Your Favorite Podcasts Revealed!

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Yesterday I asked for podcast recommendations. I got loads of ’em! So now, as a public service, I figure I should provide you with a rough Top Ten list culled from comments and emails. The full comment section has a lot more than just the podcasts below, and you should take a look if you’re in the market for something a little different, but here were the favorites:

  1. Radiolab won by a mile. The entire stable of NPR shows also got a lot of votes, including Planet Money, Car Talk, This American Life, Foreign Dispatch, and others.
  2. In Our Time was the only show that came close to Radiolab. The rest of the BBC radio lineup got lots of recommendations too.
  3. The Bugle, a news sendup from John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman.
  4. Philosophy Bites, “podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics…”
  5. “The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,” a Yale University course by David Blight. The Open Yale series in general got a lot of strong recommendations.
  6. History of Rome, a massive, ongoing series of podcasts “tracing the history of the Roman Empire, beginning with Aeneas’s arrival in Italy and ending (someday) with the exile of Romulus Augustulus, last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire.” So far it’s up to episode #172, which covers Attila the Hun’s invasion in 451 AD, so it must be getting close to wrapping up.
  7. WTF, comedy with an attitude from Marc Maron.
  8. The B.S. Report, sports talk from ESPN’s Bill Simmons.
  9. The New Yorker’s stable of podcasts, incuding Comment, Political Scene, Fiction, and Out Loud. 
  10. Slate’s stable of podcasts, including Gabfest, Culture Gabfest, and Double X Gabfest.

On the technology side, there were also several recommendations for Downcast as an alternative to iTunes. And, of course, lots of other recommendations that were a little farther off the beaten path than the ones above. Click the link for more. Enjoy.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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