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  • Page 1 — Top of pods
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    In USA, podcast listening has long been a mass phenomenon, on one hand thanks to exceptional narrative formats such as serial or S * * * town, and on or hand through recent news podcasts such as Daily of New York Times. In Germany, too, number of traffic is steadily increasing. Five years ago, only about 2 million people in Germany regularly heard podcasts, so according to a ARD-related study in year 2017, re were already around 10 million or 15 percent of population.

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    While public service programs mainly outsource ir own radio programmes as podcasts and, for example, set m up for free download on itunes, audiobook provider Audible launched a podcast series for its subscribers this year. Also Musikstreamingdienste like Spotify produce ir own podcasts, as well as news portals like mirrors online or time online.

    for avid podcast listeners or those who still want to be, we collect here most interesting formats. And we will do it regularly in future. Still, prominence of American podcasters is often reflected in quality of broadcasts. Therefore, in this completely subjective best-of-list of current podcasts, English speakers predominate.

    1. Revisionist history

    Malcolm Gladwell writes popular science fiction and is author of The New Yorker – but now mostly podcasters. His series revisionist history is quietly told: Gladwell takes listeners on a search, as he himself says, “overlooked or forgotten things”.

    Gladwell wonders, for example, how a country-songwriter named Bobby Braddock, now largely in obscurity, came up decades ago to strange idea of wanting to write saddest song in music history – and what that says about America. Or he tells crazy story of a man whose basement was packed in crates, almost unknown scientific life work of his late far – and how se records helped much later in understanding human diet.

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    The third season of revisionist history will start on May 17th. A new episode will be published every week.

    2. “Caliphate”

    In January 2017, New York Times began ir Daily News podcast The Daily – a surprise hit that newspaper itself could hardly have anticipated: almost every episode has since been under respective top five of itunes charts. Now Times has a new, albeit weekly, podcast, consequences of which, like daily, are about 20 minutes long and are characterised by a narrator’s voice.

    At Caliphate, it is Rukmini Callimachi family, who, as a foreign correspondent of Times, has been dealing almost exclusively with a subject in recent years, Islamist terrorism. Callimachi family is journalist in world who knows best about mindsets of former and active is members – because she contacts m, sometimes meets m in person and makes m speak. In Caliphate, she describes her work and gives listener an impression of interior of IS, which can be won in such an intimate and frightening form, perhaps only in a podcast: One also hears voices of self-proclaimed warriors of God.

    Four chapters of “Caliphate” have been published so far, and re is one every Thursday.

    3. “The Ezra Klein Show”

    The nice thing about podcasts, unlike radio, is that you can listen to people forever. Theoretically, re is no time limit, nor are conversations interrupted by annoying music. Podcast makers, thus, can understand this, trust ir listeners that y can concentrate longer than just a few minutes until a song needs to relax m again.