As this feature kicks off for the year, we require a reset. It’s widely established at this point that YouTube has eaten podcasting, with study upon study indicating that the platform is now the distribution point of choice for audiences everywhere. As a result, YouTube has firmly redefined the ecosystem around video, a shift that largely benefits a certain kind of program — interview shows and chat-casts, usually live-to-tape — while deemphasizing the existence of others that are more audio-first: narrative shows, interview programs conducted without a camera, audio fiction, formalistically adventurous works, etc. Podcasting still means both things, though as more time passes, it’s likely we’ll end up with a media environment where the public primarily associates the word “podcasts” with its video incarnation, in which the audio-first stuff can probably be sorted back into the word “radio.” For what it’s worth, YouTube generally defines “podcasting” as “eyes-optional content that is episodic and organized within a playlist,” which, frankly, doesn’t really help.
But I don’t think we’re quite there yet. For our purposes, I’m still going to try and square the difference by considering the whole pot, and because I’m governed by my own tastes and historical experience with podcasts as primarily an audio-first medium, you’ll find that I will be fairly audio-oriented when I curate this list. (For now, anyway.) That being said, I’m attuned to podcasting’s shift to video and its growing impact on the broader culture; for better or worse, our society is increasingly defined by The Joe Rogan Experience, Call Her Daddy, Club Shay Shay, and so on. (A podcaster is this country’s new deputy FBI chief, after all.)
Moving forward, you might see this list defined by a sort of dichotomy: a combination of what I believe to be great audio work and what I believe to be particularly interesting moments from video podcasts. As an example of the latter, I would’ve listed Timothée Chalamet’s appearance on This Past Weekend With Theo Von because of its impact on how we understand him as an increasingly prominent star, if only it debuted after the New Year. But alas, it dropped in mid-December. In the opening iteration of this list, you’ll find only audio-forward picks. But that will change soon enough.
Embedded: “Alternate Realities” (NPR)
Sometime in 2014, the radio producer Zach Mack makes a bet with his father — an aging man who believe in conspiracy theories like terrorist immigrants, electromagnetic pulses, societal collapse, etc. — that if none of his big doomsday predictions take place by the end of the year, the guy has to fork over $10,000. The gambit is a playful put-up-or-shut-up proposal, but it’s also a quietly desperate piece of outreach from a son trying his best to see if his father can be retrieved from a kind of madness that’s all too familiar today. The resulting three-part series is as gorgeous as it is painful, as what emerges is both a gripping portrait of a family in crisis and a meditation on what it means to exist in a world where we truly aren’t able to live with each other.
Scratch & Win (WGBH)
I have a lot of time for Ian Coss and his team of collaborators at WGBH after 2023’s The Big Dig, where they took a major boondoggle, an uber-expensive highway project in Boston long-decried as the poster-child for government bloat that actually turned out to be highly successful, and used it to tell a bigger story about the politics of American infrastructure. With Scratch & Win, they tackle legal gambling in America, a phenomenon that exploded into cultural ubiquity only recently, and they do that in just the way you’d hope: by running it through the tale of what they call “the unlikely rise of America’s most successful lottery,” which, of course, took place in Massachusetts, where state officials faced off with organized crime in the ’70s in a bid to take over the market.
Bad Therapist (Independent)
Some of the best cultural criticism happens in the classic conversational podcast format pegged to a specific line of deconstructive inquiry, so much so that it’s practically a veritable genre and a movement: Know Your Enemy, Maintenance Phase, If Books Could Kill, Sounds Like a Cult, System Crash, Better Offline, Culture Study, You’re Wrong About, and so on. Add another to the mix: Bad Therapist, hosted by the psychotherapist Ash Compton and the journalist Rachel Monroe, with producer Zoe Kurland. Operating as a kind of response to contemporary rise of therapy and therapy-speak as a cultural aesthetic as opposed to a scientifically driven discipline, each episode sees Compton and Monroe interrogate different expressions of therapy gone wrong: scammers, self-proclaimed gurus, and conversion therapy.
Scam Inc. (The Economist)
A curious thing happened at the top of 2025: There was a sudden contemporaneous cluster of reporting from places like The Economist, the New York Times, Wired, The Conversation, and Wondery about “scam compounds” in Southeast Asia — giant prison-like complexes where people, often victims of human traffickers, are subjected to inhumane conditions as they are utilized as cogs in a giant operation to send out millions of texts and digital messages attempting to scam people around the world out of their money. Of these, Scam Inc., from The Economist, struck me as the most effective of the cohort, with its more sweeping scope and its ability to illustrate a network of depraved systems with greater accessibility.
“Coming Out” (Radio Atlas)
Last year, the Lithuanian radio producers Rūta Dambravaitė and Inga Janiulytė-Temporin created this 50-minute piece for LRT, their country’s national broadcaster, that recounts the story of Vitalius and Albinas, a same-sex couple who had to pass themselves off as father and son for decades. “Coming Out” is a personal history of a shared life forced to stay private under the shadow of state power. Long outlawed under Soviet rule, homosexuality has only been legal in the country since 1993, and the current democratic state still does not recognize sex-same unions to this day. The piece, which features the couple talking publicly about their union for the first time, drew a strong public response in the country, and it won the Prix Europa European Audio Documentary prize — a big deal in the region — in 2024. Earlier this year, Radio Atlas, the nearly decade-old English-language project surfacing radio stories from around the world, released a version on its site with translation by Vaida Pilibaitytė and Justinas Šuliokas.