Documentary Podcasts

Dirty John

29 episodes - Latest episode: 6 months ago - ★★★★★ - 40.3K ratings
Debra Newell is a successful interior designer. She meets John Meehan, a handsome man who seems to check all the boxes: attentive, available, just back from a year in Iraq with Doctors With...

Cold

44 episodes - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★★ - 37.6K ratings
Cold is a narrative podcast series focused on missing persons cases. Investigative journalist and host Dave Cawley takes on a single story with each season. Season 1 tells of the unsolved d...

Freakonomics Radio

604 episodes - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★★ - 24.3K ratings
Discover the hidden side of everything with Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Freakonomics Radio tells you things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and thin...

Ear Hustle

69 episodes - Latest episode: 7 days ago - ★★★★★ - 17.8K ratings
Ear Hustle brings you the daily realities of life inside prison shared by those living it, and stories from the outside, post-incarceration. The podcast is a partnership between Nigel Poor,...

Embedded

77 episodes - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 10.8K ratings
Host Kelly McEvers takes a story from the news and goes deep. Whether that means digging into the Trump administration's past, the stories behind police shootings caught on video, or visiting a tow...

Snap Judgment Presents: Spooked

52 episodes - Latest episode: 6 months ago - ★★★★★ - 10.7K ratings
Spooked features true-life supernatural stories, told firsthand by people who can barely believe it happened themselves. Be afraid. Created in the dark of night, by Snap Judgment and WNYC Studios. ...

American Scandal

176 episodes - Latest episode: 1 day ago - ★★★★★ - 10.4K ratings
Every scandal begins with a lie. But the truth will come out. And then comes the fallout and the outrage. Scandals have shaped America since its founding. From business and politics to spo...

Bad Batch

35 episodes - Latest episode: 8 days ago - ★★★★★ - 7.9K ratings
Patients in search of a miracle cure end up in critical condition. The race is on to find out what went wrong before more people get hurt. The trail leads back to a medical company with sli...

Unobscured

62 episodes - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 7K ratings
History is full of stories we think we know. They are old and dark, but time has robbed us of perspective and clarity. They've become obscured and misunderstood. Which is why this series exists: to...

Accused

39 episodes - Latest episode: 29 days ago - ★★★★ - 6.6K ratings
Season 3: In 1984, a father of three disappeared while working at a mysterious Cincinnati plant. It turned out he’d met a gruesome fate: Pieces of bone, his eyeglasses and walkie-talkie wer...

This Land

12 episodes - Latest episode: 9 months ago - ★★★★★ - 5.3K ratings
An 1839 assassination of a Cherokee leader. A 1999 small town murder. Two crimes collide in a Supreme Court case that will decide the fate of one man and nearly half of the land in Oklahoma. Hosted...

This Is Actually Happening

223 episodes - Latest episode: about 7 hours ago - ★★★★★ - 4.5K ratings
What if your mother left to follow a cult… or you woke up in a morgue… or if your boat got caught in a storm and began to sink -- what would you do?   This is Actually Happening brings you ...

Sports Wars

150 episodes - Latest episode: 8 days ago - ★★★★★ - 2.9K ratings
Sports rivalries can fuel fans and athletes to fight and argue for years. But what’s the real story behind these epic battles? From Wondery, the company behind “Business Wars”, “Gladiator”...

Nancy

112 episodes - Latest episode: 10 months ago - ★★★★★ - 2.8K ratings
BFF Kathy Tu and Tobin Low are super queer, super fun and ready to take over your podcast feed. Join them for provocative stories and frank conversations about the LGBTQ experience today. Because e...

Mogul

33 episodes - Latest episode: 9 months ago - ★★★★★ - 2.8K ratings
Mogul is a show about hip hop’s most iconic moments, told by the people who lived them. Season 2 dives into the birth of southern hip hop. It all started in Miami with the 2 Live Crew, a group that...

Canary: The Washington Post Investigates

8 episodes - Latest episode: 7 months ago - ★★★★★ - 2.1K ratings
After a sexual assault case in the District of Columbia, one woman’s public warning ricochets all the way to Birmingham, Ala., where another woman gives voice to a devastating allegation. This se...

Inside Star Wars

35 episodes - Latest episode: 8 days ago - ★★★★ - 1.3K ratings
From the creators of Inside Psycho, Inside the Exorcist, and Inside Jaws, comes a new immersive audio biopic about the making of the original 1977 Star Wars. It was a movie made on a shoest...

The Thread

63 episodes - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★ - 1.1K ratings
Explore history's interlocking lives and events. Turn back the clock, one story at a time. Discover how various strands are woven together to create a historic figure, a big idea or an unthinkable ...

Decoder Ring

32 episodes - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratings
Decoder Ring is the show about cracking cultural mysteries. In each episode, host Willa Paskin takes a cultural question, object, or habit; examines its history; and tries to figure out what it mea...

Thunder Bay

14 episodes - Latest episode: 4 months ago - ★★★★★ - 1K ratings
The highest homicide rate in the country. A mayor and his wife charged with extortion. A police chief put on trial for obstruction of justice. Nine tragic deaths of Indigenous teenagers. Why does...

Carruth

11 episodes - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 957 ratings
The "miracle" began Nov. 16, 1999, when Cherica Adams was shot four times in Charlotte, N.C. A hitman tried to murder Adams, the girlfriend of NFL star Rae Carruth, and their unborn son, Chancellor...

Chicano Squad

12 episodes - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 846 ratings
Forty years ago, Houston's Latino community was plagued by discrimination, police violence and a growing number of unsolved murders. With tensions between police and the community at their peak, fi...

American Coyote

12 episodes - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★ - 838 ratings
Between 1987 and 2001, one American crossed over 1000 migrants from Mexico into the United States, using a variety of wild, comical and harrowing schemes to outwit authorities on both sides of the ...

Larger Than Life

21 episodes - Latest episode: 11 months ago - ★★★★ - 784 ratings
In 1960s Los Angeles, after the catastrophic Watts riots, an outsized character emerged — one who found an unexpected way to unite people across race and class. Odds are you’ve never heard ...

Mens Rea: A true crime podcast

108 episodes - Latest episode: about 7 hours ago - ★★★★★ - 718 ratings
Mens Rea is the legal principle of intent that must be proved in a number of crimes, such as murder. It means literally, "guilty mind". Mens Rea Podcast explores the most notorious crimes from Ire...

What Makes a Killer

32 episodes - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★★ - 590 ratings
A look into the life and crimes of the world’s most infamous serial killers. Featuring interviews with family members, forensic experts, law enforcement, and witnesses. From John Wayne Gacy and Je...

Murder Dictionary

135 episodes - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★ - 555 ratings
MURDER DICTIONARY {mer-der dik-she-ner-e} : a humorous discussion between true crime fanatics : an exploration of multiple cases based on the weekly topic, following the letter sequence of the alph...

Allen v. Farrow Podcast

5 episodes - Latest episode: 19 days ago - ★★★★★ - 502 ratings
In the companion podcast to the HBO Original documentary series Allen v. Farrow, award-winning filmmakers Amy Ziering, Kirby Dick and Amy Herdy reveal new details about the sexual abuse allegation...

Bates Investigates

25 episodes - Latest episode: 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 421 ratings
Season One: The most in-depth serialized look into the case of Oklahoma vs. Daniel Holtzclaw, as told from the perspective of the prosecution, but with the scrutiny of the defense.

Hi-Phi Nation

46 episodes - Latest episode: 6 months ago - ★★★★★ - 414 ratings
Hi-Phi Nation is philosophy in story-form, integrating narrative journalism with big ideas. We look at stories from everyday life, law, science, popular culture, and strange corners of human experi...