Ever wonder what’s broadcasting in Mumbai this afternoon? Or playing on the Classic Hits station in Amsterdam? Why is Billy Joel playing in Ystad, Sweden? Did you know that Berlin has an entire FM wavelength dedicated to Eurovision songs? Because of course it does. You can hear for yourself if you tune into Radio.Garden, a streamer developed in Hilversum, out of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, which is the most Netherlandish thing I can think of other than stroopwaffels.
You’re presented with a 3-D virtual globe, and just by spinning it, you can drop in on a city’s radio offerings and tune into… the world. It’s easy to lose yourself in your own wanderings as you click around, hearing every genre of music known to man, local commercials, and newsradio chatter. Learn to recognize and practice regional dialects and accents! Find out what life is like in COVID-free New Zealand right now! Listen to a football announcer during a live game in Portugal! Or pretend you’re sashaying down the street in Madrid listening to Iberian pop while daydreaming about running into your favorite Spanish director! I know I’m not the only one.
Run, don’t walk, over to Radio.Garden today. Escape your very limited pandemic-collapsed world for a little while.
In a similar vein is the Window-Swap.com website, where you can “open a new window” in some random place whenever you feel like it. For the full experience, open a window and then tune Radio.Garden to a station in that same location. Now you’re at an AirB&B. You’re welcome.
I have been awash in podcasts ever since their inception, and I am still thankful for that time in 2005 when I got my first job in an office in which I spent many long stretches of time by myself, and I filled the silence with the film nerd commentaries and news stories I downloaded onto my first-gen iPod. They are currently my primary means of absorbing the news and editorials to do with the news, as well as the source of so many esoteric factoids and stories that I temptation-bundle with my chores everyday when I don’t have enough time to sit down and read interesting magazine articles that always enrich my knowledge and enjoyment of life. Huge fan.
Some of my favorites right now:
Axios Today/Axios: Re:Cap – A matching pair of morning/afternoon programs from the mercifully center-leaning news organization that concisely doles out the most pressing news headlines every weekday. Friendly, quick, and informative.
Code Switch – An older favorite that got a sudden boost over the summer of 2020 when people decided they needed to expose themselves to more diverse content in the world. Code Switch is engaging, real, and invitingly honest about endless topics touched by race—which is pretty much everything. The hosts, Shereen and Gene, warmly hold your hand through stories and concepts that might otherwise intimidate, but they never fail to bring hard truths.
Land of the Giants – Vox has just begun its third season of this serial, which is all about the history of Google. The previous 9- and 8-part seasons—focusing on Amazon and Netflix—are far more fascinating and way less dry than you might expect. Getting familiar with the origin stories of these ubiquitous companies delivers a new perspective for us as consumers. Even as a millennial who is old enough to have a conscious memory of the days when all these companies were in their infancy, I’ve gained an essential conceptualization of how these economic and cultural behemoths have affected the world’s expectations of successful capitalism and progress. And I'm still fine with making Alexa part of my life. You can pry her out of my cold dead fingers.
The Argument – Last year, when I was starved for mature, adult conversation surrounding politics, The Argument saved my sanity. It is, by far, the most civil discussion of varying viewpoints on the current political landscape that I’ve ever encountered, and the hosts are as fair as they are intelligent. I’ve learned so much from them about considering other people’s viewpoints on many political concepts and controversies and I always enjoy their insight every week.
No Stupid Questions –This has become the podcast that makes me giddy every time a new one pops up on my downloads list. Unsurprisingly, it’s the first spin-off from the Freakonomics team, which ensured its quality from the start, at least in my Freakonomics-loving heart. Steven Dubner has gloriously fun and intelligent chats with his friend the research psychologist Angela Duckworth (who became my personal heroine after she admitted one day that she has the same weird appreciation I have for wall-to-wall carpeting), and every episode feels like you’re hanging out with them during cocktail hour at an upscale bar in New York City—an extreme luxury I used to have annually with my Brooklynite friends. I miss them. So much.
This week I had a fleeting consideration about what Gen Z thinks about Millennials. It was some article about TikTok trends (because I only have so much time to actually spend on TikTok, I require weekly round-ups of what’s going down) that mentioned how Gen Z kids were slagging off side-parted hair and skinny jeans. This struck me (and probably every other Millennial) as a bizarre pair of things to criticize. Like any of us care what a bunch of Tide-Pod eating fetuses say about how we style ourselves. So Friends and Memphis-inspired design is FINE with you but not a vague hair choice?
Still, this still made my brow furrow with bemusement. While I am achingly aware that we didn’t start the fire and every generation has its things that we regret and/or get roasted for later in life, it was an awakening to the fact that I’m even older than I thought. Already, my age demographic is subject to accusatory shit.
The greater shade Gen Z is throwing is that us Millennials like to claim we’re subverting the “system” but we’re totally caving and just assimilating into it anyway with our Instagramming and Facebooking about all the standard adult-ass crap we do on a daily basis. They say we're too "earnest" about the way we're trying to change the world for the better. As if earnest is a four-letter word in my book. Being earnest takes fucking guts these days, and I am all for it. Sorry/not sorry if I have a mortgage and a pool and a steady job with a 403b that basically funds my weekends spent discovering new cocktail recipes and trips abroad (in the beforetimes). It’s called GROWING UP. Ever since Homo erectus started jogging instead of walking, every new generation has thought itself infinitely better than the last for some reason or another. Come say that to me when you’re in your late 30s, buddy. At least I'm not addicted to the Dunkin' and Starbucks your parents buy you and I can afford a compost tumbler and silicone zip bags so I can reduce landfill trash and quit using so much fucking plastic and do my little part to attempt saving the Earth. If you're lucky, you may get there one day.
As a non-parent, I feel even more resentment toward these hoodlums because I didn’t give birth to them. The only children under my roof are three cockatiels between three and four years old and they're whatever the next generation is, and they're already pooping all over me. How dare someone else’s progeny poop on me. Piss off.
That said, twice this week, a Gen Zer complimented me. The first was at a middle school, where a student of indeterminate gender with green hair just walked up to me between classes and said I looked cool. Then two days later, a high schooler said she really liked my outfit. So maybe these Gen Zs aren’t so bad after all. Or I need to start being a fashion influencer.
Honestly, these Boomers and Gen Xers fucked us both over, so let's just gang up and vote for progressives until the end of time.
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