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FT editor Roula Khalaf has chosen her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
When starting a podcast, experts say it's important to have a strong name. The title not only reveals something about the content, but it also needs to be concise, memorable, and off-the-cuff. Especially if listeners want to recommend it to others. Anyway, that's the advice. However, the producers of the new podcast finally!A show about women that isn't a nightmare full of thinly veiled aspirations. It's likely they didn't get the memo or ignored it. It's true that the name is a bit of a mouthful, but it's unusual and interesting. And in a crowded audio market, sometimes it's more beneficial to tell us what you're trying to do than to tell us what you're trying to do.
Produced by Jane Marie, who also worked on. this american lifeJoanna Solotaroff, Producer two dope queens, finally! The show consists of 30-minute episodes that follow a series of American women through their day, during which they reflect on everything that's gone right and wrong in their lives. We spoke with Hilary Blahnik, who decided to work with Hilary at Seattle's Pike Place Fish Market. Blahnik dreamed of becoming a singer, but her doctor told her she had a nodule on her vocal cords, which turned out to be a misdiagnosis. She moved to Seattle, where she had no friends and no place to live, but she quickly found a community and a means of livelihood. In the fish section of the theater, the vendors toss the fish on the counter before wrapping it.
I also met Gene Ketchum from Minnesota. She is the co-founder of Aging But Dangerous, an organization that brings older women together for friendship and new experiences. When Ketchum was in her 60s, she went skydiving with her 91-year-old father. Now 83 years old, she was recently photographed naked for her calendar. “It's not the body that matters, it's the attitude,” she says. She said, “I have people to meet and things I want to do, so I can live until I'm 100 years old.''
The next episode, released this week, features Valerie June, a velvety-voiced country-soul singer from Tennessee. To hear stories about the countryside where she grew up: “I hear the trees, I hear the sounds of nature, the plants, the birds, the pond, the wind… They talk to me, you know?” Let yourself be quietly hypnotized by an elegantly tinkling soundtrack. Later installments will feature a crematorium worker, a chess master, and a New York cat catcher.
advertising text finally! They say it's like a radio reality show, and while that's not wrong, it doesn't quite capture its understated yet unique charm. As the title makes clear, this series is not about idealizing femininity or telling women they can do better. This is a series of sweet, funny, and engaging self-portraits, a space for women from all walks of life to tell their stories.
podcast.apple.com
