The Greatest Podcast Episodes Ever Made

This American Life Episode 436 demonstrates that the narrative journalism podcast reaches its highest form when it makes listeners understand a person who is difficult to understand by giving that person room to explain themselves. The episode's portrait of Bob Hare's work on corporate psychopathy produces a different understanding of corporate culture than policy analysis or business journalism can, because it starts from the human rather than the institutional.

Serial Episode 1 demonstrates that the investigative podcast's power is in sharing uncertainty rather than certainty. Koenig's opening — her description of genuinely not knowing what she thinks about Adnan Syed's guilt or innocence — created a new kind of podcast audience that returned each week not to be informed but to participate in an ongoing investigation. No other single podcast episode produced more podcast listeners.

Prophets of Doom demonstrates that the solo history podcast has no upper limit on length when the host's passion, knowledge, and storytelling skill are sufficient to sustain it. Carlin's six hours on the Münster Rebellion are not felt as six hours because the content justifies every minute — which is the promise of the long-form solo podcast format and the test that most long-form content fails.

S-Town Chapter I demonstrates that the podcast format is capable of the same quality of character introduction as the best literary fiction — that audio journalism can make a listener fall in love with a person they've never met, through the accumulation of specific detail and the voice's own unguarded relationship with the subject. The episode sets a standard for character-driven audio journalism that has not been equaled.

Radiolab Colors demonstrates that science podcasting can produce the experience of the scientific phenomenon itself rather than only description of it. The episode's production design around color experience — giving blind and sighted listeners different but equally valid experiences of the same content — demonstrates a level of intentionality about the relationship between audio and understanding that most podcast production doesn't reach.

The Maron-Obama episode demonstrates that the podcast format had arrived as a cultural institution when a sitting president chose it for a candid, unmanaged conversation. Obama's willingness to say things in Maron's garage that his communication staff would have prevented in any other format — including using a racial epithet in an argument about racism — produced the most honest hour of his public communication as president.

99% Invisible Kowloon demonstrates that the design narrative podcast is most powerful when it uses a specific place or object to reveal something about how human beings organize space and life. The episode's portrait of Kowloon — a city within a city with its own water supply, electricity, and social order, existing outside any government's jurisdiction — produces a different understanding of what cities are than any urban theory produces.

Birbiglia's Squirrel demonstrates that the personal narrative podcast is most powerful when the story being told is genuinely embarrassing to tell — when the storyteller's willingness to be exposed is what creates the intimacy that makes the audience care. Birbiglia's story is funny because he is willing to be seen completely, which is the condition that personal narrative podcasting at its best creates.

The Conan-Norm episode demonstrates that the comedy podcast interview reaches its highest form when two people who know each other completely decide to be honest about comedy itself. The conversation reveals Macdonald's actual theory of comedy — what he thought was funny and why, which was different from what almost anyone else thought — in a way that his performances only implied. The episode has taken on additional significance since Macdonald's death.

McDonald's Broke My Heart demonstrates that the best podcast essay produces genuine disagreement rather than only assent. Gladwell's argument — that McDonald's decision to switch from beef tallow to vegetable oil produced one of the most significant culinary losses of the twentieth century — is so specific, so counterintuitive, and so earnestly argued that it remains the most debated episode of the show years after its release.

The Snowball Effect demonstrates that behavioral science podcasting produces its most lasting impact when the research finding it covers changes how listeners understand a behavior they've already engaged in. The episode's explanation of why we follow others — and why the knowledge that we're doing it doesn't make us stop — is both counterintuitive and immediately recognizable, which is the combination that produces the understanding that changes behavior.

The Daily's Weinstein episode demonstrates that daily news podcasting can produce historically significant journalism at the moment news is breaking rather than only reporting on history afterward. The episode's combination of the Times's investigative reporting and the Daily's narrative format produced the most widely listened-to single news podcast episode of the #MeToo era, reaching an audience that the newspaper alone couldn't.