Try Pod

I've been listening to NPR since high school because NPR is the best thing that has ever happened in US history, but I didn't start regularly listening to podcasts until I got to college. I started off with the same segments I would listen to at home, you know the classics: "Fresh Air" and "This American Life," but I needed more information and I do so much reading as is that I couldn't get my eyes to read Google News. So I started listening to podcasts that way I can find out what's happening while I walk to class.

My podcast subscriptions have increased substantially in the past few months because once you have one politics podcast, you really need them all just to see how other organizations are spinning/describing the situation.

It also happens that March is the month for a podcast campaign called Try Pod where you're meant to suggest your favorite podcasts to people who don't already listen to podcasts. (I know March is pretty much over, but listen, I had three midterms this month, so I didn't really have time to write anything and Spring Break JUST started so I'm writing this now.)

Ira Glass, the King of Podcasts, posses with Tavi Gevinson, the Queen of Magazines and Blogging

First, I'm sure you're wondering "Maame, how can I find podcasts to listen to?"
Don't worry--I got you. If you have an iPhone there is the podcast app, it's purple and comes with your phone. If you have an android I believe Google Play has a podcast app, and if for some reason you don't have a phone most podcasts have websites where they upload there content. NPR also created an app called NPR One with most of their podcasts as well as live radio.

Secondly, I know you're thinking "Maame, I don't know where to start!"
Again--chillax, I'm here for that. Here is a list of my favorite podcasts that I think you should all listen to according to genres that I'm going to make up.

This has since spiraled out of control and it's safe to say that I am addicted to podcasts, which isn't the worst thing ever--I could be addicted to crack or something. Anyway, I just spend all of my quiet time listening to podcasts: call me a podcast connoisseur so I'm going to grace you with my favorite pods. I am about to save you from your podcast-less misery with a list of my favorite podcasts.

PLUG YOUR EARPODS IN!

Classic Pods

"This American Life" 
NPR's "This American Life" has been running the game since 1995 when it came out. It's for the most part nonfiction stories about ... American lives ... it's kind of it the title (lol). Anyway, I really enjoy it because every week they bring you 3-4 stories that are loosely connected by one theme and they're always interesting. This is the best podcast out there if you ask me, but I'm also extremely bias; I wrote one of my college essays about the creator, Ira Glass (and got waitlisted, a bunch of haters).

"Serial"
The definition of a true crime podcast lives in the "This American Life" spin off  "Serial." Host Sarah Koenig picks a crime and speaks with as many people involved to try to solve it without really solving it. I listened to the first season before I really understood what was going on in the whole podcast scene. The life blood of podcasting lives in TAL and its related content.

"Planet Money"
Planet Money is an amazing podcast about straight up economics hostest by Robert Smith and Stacy Vanek Smith. They teach about the markets and how public policy affects it, and everything in between. One time they went to Kansas and bought a bunch of crude oil, refined it, sold it, and went to the gas station where it was being sold, all while explaining how the oil market works from start to finish. If you're into economics its a party.

"Revisionist History"
Y'all know Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah, well he has a podcast where he just goes on about a bunch of interesting things in classic Gladwell fashion. Weird topics like 18th century art, Princeton's racist-titled school of public policy, a menonite pastor with a son who's gay. Just listen to it.

Poli Pods

"Pod Save America"
If you are a classic Obama hack listen up right here and right now. A bunch of ex-Obama staffers (Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfeiffer) sit down in Jon Favreau's living room or something and talk about politics for the week in a really funny, but utlra-progressive way. They started a media company and now they just pump out new podcasts like every week it feels like. If you like a bunch of young retired people make political jokes you'll love it.

"The Ezra Klein Show"
Technically, I am an Independent, but that has never stopped me from basically being a Democrat, so all of my poli pods are left leaning. Ezra Klein is the editor and chief of Vox News, and his unimaginative title doesn't give the actual podcast credit; each episode he has a guest who's usually super accomplished in journalism, academia, or government come and talk to him a bunch of nothing really, but because they're so interesting you don't even mind.

Weird Pods

"Lizard People"
It's a fake conspiracy podcast and as a conspiracy denier, I'm down to drag a few of them. It's pretty new and the host Kate Hempstead is kind of bad at sticking to the topic. I wish that maybe they would stop focusing on completely useless stuff, but once they get into it boy is it interesting. I like the newer episodes more than the older one's because Hempstead is still getting used to podcasting. I think it's an up-and-comer.

"S Town"
A producer from "Serial" and "This American Life" got a few emails from a man in Alabama asking him to help investigate a murder. I have no idea why Brian Reed thought this was a good idea, but he went down from New York City to take a look. It's a very funny and equally sad podcast about death, the South, clocks, and some poison. It's a seven part series in hour long episodes and I finished the whole thing in two days.

"So Many White Guys"
If you listen to podcasts enough you'll begin to notice a trend: most of the big hosts are white men. Ira--white; the guys from Pod Save America 4/4 white; Freakonomics--Anglo Saxons; S-Town--from the caucus region. So, you can imagine being a black woman in the podcast game and only hearing stories told from one demographic, so Phoebe Robinson is changing that. Each season she interviews people who are not straight, white men until the very last episode where she interviews the token white man. The past season she had two token white men by accident, including Tom Hanks. I started listening to the podcast for its name, but I continue to listen because Robinson is just so funny.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

After the 2016 presidential election I felt defeated; I think a lot of young people did. I had watched the last two elections work out the way I, and the adults around me, wanted them to. A lot of us were convinced by the last eight years that hope and change and a sense of "we-ness" would prevail as it had twice before. "Love trumps hate," seemed so obvious, I thought it would be proven on election night. I believed in an America that was constantly breaking boundaries we never thought we'd overcome; I thought we could only go forward.

I was wrong. That new aged thinking, as it so often does, failed.

The weeks after the election went by too quickly, and the days since Trump's inauguration have gone too slowly.

I think if anything, almost by force, this past election has made me more proactive and forced me to mature. Prior to Trump's win, I let a lot of other people do a lot of the work; and I only did things when it was convenient to me, because I always thought it would just work out--like it always did.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "the moral arch of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I used to think it bent that way on its own, that it would just get better because it had to; I no longer think that's true.

The moral arch bends toward justice, not because that's the natural order, but because we force it that way. We have to constantly work against the prejudice and the hatred that can so easily move the arch in the wrong direction. Instead of thinking of that Dr. King quote in terms of how it must be, I think of it as how it is and how it ought to be, where we should be moving toward.

Since the inauguration, I find myself watching old Barack Obama speeches; my favorites are from his 2008 presidential campaign and first term. I think those speeches are the most fitting because then, just like now, people felt a sense of hopelessness; and just like nearly a decade ago, his words inspire me.

Me at my first anti-Trump protest.

In November I felt beaten down and almost like I would have to keep my head down and just survive the next four years. At the Jefferson Jackson Dinner for the 2008 presidential election, then-candidate Obama referenced Dr. King's belief in the "fierce urgency of now."

The "fierce urgency of now" was part of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, in the part the teachers don't tell you about. It's all about how there isn't time to waste because every minute spent waiting is another second where people are getting hurt. Those words really set a fire off in me.

Let's face it we are being led by an incompetent and malevolent man. The executive order banning Muslims was really the last straw for me; and the roll out for it was proof enough that the administration does not care about human beings who do not fit into some narrow rigid definition of Americanism, and it's scary if you don't fit perfectly within it.

I'm sure we'll make it through, collectively as a country, we will survive these four years; but I worry for the people who have and continue to get hurt. Relatively small things like how someone told my brother to go back to Africa or how kids on twitter say the most racist things now-a-days. And bigger deals like how people were blocked from entering the country, families being ripped apart in ICE raids, the possibility of hundreds of thousands going without health insurance.

There's a constant lull of worry sitting in the pit of my stomach, but instead of allowing it to hold me back, I'm letting it push me forward.

I've signed up to volunteer at organizations the Trump administration doesn't want to continue. I'm getting over my fear of needles to donate blood. I've called my senators and the White House probably over 100 times now. I learning more about what goes on in Washington D.C.--ask my friends I'm always listening to a podcast now. I feel as though I'm helping to bend the moral arch, instead of just being a bystander.

As I start mobilizing and see others a think about the brokenhearted girl sitting in Ujamaa back in November, I wish she knew the community that was forming around her. I wish she knew that the Women's March on Washington would be the biggest protest in US history--I wish she knew the collective power of the people bending the moral arch alongside her. I wish she knew her own power.

I wish she knew that she would feel the fierce urgency of now.