OCTOBER 31, 2026

It’s October! Oh boy. As you might’ve noticed, we’re rolling out a new look around here. Hope you like it. And in keeping with our updated routine around this more nimble version of the newsletter, we’re kicking off today’s issue with our latest additions to the running Best Podcasts of the Year (So Far) list followed by some notices of new shows and noteworthy developments. You know, the usual. Let’s get to it.

It’s good to hear Chenjerai Kumanyika’s voice again. The audio documentarian, known for the award-winning Uncivil and the Seeing White miniseries via Scene on Radio, leads this series surveying the rise of modern American policing through the lens of the New York Police Department, which has the distinction of being the largest and among the oldest municipal law-enforcement agencies in the United States. If you’ve ever paid even a scintilla of attention to these two subjects, you’re probably familiar with the fact that the institution has a deeply checkered history, down to its very foundations, that’s worthy of interrogation. The stories that Kumanyika brings do just that, threaded together in his signature propulsive oratory style.

As an organization, National Public Radio has been a constant subject of brouhahas and tumult in recent years, but that shouldn’t take away from the instances where it makes positive developments. Like, for example, what it’s been doing with the NPR Network branding, spotlighting great longform projects by member stations. If you’re interested in local features reporting from around the country, you should definitely take a look at what’s on offer. One from earlier this year that stood out is Extremely American — in part because (disclaimer) I have ties to Idaho, but also because American religious extremism is a huge story that continues to lurk beneath the surface. The series follows Heath Druzin, a local journalist, as he spends a year inside a Christian-nationalist movement with ambitions to convert the country into a theocracy that has rapidly accrued political and financial power in a small college town in northern Idaho. This story may seem like an isolated phenomenon, but it’s more widespread than you might think.

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Tech-news podcasts are a vibrant genre dating back to the origins of the medium’s history, and these days, you’re not particularly short of good places to get ’em: our cousins over at The Vergecast and Pivot, the New York Times’ Hard Fork, indies like Dithering, OGs like This Week in Tech and Accidental Tech, so on and so forth. But there’s something about Better Offline, hosted by Ed Zitron, the punchy and puckish media personality, that feels like a fresh shot in the arm. Think of it as a tech-news show with an alt-weekly bent, largely approaching the subject with the inherent belief that the tech industry is a pure elite power now — and that there is nothing particularly redeemable about elite power.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There have been, like, what, a thousand profiles of the guy now, primarily pegged to his series of podcast episodes at the top of the year articulating Biden alternatives that’s widely thought to have softened the ground for institutional Democrats to actually go through with blowing up their ticket after the president whiffed in the first debate against Trump. But you know what? I’m retroactively placing Klein’s original audio essay on this list because, quite frankly, this thing should probably go down as one of the most consequential podcast episodes to ever exist.

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The draft window ends tomorrow, October 3. What are you waiting for?