10 Podcasts for People Who Love (and Miss) Heavyweights
Jonathan Goldstein’s Heavyweight , where he helps people confront things from their past, is one of the most beloved podcasts of all time. In 2023, when Spotify was making huge cuts, it was one of them. But earlier this year, Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries was at it again, and the episodes will be back soon. If you want more heavyweight stuff now, this list of podcasts will satisfy you. They share the ideals of heavyweights – curiosity, empathy, humor and beautiful sound.
Telephone tapping
Jonathan Goldstein’s early CBC show, The Wire , a spiritual ancestor of the heavyweight , is strange, warm and touching. Each episode combines scripted monologue with real-life moments and absurdist vignettes, all wrapped in Goldstein’s signature self-deprecating wit. It’s freer and more surreal than Heavyweight , but the emotional core is the same: people trying to figure themselves out and each other. You’ll hear stories that sound like late-night confessions or voicemails from someone who knows you better than you know yourself. Listening to Wiretap is like reading Jonathan’s diary – and discovering that it is somehow yours too.
Proxy
Yowei Shou is trying to help people. In her excellent show Proxy, Yowei (who calls herself an emotional journalist) solves niche emotional mysteries explored through proxies—by finding people with unresolved relationships and connecting them with a stranger who can help them better understand their problems. (She recently connected a man whose wife left him for another woman with another woman who left her husband for a woman.) Youwei comes from the wildly popular NPR podcast Invisibilia , so you can trust her to tell a good, tender, professionally structured story. There’s nothing quite like Proxy, making it a place for unique conversations never heard before.
Featured Shorts
Selected Shorts is an audio-lover’s mash-up, a magazine and a time capsule all in one. Each month, executive producer and host Mitra Kaboli produces a curated selection of audio documentaries, interviews and discussions hosted by some of the best people in the business. These are things from the past that inspired some of the best things you listen to today. The feed has free content (I recommend Sean Cole’s Call Now, a hilarious piece about lawyer advertising), but to get all the goodies, you’ll need a subscription.
Family ghosts
In episodes of Family Ghosts, host Sam Dingman starts with a personal secret—old family rumors, a missing person—and digs until he finds gold. It’s a mystery that grabs your attention, but it’s Sam’s thoughtful musings about what it means that will make you want to add these episodes to your queue. These are stories about identity, legacy and truth that often lack a clear resolution, like so many of our relationships. It is touching and comforting to hear about the difficulties that occur in other people’s families. That’s why we look into windows at night; it makes us feel less alone.
this is love
Phoebe Judge’s This Is Love has the same heartfelt curiosity and emotional depth that makes the heavyweight so beloved. It’s like Phoebe is painting a love-themed mural using human stories of love in all its forms (friendship, romance, animal love). She is known for her calm and even voice that makes you want to sit still and really listen to what she has to say as she tells stories of connection, devotion, and the unexpected manifestations of love in people’s lives. The show doesn’t shy away from melancholy, but always evokes a sense of awe rather than despair.
Quick Judgment
In Snap Judgment, Glynn Washington is your host for a poetic series of stories, starting each episode with her own, told with such energy you can feel it pulsating through your body. He then hands the microphone over to his narrator and you hear their story, expertly crafted with killer beats. Result? Movies for your ears. These stories—a foreign negotiator trying to free a captive American journalist, someone experiencing a glitch in the universe, an underwater photographer being rescued by harp seals—will stick with you. Listen to just one story (I recommend starting with ” The Border Hacker “) and join the vast community of Snappers who sit at the altar of storytelling master Glynn Washington, waiting for him to release new beats.
Interesting articles
Like Heavyweight, Articles of Interest is a carefully crafted show that finds deep meaning in unexpected places. Host Avery Trufelman explores the hidden history of clothing and fashion with the same combination of curiosity and storytelling excellence that Jonathan Goldstein brings to his show. Both shows make small feel big, revealing emotional depth in things that most of us overlook. There’s a gentle wit and generosity to the storytelling that leaves you feeling smarter and closer by the end of each episode. If “Heavyweight” is about people trying to understand their past, then “Articles of Interest” is about understanding the past baked into what we wear.
Handsome / Anonymous
Episodes of Beautiful/Anonymous (short for Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People) will take you to unexpected, humane places. Each episode is like making a phone call to a stranger: host Chris Gethard sets a stopwatch for 60 minutes and talks to them, letting them take the conversation as they see fit. Chris Gethard brings a gentle curiosity to every anonymous call, leaving room for sometimes strange, sometimes funny, but always heartfelt conversations that, like Heavyweight , often reveal a human secret about someone. Chris spoke with a witch, a man whose wife was dying of cancer, a funeral director, a man who opened up about his heroin addiction, and many others.
Palace of Memory
The Memory Palace and the heavyweight are kindred spirits, both haunted by the weight of the past. But with Memory Palace, the stories are quieter and a little more mysterious. Nate DiMeo tells true, often forgotten stories with the rhythm of a lullaby and the power of a good story, piercing the story into your ears like a secret. The episodes don’t need resolutions or jokes to hit all the feels, but the episodes will stay in your head for a while. “House of Low” is a haunting story about a pioneering woman in fashion, “Below, Above” is a story about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and “I’m Still Alive” explores the history of premature funerals.
Endless thread
Most of The Infinite Thread’s stories start with something strange found on Reddit and then evolve into stories about people in real life. Using storytelling, interviews and discussions, hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Emory Sivertson find the people involved in the stories and bring their themes to life. What makes it like a heavyweight is its mixture of mysteries and personal experiences that will give you a glimpse into the lives of people around the world, both online and offline.