Amy Poehler<\/a> gets her guests to open up \u2014 she\u2019s been a mainstay in comedy for more than three decades, acting in blockbuster movies and long-running sitcoms, capturing our hearts with a girl-next-door bubbliness cut with a sharp wit. Good Hang takes advantage of that, both because she\u2019s able to bring in her friends \u2014 some of the biggest names in showbiz, like Maya Rudolph and Julia Louis-Dreyfus \u2014 and the video format allowing us to see the smirks and winks that give extra depth to the conversations. It\u2019s like being at a dinner table with some of the brightest, and funniest, minds of our times.<\/p>\n\tFinal Thoughts: Jerry Springer<\/p>\n
\t\t\t![\"Final](\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-rollingstone-2022\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tFormer daytime TV host Jerry Springer is one of the most complicated public figures of the late 20th century: An elected Democratic mayor who lost his office over a sex scandal, only to remake himself as the host of one of the most notorious television shows of the 1990s, only to again remake himself as a thoughtful and insightful public speaker. Leon Neyfakh (co-creator of the massive Slate series Slow Burn) takes the listener on a four-and-a-half hour journey into Springer\u2019s life and times, talking to those who knew him, worked with him, and battled him. As an Audible Original, this isn\u2019t available on the regular podcast feeds, but nonetheless is an excellent example of the way that longform audio can immerse a reader in a story.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\tLong Shadow: Breaking the Internet<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tOK, so this isn\u2019t exactly a new show \u2014\u00a0Breaking the Internet is the fourth season of Garret M. Graff\u2019s incredible longform series Long Shadow, which explored how we ended up in this precarious moment in history\u00a0\u2014 but it\u2019s still one of the most impressive podcasts to hit the airwaves this year. His previous seasons have tackled 9\/11, the rise of the far right, and America\u2019s peculiar history with guns; this one turns the lens on the internet, tracking how a tool that was supposed to democratize the world ended up fracturing it, possibly beyond repair.<\/p>\n
\tNashville Now<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tLongtime Nashville journalist (and Rolling Stone editor) Joseph Hudak is the host of this weekly interview show that brings Nashville\u2019s biggest names into the studio for candid conversations. Want to know what Gretchen Wilson\u2019s been up to for the 20 years since her hit \u201cRedneck Woman\u201d came out, or how Shooter Jennings found father Waylon Jennings\u2019 lost tapes? Hudak puts his subjects at ease while offering his expertise into the subject, giving us some of the most revealing conversations in country music.<\/p>\n
\tThe Outfit\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tFrom the moment the public found out about it, America has been obsessed with the Mafia. But there\u2019s so much more to it than The Godfather and the stories we\u2019ve been told. Journalists Alana Hope Levinson (former editor of Mel and current features editor of Wired) and Dan O\u2019Sullivan (author of the Substack crime newsletter Sullyville) dive into the lesser known players of organized crime, like Ken Eto, the Japanese American member of the Chicago outfit, or the Kray twins, who terrorized London in the 1960s. They also branch out into how the mafia has affected culture, like its involvement in building the Twin Towers and reality TV. (And don\u2019t worry \u2014\u00a0yes, there\u2019s an episode about Goodfellas.)<\/p>\n
\tThe Devil You Know<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tSarah Marshall\u2019s longtime show You\u2019re Wrong About has become a staple in the podcast world for bringing in brilliant guests for thoughtful and surprising explorations of topics from the cola wars to Christmas. But for this eight-part series, she goes it largely alone to dig into the origins of the satanic panic\u00a0\u2014 a period from the 1970s to 1990s, where members of the media and the public whipped themselves into a frenzy over the possibility that Satanic cults were kidnapping and murdering children across the country. Though many have tackled the subject, Marshall\u2019s sober analysis and interviews with some of the key victims of the panic make this a must-listen.<\/p>\n
\tAllison After NXIVM<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tMany of us know the story of NXIVM<\/a>, Keith Raniere\u2019s upstate New York self-help group which devolved into a sex cult and resulted in Raniere being sentenced to 120 years in prison for sex trafficking, conspiracy, and racketeering. We also might know about Allison Mack, the former child star and Smallville actress who was one of Raniere\u2019s key deputies. She also served time (three years for racketeering)\u00a0and since her release in 2023, has largely been silent. But in 2024, she decided it was time to finally tell her story. Journalists Vanessa Grigoriadis and Natalie Robehmed were up for the job, and after sitting with Mack for hours of interviews across multiple days, put together this painful, and often gruesome, look at how an otherwise normal individual finds herself at the helm of a cult.<\/p>\n\tChameleon<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tJosh Dean first launched Chameleon way back in 2022 with a series called The Hollywood Con Queen, a multipart investigation into a mysterious person who convinced movie-industry gig workers to travel halfway around the world, only to find themselves stranded in strange lands, for no apparent reason. Now, he\u2019s brought it back as an episodic weekly show, giving the full story of a particular con in just 45 minutes. These bite-sized crime stories \u2014\u00a0like Anne Hathaway\u2019s con-artist fianc\u00e9, or a fake version of the Zombies that toured America \u2014\u00a0offer the same kinds of confounding mysteries as his longform efforts, without the commitment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From crime deep dives to investigations to chat shows with our favorite celebrities, here’s our top podcast picks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[15708,97736,146,85,46,20160,965],"class_list":["post-182711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-amy-poehler","tag-best-of-2025","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-monica-lewinsky","tag-podcasts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}