without it even noticing.
01.
Which? Investigates
Image courtesy of Which?
This one will help you stride confidently through modern life, knowing that you’re doing broadly the right thing. It’s about where big global currents and your everyday collide, and how your choices matter. The first series pulls apart sustainability and corporate greenwashing, scrutinising everything from how your bank account might be contributing to climate change to what that old, dead phone that’s been languishing in a drawer could be doing to help.
02.
Conflict of Interest
Image courtesy of Imperial War Museum
As Mr Alan Bennett once pointed out, there’s no period so remote as the recent past. Relatedly, there’s also no humiliation as complete as nodding through a heavyweight pub chat about Syria while trying to come up with a hotter take than “yes, war is bad”. The Imperial War Museums’ new series picks through wars from the last 50 years, from Libya to The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and how these events echo today. Each episode, a different famous face (or voice) is there to ask the obvious questions, so you don’t have to.
03.
Ten Thousand Posts
Image courtesy of Ten Thousand Posts
There are a lot of podcasts that attempt to make sense of the world through economics and geopolitics; you know, good, wholegrain, fibre-packed discourse. Mr Hussein Kesvani and Ms Phoebe Roy’s podcast is different. It suggests that important people do and say stuff because of “poster’s brain”, the impulse to blurt out a contrarian opinion on something, no matter how dumb, just to have said something. Picking apart how social media warps the dynamics of life offline – from Mr Dominic Cummings’ Substack odyssey to YouTubers running for the 2021 London Mayoral election – it’s funny and illuminating.
04.
Talking Politics: History of Ideas
Image courtesy of Talking Politics
Starting in the 1650s with Mr Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and its ideas on the modern state, Cambridge University professor of politics Mr David Runciman plots the trajectory of philosophy’s greatest hits: Ms Mary Wollstonecraft, Ms Frantz Fanon, Mr Jeremy Bentham and more. It’s not a crash course – it’s far too welcoming and low stakes for that – but it might be a soft bump course. Less a series of lectures than an afternoon in the pub with an extremely well-read and voluble friend, though less irritating than that would gradually prove in real life.
05.
Twenty Thousand Hertz
Image courtesy of Twenty Thousand Hertz
Few podcasts delight so much in the possibilities of telling stories with sound than this one. It’s all about the nature of sound itself and where the most recognisable, under-appreciated sounds, music and fragments of noise come from: sound effects painstakingly created by Foley artists; a weird humming sound nobody can explain but is driving a small town mad; Netflix’s “ta-dum”. Never less than revelatory.