According to Pocket Casts (my podcast player of choice), since November 9, 2015, I've listened to 137 days 11 hours worth of podcasts.

Despite listening to many podcasts for so long, I practically NEVER listen to podcasts that are just a couple people talking in a room, which make up the biggest podcasts in existence. I love narrative structure. Reported stories. Production value. The marriage of journalism and storytelling similar to reading a great longform article, but with sound.

Essential Staples

This American Life
Chicago Public Media / PRX
The gold standard of narrative journalism. Ira Glass and team have been perfecting the art of radio storytelling since 1995, with each episode built around a theme and divided into acts, like a play. Stories range from intimate personal narratives to investigative journalism, always finding the universal in the specific, still a weekly staple after nearly 30 years on air.

Unfictional
KCRW
One of my absolute favourites, though sadly no longer running. Produced by KCRW in Los Angeles, this show featured deeply personal, artfully produced stories about real people experiencing extraordinary moments. The production quality was cinematic, like This American Life meets audio documentary film. Each episode was a narrative arc that stayed with you long after listening.

Now or Never
CBC
Sort of a Canadian This American Life, hosted by Ify Chiwetelu and Trevor Dineen. Stories about Canadians at pivotal moments in their lives. People taking risks, making changes, or confronting long-held beliefs. The show captures Canadian life while exploring universal themes each episode.

Radiolab
WNYC Studios
An excellent radio show which revolutionized audio storytelling by treating sound design as a narrative tool. Originally hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show explores scientific/philosophical questions through fun soundscapes and conversational investigation. The new hosts (Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser) are talented, though in my honest opinion, not quite as magical as the original pairing, still essential listening.

True Crime & Justice (Done Right)

Criminal
Vox Media Podcast Network
The best true crime podcast out there. Tasteful, nuanced, and interesting. Hosted by Phoebe Judge (whose voice I absolutely love), Criminal tells stories about "people who've done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle." Unlike sensationalized true crime, this show treats its subjects with dignity while never shying away from complexity. Stories range from historical mysteries to contemporary justice issues.

This is Love
Vox Media Podcast Network
From the creators of Criminal, this show keeps the same carefully reported style but focuses on love stories instead of crime. Phoebe Judge explores the many forms love takes, whether omantic, familial, obsessive, sacrificial. Just as thoughtful and beautifully produced as its sister show.

Serial
Serial Productions / The New York Times
Most people only listened to Season 1 (the Adnan Syed case), but all the seasons and associated shows are extremely interesting. Season 2 covered Bowe Bergdahl, Season 3 embedded in Cleveland's criminal court system. The show that launched a thousand true crime podcasts, but few matched its journalistic rigor and ethical grappling with storytelling's power and responsibility.

S-Town
Serial Productions / The New York Times
Gets its own mention because it's one of the best limited series podcasts I've ever listened to. Produced by the Serial team, this seven-episode investigation starts as a murder mystery in rural Alabama and becomes a meditation on genius, mental illness, and what we owe the dead when we tell their stories. Haunting and unforgettable.

Pretend
Creative Babble
An investigative true crime podcast about real people who lie for a living—con artists, scammers and the victims caught in their web. Hosted by journalist Javier Leiva, examining the psychology behind deception and fraud while telling cinematic, ethical stories.

Writing & Craft

Writing Class Radio
Independent
An excellent podcast about creative nonfiction writing, featuring craft talks, interviews with writers, and close readings of great essays. The hosts are knowledgeable and clearly love the form. I'll be honest though, sometimes they seem to not like each other? Which creates an interesting tension in the dynamic. Still, if you care about the art of the essay, this is an essential.

I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats
Night Vale Presents / Merge Records
Joseph Fink (creator of Welcome to Night Vale) and John Darnielle (singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats) go through Mountain Goats albums song by song, discussing what it means to make something and what it means to love something someone else made. Darnielle is one of the most thoughtful and articulate writers working in any medium, and listening to him explain what a song was trying to do changes how you hear music. A beautiful, unhurried meditation on art and fandom.

Longform Journalism

The Guardian Long Read
The Guardian
These are just narrated longform articles, but they're some of my favourite podcasts. The Guardian's longform journalism is consistently excellent. Deeply reported, beautifully written pieces on everything from politics to culture to climate. Great for commutes or housework when you want substance but something shorter than an audiobook.

Cultural & Social Issues

Invisibilia
NPR
Extremely interesting and often-underdiscussed topics exploring the invisible forces that shape human behavior. Like our ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and emotions. Hosted by various NPR reporters over the years (including Lulu Miller before Radiolab), the show tackles psychology, neuroscience, and social science with narrative flair. I miss this show dearly since it ended in 2020, and it remains in my all-time favourites.

Proxy
Radiotopia / PRX
Yowei Shaw spent years as one of the best producers at Invisibilia, and this is her own show on Radiotopia. The concept is: you have a problem so specific it makes you feel completely alone. Proxy finds the person who has lived the closest possible version of your experience, then follows the conversation that unfolds. Shaw calls herself an "emotional investigative journalist," which is exactly right.

Here Be Monsters
Independent / Radiotopia
Extremely compelling and often harrowing stories about people confronting their fears and the unknown. Hosted by Jeff Emtman, with sound design by Bethany Denton, this show creates an atmosphere of unease and wonder. Topics range from the supernatural to the psychological, always grounded in real human experience. The production is cinematic and often unsettling.

Modern Love
The New York Times
The original seasons (before they got paywalled) featured some of the best podcasts I've heard. Actors reading essays from the Times's "Modern Love" column, with updates from the original writers and lovely production. The newer seasons are really lacking by comparison. Early episodes captured intimacy, loss, and connection.

Beautiful/Anonymous
Earwolf
Very human hour-long phone calls between host Chris Gethard and random callers (who remain anonymous, usually). No topic is off limits. A good connection back to humanity. You never know if you'll get someone calling about a mundane problem or revealing the deepest trauma of their life. Gethard's empathy and curiosity make every conversation worthwhile.

How to Be a Girl
Independent
An extremely caring podcast from a mother (Marlo Mack, a pseudonym) raising a transgender daughter. Started in 2015 when her daughter was four, it documents their journey with honesty, humor, and deep love. Not active anymore, but the archive is so important for parenting and gender.

The Heart
Mermaid Palace / Radiotopia
Audio art about intimacy and humanity, founded by Kaitlin Prest in 2014. The production is so carefully crafted it barely feels like a podcast. Prest and her collaborators make work about bodies, love, consent, fear, and the unmappable territory between people. The NO series, examining consent through real recorded conversation, was really important for me.

Gimlet

Reply All
Gimlet Media / Spotify
Self-described as "a show about the internet," Reply All was actually one of the best podcasts of its era. A show about being alive in the early 21st century. Hosted by PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman, its best episodes turned strange internet phenomena into journalism: The Case of the Missing Hit, the Long Distance scammer series, The Snapchat Thief. The show ended messily in 2022, sadly.

Heavyweight
Gimlet → Pushkin
Jonathan Goldstein helps people resolve moments from their past they wish they could change. Cold case relationship salvage, thorny reunions, and difficult encounters with people who maybe don't want meet again. Goldstein is SO funny, and he deploys that humor to close the distance to things that would otherwise be too painful to approach directly. The episodes about his own father and childhood friends are devastating.

Where Should We Begin?
Gimlet → Vox Media
Real couples therapy sessions with Esther Perel, the Belgian psychotherapist known for her work on desire and long-term relationships. Unlike therapy-adjacent podcasts that merely discuss relationships, this is actual therapy. Anonymous real couples share details of their conflicts, with Perel doing the work in real time. She is remarkable at identifying the deeper roots. I have always learned more about myself and my relationships by listening.

Mystery Show
Gimlet Media
One perfect, tragically short season of six episodes in 2015. Starlee Kine—a longtime This American Life contributor—built a show around a simple premise: solving minor mysteries that can't be solved by Google. The questions seem small (why did a video store close? how tall is Jake Gyllenhaal?), but the investigations always became something larger and stranger than expected. Named best new podcast of 2015 by iTunes, and then abruptly discontinued.

Internet & Technology

Search Engine
Jigsaw Productions
PJ Vogt's post-Reply All podcast, built around questions you might ask the internet when you can't sleep. Less flashy than Reply All's peak but more personal, the show takes strange questions—about drug policy, AI, the pharmaceutical industry, whatever Vogt can't stop thinking about—and investigates them with depth and curiosity. Edited by Sruthi Pinnamaneni, whose work on Reply All was always excellent.

Hyperfixed
Radiotopia / PRX
Alex Goldman's post-Reply All show, in which listeners submit intractable problems and he attempts to solve them with what he calls "overconfident idiocy." The problems range from minor annoyances to genuinely difficult life dilemmas, and Goldman approaches each with the same obsessive energy that made Reply All's best investigative episodes satisfying.

Limited Series & Investigative

Missing Richard Simmons
Pineapple Street Studios
Six-episode investigation into why the beloved fitness icon disappeared from public life. Raises fascinating questions about celebrity, privacy, and our right to demand explanations from public figures. Controversial but undeniably compelling.

9/12
Pineapple Street Studios
Examines the days and weeks following September 11, 2001, exploring how that trauma shaped America. Less about the attacks themselves and more about the collective psychological aftermath and the decisions made in that fog of grief-stricken rage.

Running from COPS
Pineapple Street Studios
An investigation into the long-running reality TV show COPS and how it brainwashed American perceptions of policing, race, and crime. Subversive and necessary journalism about copaganda masquerading as entertainment.

Hysterical
Pineapple Street Studios
Investigates a 2011 outbreak of mysterious illness among teenage girls in Le Roy, New York. Part medical mystery, part exploration of how society treats young women's bodies and minds. Compelling and deeply researched examination of hysteria, both individual and mass.

This is Actually Happening
Wondery
Harrowing first-person stories of people who lived through extraordinary, often disturbing experiences. Medical trauma, near-death experiences, violent crime, psychological breaks. These stories are raw and often difficult to listen to, but profoundly human. The show lets people tell their own stories in their own words, with minimal interruption.

Millennial / Dear Millennial
Independent / Radiotopia
First-person account that's very relatable to me as a cusp baby/zillenial. Hosted by Megan Tan, exploring the anxieties and aspirations of millennial life through intimate audio diary entries. Not active anymore, but the archive captures the generational moment.

Symptomatic
iHeartPodcasts
Each episode follows host Lauren Bright Pacheco as she unravels the medical mystery of a patient's baffling symptoms and explores how their lives were turned upside down in search of a diagnosis. The show spotlights rare and chronic illnesses while giving a voice to patients fighting to be heard.

News & Current Affairs

BBC World Service Global News Podcast
BBC World Service
Very good neutral news podcast that comes out twice a day. Actual international coverage, not just American news with "world" in the title. The BBC's reporters are based everywhere, and the perspective is genuinely global. Essential for understanding what's happening in the world.

The Documentary
BBC
Good interesting pieces about everything from the BBC's archive. Fifty-minute deep dives into subjects you didn't know you cared about. The BBC has been making documentaries for decades, and their standards remain high.

Embedded
NPR
A very good in-the-weeds series going deep on specific issues—from police departments to the military to political campaigns. NPR reporters embed themselves in institutions and communities for weeks or months, returning with intimate, complicated portraits that resist easy narratives.

Canadian Content

PlayMe
CBC
A podcast version of plays. Very good old-school radio vibes. CBC has been producing radio drama since the 1940s, and PlayMe continues that tradition with contemporary playwrights and performers.

Campus
CBC
CBC's first podcast, featuring interesting stories from university life across Canada. Captures that particular intensity of late adolescence like intellectual awakening, identity formation, and the awkwardness of becoming an adult.

Alone, a Love Story
CBC
Another good limited series by CBC. Hosted by Michelle Sylvester, documenting her year living alone after divorce. Intimate, funny, and heartbreaking exploration of solitude, independence, and what it means to be complete by yourself.

The Vinyl Cafe
CBC (RIP Stuart McLean)
RIP Stuart McLean (1948-2017). Cute fictional family stories about Dave and Morley and their kids, set in small-town Canada. McLean's gentle humor and warm voice made this a national treasure. Reminds me of For Better or For Worse. Distinctly Canadian, progressive, and deeply kind. The archives remain a comfort for me.

Comedy & Entertainment

RISK!
Independent
Created and hosted by Kevin Allison (of MTV's The State), RISK! is what The Moth sounds like with the guardrails removed. People tell true stories they never thought they'd dare share—about shame, desire, addiction, violence, and all the things we carry privately. The format sounds salacious but the show is usually brave and often deeply moving. It's been running since 2009.

Mortified
Radiotopia / PRX
Adults reading from their childhood diaries, letters, lyrics, and journals in front of total strangers. Cringe comedy but also extremely tender. A live show that turns adolescent earnestness into time travel. It works because the people reading are simultaneously the author and the target; the humiliation and the mercy. Endlessly relatable and funny.

Norm Macdonald Live
Independent (YouTube)
RIP Norm (1959-2021). The funniest man that ever lived. These podcast episodes are still on YouTube. Usually just Norm, his poor assistant Adam, and a guest who was often his former SNL cast mates, talking for an hour. His timing, his commitment to the bit, his refusal to explain himself were all genius. Watch the Artie Lange episodes if you want to see a master at work.

Till Death Do Us Blart
The Worst Idea of All Time
A bunch of guys watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 once a year, every American Thanksgiving, until the end of time. Started in 2015 and still going. I genuinely look forward to it every November. It's gotten increasingly surreal as the years pass and they run out of things to say about the same terrible movie. I hope it outlives me.

Sleep & Relaxation

Sleep With Me
Independent
My favourite and only sleep-related podcast. Hosted by Drew "Scooter" Ackerman, who has the most wonderfully boring voice and tells meandering, pointless stories designed to help you drift off. Sometimes he's so funny that he keeps me up laughing, though, which defeats the purpose. But that's part of the charm, really.