Audio I listened to in 2018
I wrapped up last year with a list of some of the best audio I listened to in 2017. This year I huffduffed about 260 pieces of audio, so I could do a similar end-of-year list for 2018. But I thought I’d do something a little different this time.
It seems like podcasting is going from strength to strength with each passing year. Some friends of mine started new podcasts in 2018. Matt started Hobby Horse, where he talks to people about their tangential obsessions. Meanwhile Khoi started Wireframe, a jolly good podcast about design.
Apart from the trend of everyone having their own podcast these days, there’s also been a trend for quite short and manageable “seasons” of podcasts. See, for example, Horizon Line by Atlas Obscura, which is just four episodes long. Given the cherry-picking nature of my usual audio consumption (the very reason I made Huffduffer in the first place), this trend suits me quite well. There have been a few podcast runs in 2018 that I can recommend in their entirety.
The Secret History Of The Future is a collaboration between Seth Stevenson and Tom Standage, one of my favourite non-fiction authors. They look at modern technology stories through the lens of the past, much like Standage has done in books like The Victorian Internet. There are annoying sponsor blurbs to skip past, but apart from that, it’s a top-notch podcast.
I discovered Settling The Score this year. It’s a podcast all about film scores. The two hosts have spent the year counting down the top 25 scores in the American Film Institute’s list of (supposedly) greatest scores in American cinema history. It’s a pleasure to listen to them take a deep dive into each film and its score, analysing what works and what doesn’t. It will also make you want to rewatch the movie in question.
By far my favourite podcast listening experience this year was with Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Years. It’s just six episodes long, but it manages to tell the sweep of human history and technology in an entertaining and fascinating way. I’ll admit I’m biased because it dwells on many of my hobby horses: the printing press, the telegraph, Claude Shannon and information theory. There are no annoying sponsorship interruptions, and best of all, you’ve got the wonderful voice of Stephen Fry in your earholes the whole time. Highly recommended!
So there you have it: three podcasts from 2018 that are worth subscribing to in their entirety: