This Week in Podcasts

I have decided to publish this a day early this week, as I leave for Canada in just a few hours and waiting any longer would make this impossible. Until I return on the sixteenth, then, enjoy this final installment of my ongoing series, This Week in Podcasts. I look forward to coming home and finding a host of shows awaiting my arrival almost as much as I anticipate writing this piece’s successor.

We’re Alive. Although I included a link to this fantastic show in last week’s article, I feel compelled to bring it up here once again because it has by far and away dominated my listening time over the past week. So much so, in fact, that I have had to forcefully tear myself away in order to listen to some of my favorite shows — and that’s really saying something.

The appeal of We’re Alive isn’t that of a zombie show, because I dislike the genre a great deal; rather, the appeal of We’re Alive is its place as a fictitious piece speculating as to humanity’s true nature and most base urges at the time of great trial. That’s why I find this show so interesting, and have come to enjoy listening to it so much. For the zombie fans out there and those who — like me — avoid the genre altogether alike, I highly recommend this show. Come for the zombies, but stay for the hard look at humanity in both its finest and poorest moments.

Pixel Recess. Another show from last week, but again — I just can’t help but bring it up once more: at less than ten minutes per episode, I listen to these in batches of five or more at a time. Because of that, and because it’s just so good and remarkably funny, there would be too many to list individually. So just once more, let me offer this up as a recommendation to anyone looking for — as it was described to me — “a more design-y version of Bionic”. If that description alone doesn’t make you want to listen, give an episode or two a shot: you can afford the time investiture.

Debug Episode 43: Exclusive: Marco Arment breaks his silence on Overcast!. Guy English and Rene Richie had Marco Arment on to talk about Overcast and, by extension, the podcast industry at large and some of the challenges this medium faces going forward. I found the numerous other shows Marco has already done talking about Overcast interesting, but this one was by far the best: he dove right in to the nitty-gritty details of his decision-making process when it came to almost every aspect of his new app, and his insights into the current state of podcasts were very interesting. On top of those though, as if those two topics alone could not stand on their own, the trio also discussed the challenges of and possible solutions to breaking into the software industry, and how the best way to get noticed is to do great work.