 Dear readers, | | I would have been very bad as a contestant on The Traitors. | | Enjoying 1.5x Speed? Feel free to send this newsletter to your buds, and click here to read previous editions. And as always, you can reach me at nicholas.quah@nymag.com or find me on Twitter. | | Want more recommendations from our critics? Subscribe now for unlimited access to Vulture and everything New York. |  |  | | Photo-Illustration: Vulture. Photos courtesy of the subjects. | | | | Okay, so. I've got one more thing to pull from the Vulture Podcast Survey, then we'll finally move on. What can I say: When you've got a good piece of fruit, you squeeze that thing dry. | | Among the goals we had was to sneak a little peek into the future. To that end, we included a question about the podcast creators who felt exciting to respondents — and who, specifically, they believed was going to have a big year in 2023. | | There were plenty of submissions, but one name came up often: James Kim, who bubbled up a few years back with his indie fiction project, Moonface. Of course, he wasn't the only person who received multiple votes, so for this week's column, I reached out to Kim and three others — Shivani Dave, Ronald Young Jr., and Mary Knauf — to get a sense of what we should be expecting from these podcasters this year, and how they're thinking about 2023. |  |  | | Photo: Artin Aroutounians | | Kim is the creator of Moonface and, with Brooke Iskra, the short Vermont Ave, which won the Best Fiction prize at the Tribeca Festival in 2021. He's currently producing several projects through his studio, Overtones Media. | | "I've had my head down working on several of my own projects for the past couple years. Somehow they're all potentially coming out this year, which has been exciting, stressful, scary, and it has put me in a state of disbelief. Not too long ago, I found it hard for people to say yes to my ideas. Now I've got three in the works at the same time! | | The first one is You Feeling This? It's a fiction anthology show centered around the people who make up Los Angeles. I think of it as a podcast mixtape about love. The whole goal of the show is to bring creators who are either new or starting out in the fiction podcast space and have them tell intimate stories about what love means to them. There's stories about work-life balance, friendship break ups, even a ghost story. The style of the podcast is also what brings these stories together. We decided to not record anything in a studio; everything you hear has been recorded on location. It was a challenge, but we're stoked about how it's turning out. That probably comes out in the spring. | | I'm also working on a documentary podcast. I can't say too much about it, but I'm working with a really talented team and an incredible host. It's her personal story, actually. And It's a story that I deeply connect with because of what it's trying to say. We've been reporting it for a couple years now and we can't wait for people to hear it. | | Then there's this fiction podcast I've been working on since 2019. We're on maybe the 84th draft of the script? I wish I was joking. I spent all of lockdown working on this show with my writing partner Julian Park. We just added another great writer to our team — Shelly Yo. It's ambitious. We've got a lot to say with it. I'm crossing my fingers that it comes out this year." |  |  | | Photo: Denis Robinson | | Dave is a journalist, broadcaster, and physicist based in the UK. They left the British radio mothership in 2021, and have since gone on to present for a number of audio programs including The Guardian's Science Weekly, Virgin Radio's Pride Drive Show, and a podcast called She Said, They Said. They are also a producer for The Log Books, award-winning, independent LGBTQ+ history podcast. | | "For 2023, I have a few projects in the pipeline and they are all new so there is not a whole load I can say about them at the moment. One is a project that hopes to empower and connect the LGBTQ+ community sharing stories of our history and culture while unearthing experiences that are less documented. That should be out in the summer. | | Another, probably out in the autumn, is allowing me to flex my science muscles — I studied physics at university and miss being a part of the science world. This podcast will hopefully help others see how awe-inspiring science can be and how it impacts all of us daily. | | The third podcast I am incredibly excited to launch in 2023, around spring, will be one in partnership with my local independent bookshop, BookBar, showcasing the wide variety of authors they champion and host in the store. | | I also like to keep busy outside of podcasts. Currently, I present the best tracks to kick back to on Virgin Radio Chilled — a national UK radio station — on Saturdays and Sundays. I've got a few stand-up gigs booked in for later in the year, which I still need to write the sets for. I can be found in the LGBTQ+ bars of London debuting my political satire drag king persona — Dishi Sumac — or making TikTok's." |  |  | | Photo: The June Press | | Ronald Young Jr. is an audio producer, storyteller, and host based in Alexandria, Virginia. He most recently produced two seasons of Seizing Freedom for VPM, and hosted shows like Solvable, with Pushkin Industries, and HBO Docs Club, with Pineapple Street. He also featured as a storyteller on the third episode of True Story with Ed Helms and Randall Park on Peacock. | | "As an avid pop culture enthusiast, I started a television and film review podcast, Leaving the Theater, back in 2019 through my production company, ohitsBigRon studios. The show saw tremendous growth in 2022, owing to my guest appearances on several popular pop culture review shows like Crime Writers On… and Too Scary Didn't Watch. I'm also a regular contributor to NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. | | This year, I will be hosting a live show for Leaving the Theater in Washington D.C. With it, I'll be featuring some locally and nationally acclaimed storytellers as well as moderating a panel discussion on love in film and television with panelists Daisy Rosario, Jonquilyn Hill, and Mark Pagan. I'll also be hosting this year's On Air Fest, which is coming up in February, and I'm currently working with producer Sarah Dealy on a new weight-centric show that will feature stories of people navigating life in a fatphobic world. That project will involve a crossover with Avery Trufelman and Articles of Interest. | | Other than that, I'm also in the process of pitching a few new shows, including an always-on pop culture show and a few fiction series. My plan is to keep producing and telling deeply relatable audio stories, whether true or allegorical, in 2023, and also to keep having fun analyzing pop culture on Leaving the Theater and on whatever shows I get to guest on." |  |  | | Photo: Jonathan Shifflett | | Mary Knauf is a freelance audio producer based in Los Angeles. She came up through Southern California Public Radio, going on to work on podcasts like The Thing about Pam, Don't Ask Tig and Radiolingo. | | "I recently founded a small production company called Sleepy Time Productions with my partner, Jonathan Shifflett. We focus primarily on original audio fiction, and have a handful of podcasts in development, with our first show set to launch this summer. It's a scripted series, centered around a world of dolphin mysticism and alien conspiracies. We're loving the challenge of writing fiction for audio, which is an arguably pretty restrictive medium, and whenever we feel stuck we usually just go for the wildest option. | | I've also been executive producing several documentary series at Crooked Media that are going to be announced this year. A couple of my favorites are a show about a 1970's feminist erotic magazine, and a show about a small town that tries to reinvent itself but then all hell breaks loose. | | When it comes to my 2023 goals, it's a few different things. I'm excited to make stuff that's tailored specifically for the medium itself. And in making this production company, I'm hoping to free up a lot of the industry-wide pressure to make things a certain way, and to collaborate with people who don't just have their sights on producing potential TV/film IP. People who are audio nerds, itching to make something risky and a little out there." | | Other names that podcast people were excited about include: Hannah Ajala, Kelsey Decker, Sam Mullins, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, Juliet Litman , James T. Green, Death by Online's Natalie Watson and Danika Harrod, Maya Lin Sugarman, Danny Brown, and Josh Gwynn. | | ➽ Sweet Bobby heads should take note: Its publisher, Tortoise Media, debuts a new series this week on yet another case of crypto shenanigans and probable financial malfeasance. It's called Real Money: The Hunt for Tether's Millions. Aleks Krotoski serves as the host, and it's produced by Joanna Humphreys. | | ➽ The second season of Bridgewater, the supernatural-thriller fiction pod created by Aaron Mahnke and written by Lauren Shippen, dropped last Friday. | | ➽ The Chapo Trap House crew has released a new history miniseries with a hefty title — HELL ON EARTH: The Thirty Years War and the Violent Birth of Capitalism — that functions as a sequel of sorts to the team's 2021 Stitcher series Hell of Presidents. HELL ON EARTH appears to be a big swing for the House of Chapo, and also, note the paywalled release approach: The first episode is available through the public Chapo Trap House feed, but the rest will come out via Patreon. | | ➽ Wasn't personally able to do a ton of new listening this week for various long weekend-related reasons, but I have been dipping through the back catalog of David Farrier's Flightless Bird, a weekly series distributed through the Armchair Expert feed. I'm not normally a patron of Dax Shepard's audio products, but I do tend to enjoy Farrier's work as a maker of offbeat docs. (See: 2016's Tickled, about the subterranean tickling subculture (yep), and Netflix's Dark Tourist.) Flightless Bird basically sees Farrier trying to understand America through a range of entry points, only some of which are explicable: Burgers, religion, and soft drinks, sure, but also shower curtains, leaf blowers, and bottled water. It's pretty fun. | | ➽ For the site, I wrote about the opening to HBO's The Last of Us and its relationship to the original video game. Nice to see Bighead again! | | ➽ At some point, someone needs to sit me down and tell me whether this ChatGPT thing is going to run me out of a job. Or will being a writer be less about writing, and more about tending to your own personal AI, like a strange little Pokemon? | | And that's a wrap for 1.5x Speed! Hope you enjoyed it. We're back next week, but in the meantime… | | Sign up to receive Vulture's 10x10 crossword every weekday. | | | |
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