Slate's "Working" podcast is pretty new but has been excellent so far. 20-40 minutes each week covering the basics of various people's working day.
You'd probably like "Criminal" which is short crime-related stories. Only a few have been produced, but they've been picked up by the Radiotopia folks to do more and more often.
"WTF with Marc Maron" has some amazing interviews with people from the comedy and music worlds, along with short monologues from Marc's twisted mind. The (pay-for) archives are where the best episodes are (Judd Apatow, Louis CK, Ira Glass, Ken Jeong, Ed Helms, Dick Van Dyke, Mel Brooks, Dave Foley, Dave Grohl, Aubrey Plaza, Bryan Cranston, the list is endless) but the most recent 50 are always free. His interview of Robin Williams was incredible, and he just reposted it in the free stream recently.
Also on my playlist: 99% Invisible (stories about the design of things (more interesting than that sounds)), Good Job Brain! (pubquiz-themed trivia show), Ask Me Another (live trivia show), The Memory Palace (extremely rare, but fantastically interesting episodes), Born Yesterday (interesting tidbits from history), The Bugle (John Oliver riffs with a comic colleague from England), StartUp (Alex Blumberg recounts starting his own podcasting company after leaving This American Life), and of course This American Life and Radiolab (if you can stand the style).
Also, check out the big list of podcasts the new label Wolfpop just put out. Lots of good pop-culture stuff: Nate Corddry Reading Aloud, Denzel Washington is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period, The Canon (histrionic arguments about movies), and Maltin on Movies (calm discussions about movies) are the ones I'm trying at the moment.
Podcasts my family enjoys but I've had to cut mainly just for time: Planet Money (NPR/TAL-style explainers about the economy) and the Sporkful (good-natured arguments about the minutiae of various foods).
NPR has a ton of great, well-produced podcasts and radio-shows-made-into-podcasts: Pop Culture Happy Hour, Dinner Party Download, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Fresh Air.
Hope that gives you a good starting point.
EDIT: some other podcasts I've listened to but given up for various reasons, but which are definitely worth checking out: The Moth, RISK, Snap Judgment, On Being, Life of the Law (I think).
My primary intent was the "public as noncommercial" meaning. That's an increasingly blurry line. I've been a watcher and listener for long enough that I remember when there were far fewer credits and they were much less specific.
There's the other can of worms about various influencers of what appears (or doesn't) on PBS, NPR, PRI, and APM. There's Noam Chomsky having interviews and essays pulled on minutes' notice from NPR, Koch intervention with IIRC WBUR Boston, and numerous other instances. I've been noting a general lack of appropriate coverage for well over a decade, though some of that may simply be my own increasing sensitivity.
Not that there aren't exceptions. Terry Gross's "Fresh Air", Ira Glass's "This American Life", "Bill Moyers and Company", and "The Commonwealth Club" tend to provide some of the most insightful programming. If I had to choose between the news coverage and those four programs (three of which are once a week), I'd pick the latter. "Planet Money" has been good but gets washed out when it's in a normal news broadcast.
Listening to a local station's pledge recently I was struck by the comment that the three most-valued aspects of programming were all long-form programs: a call-in talk show generally committing a full hour to a single issue, Fresh Air, and This American Life. They're also all associated with a single principle personality. I see this as a call for giving time to explore a topic in depth rather than the several minutes' limit imposed by other formats (which itself is far longer than most commercial news programs). Though the non-frantic nature of the programs also possibly plays a role: these are thoughtful conversations between adults. I can't stand the commercial documentary breathless reporter, hyperbole, and thumping soundtrack format at all (usually encountered through YouTube samplings if at all these days).
Ugh, are you kidding? Charlie Rose is a terrible interviewer, fawning all over people he thinks have high status, and constantly interrupting and pissing on people he disagrees with. [He’s maybe better than cable news shows, but that’s a pretty low bar.] He asks far too many ridiculously leading questions, cuts off insightful lines of discussion by his guests to bring them back to whatever point he’s trying to make, and often just starts rambling about something irrelevant. His show is worth watching because of the fantastic quality of the guests, not his skill as an interviewer. My favorite Charlie Rose moment was maybe 10 or 15 years ago, in an interview with I think Bill Joy, but it might have been someone else. Charlie asked some rambling minute-second “don’t you agree that...” type question, and his guest responded with a bored look, “well, duh.”
Go listen to a couple of episodes of Terry Gross’s truly masterful interviews on Fresh Air, or watch interviews by, say, Bill Moyers, and then come back and watch an episode of Charlie Rose. Try paying attention to the different ways they lead an interview, and the resulting differences in the conversation. Often someone will be in the news or have a new book out, and will appear on both Charlie Rose and Fresh Air at about the same time; the Fresh Air interview is always dramatically better.
Hacker Cinema
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Slate's "Working" podcast is pretty new but has been excellent so far. 20-40 minutes each week covering the basics of various people's working day.
You'd probably like "Criminal" which is short crime-related stories. Only a few have been produced, but they've been picked up by the Radiotopia folks to do more and more often.
"WTF with Marc Maron" has some amazing interviews with people from the comedy and music worlds, along with short monologues from Marc's twisted mind. The (pay-for) archives are where the best episodes are (Judd Apatow, Louis CK, Ira Glass, Ken Jeong, Ed Helms, Dick Van Dyke, Mel Brooks, Dave Foley, Dave Grohl, Aubrey Plaza, Bryan Cranston, the list is endless) but the most recent 50 are always free. His interview of Robin Williams was incredible, and he just reposted it in the free stream recently.
Also on my playlist: 99% Invisible (stories about the design of things (more interesting than that sounds)), Good Job Brain! (pubquiz-themed trivia show), Ask Me Another (live trivia show), The Memory Palace (extremely rare, but fantastically interesting episodes), Born Yesterday (interesting tidbits from history), The Bugle (John Oliver riffs with a comic colleague from England), StartUp (Alex Blumberg recounts starting his own podcasting company after leaving This American Life), and of course This American Life and Radiolab (if you can stand the style).
Also, check out the big list of podcasts the new label Wolfpop just put out. Lots of good pop-culture stuff: Nate Corddry Reading Aloud, Denzel Washington is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period, The Canon (histrionic arguments about movies), and Maltin on Movies (calm discussions about movies) are the ones I'm trying at the moment.
Podcasts my family enjoys but I've had to cut mainly just for time: Planet Money (NPR/TAL-style explainers about the economy) and the Sporkful (good-natured arguments about the minutiae of various foods).
NPR has a ton of great, well-produced podcasts and radio-shows-made-into-podcasts: Pop Culture Happy Hour, Dinner Party Download, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Fresh Air.
Hope that gives you a good starting point.
EDIT: some other podcasts I've listened to but given up for various reasons, but which are definitely worth checking out: The Moth, RISK, Snap Judgment, On Being, Life of the Law (I think).
My primary intent was the "public as noncommercial" meaning. That's an increasingly blurry line. I've been a watcher and listener for long enough that I remember when there were far fewer credits and they were much less specific.
There's the other can of worms about various influencers of what appears (or doesn't) on PBS, NPR, PRI, and APM. There's Noam Chomsky having interviews and essays pulled on minutes' notice from NPR, Koch intervention with IIRC WBUR Boston, and numerous other instances. I've been noting a general lack of appropriate coverage for well over a decade, though some of that may simply be my own increasing sensitivity.
Not that there aren't exceptions. Terry Gross's "Fresh Air", Ira Glass's "This American Life", "Bill Moyers and Company", and "The Commonwealth Club" tend to provide some of the most insightful programming. If I had to choose between the news coverage and those four programs (three of which are once a week), I'd pick the latter. "Planet Money" has been good but gets washed out when it's in a normal news broadcast.
Listening to a local station's pledge recently I was struck by the comment that the three most-valued aspects of programming were all long-form programs: a call-in talk show generally committing a full hour to a single issue, Fresh Air, and This American Life. They're also all associated with a single principle personality. I see this as a call for giving time to explore a topic in depth rather than the several minutes' limit imposed by other formats (which itself is far longer than most commercial news programs). Though the non-frantic nature of the programs also possibly plays a role: these are thoughtful conversations between adults. I can't stand the commercial documentary breathless reporter, hyperbole, and thumping soundtrack format at all (usually encountered through YouTube samplings if at all these days).
Ugh, are you kidding? Charlie Rose is a terrible interviewer, fawning all over people he thinks have high status, and constantly interrupting and pissing on people he disagrees with. [He’s maybe better than cable news shows, but that’s a pretty low bar.] He asks far too many ridiculously leading questions, cuts off insightful lines of discussion by his guests to bring them back to whatever point he’s trying to make, and often just starts rambling about something irrelevant. His show is worth watching because of the fantastic quality of the guests, not his skill as an interviewer. My favorite Charlie Rose moment was maybe 10 or 15 years ago, in an interview with I think Bill Joy, but it might have been someone else. Charlie asked some rambling minute-second “don’t you agree that...” type question, and his guest responded with a bored look, “well, duh.”
Go listen to a couple of episodes of Terry Gross’s truly masterful interviews on Fresh Air, or watch interviews by, say, Bill Moyers, and then come back and watch an episode of Charlie Rose. Try paying attention to the different ways they lead an interview, and the resulting differences in the conversation. Often someone will be in the news or have a new book out, and will appear on both Charlie Rose and Fresh Air at about the same time; the Fresh Air interview is always dramatically better.