Medium Playback
11 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 5 years ago - ★★★★★ - 75 ratingsHear some of the best stories on Medium, straight from the authors who wrote them. On each episode of Medium's flagship podcast, we invite an author to the studio to perform a recent story they wrote for Medium and then talk with us about it. Hosted by journalist Manoush Zomorodi and writer Kara Brown, Playback features insightful, first-person stories on timely topics affecting the world today — and then gives you the story behind the story from the writer.
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Episodes
"The Edge of Adulthood"
November 14, 2018 16:45 - 40 minutes - 37 MBThe final episode of Medium Playback's first season is about those who are just peering into the adult years that lay ahead. Right now, teenagers face a deeply unstable future — but maybe that's always been the case. Journalist Alyssa Giacobbe was one of the nine reporters who interviewed 46 teenagers for the collection The Edge of Adulthood. The results are both intriguing and familiar. This episode includes the original audio from four interviews Alyssa conducted so that you can hear from...
Meghan Daum: "Nuance: A Love Story"
October 17, 2018 15:25The dark web was her safe space. Meghan Daum, a long-time L.A. Times columnist, faced two endings: Obama’s government and her marriage. What resulted was a distancing from her gentrified bubble and a new love affair with the shadowy corners of free-speech internet. In “Nuance: A Love Story,” Meghan charts her growing infatuation with the public intellectuals touting controversial political ideas. They’re the folks arguing against identity politics, for example, and in favor of fundamental bi...
Morgan Jerkins: "Traveling While Black"
September 26, 2018 15:09Is there any place where a black person can just be herself? Three contributors to the collection Traveling While Black — Mateo Askaripour, Jamilah Lemieux, and collection editor Morgan Jerkins — read their stories on their adventures (and disturbances) while making their way across the country and globe. Of course, traveling is a luxury, and it can sound strange to complain about the time you spent in Europe or boarding with your first class ticket. But when you’ve fought through a rigged s...
Douglas Rushkoff: "Survival of the Richest"
September 05, 2018 17:41 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MBThis week’s Playback gets into the psyche of some big-money overlords — the ones who can’t make it to Mars with Elon, anyway. In his wildly popular story “Survival of the Richest,” researcher Douglas Rushkoff starts off writing about an invitation he received last year to give a keynote speech to some wealthy investors at a deluxe private resort. On the face of it, they wanted Douglas’s advice on how to escape environmental collapse. But quickly, he realized that these one-percenters just sh...
Ben Blum: "The Lifespan of a Lie"
August 22, 2018 16:08 - 57 minutes - 52.8 MBThis week's Playback features an investigative showdown. Journalist Ben Blum looks into the reality of the most famous psychology study to ever be conducted, The Stanford Prison Experiment, and makes some shocking discoveries himself. Embedded in Blum's story, you'll hear clips from his interviews with psychologist Philip Zimbardo and participants, as well as real archival audio from the experiment Blum uncovered in his reporting. The experiment became famous for the finding that people can ...
Kristi Coulter: "Enjoli"
August 08, 2018 15:45 - 41 minutes - 37.7 MBThis week, Playback is a throwback, but the story timeless. Society is fine-tuned for hardworking women — executives, moms, daughters, creatives, and yogis alike — to get drunk. In “Enjoli,” writer and former Amazon employee Kristi Coulter constructs a diary that turns into a radical reframing of what a “having it all” culture actually looks like: socially accepted forms of alcohol dependence in overspent women. “I’m newly sober and dog-paddling through the booze all around me,” Kristi begin...
Mike Monteiro: "Design's Lost Generation
July 25, 2018 14:40For episode four, we hear from designer and founder Mike Monteiro, who has a strong word for his creative ilk. In “Design’s Lost Generation,” he insists that designers, especially UX designers — who play a huge role in theorizing and building the technological systems that determine much of the future of humanity — should only be able to practice their craft after getting licensed. After reading the story, he chats with host Manoush Zomorodi about it. “We’ve been moving fast. We’ve been bre...
Jonathan Parks-Ramage: "Jesus, Mary, and Joe Jonas"
July 11, 2018 14:53 - 1 hour - 56 MBEpisode three is all about Jesus Christ and his superstars. In his piece “Jesus, Mary, and Joe Jonas,” writer Jonathan Parks-Ramage discovers Reality L.A., an evangelical Christian church that attracts the lost kids of Hollywood with top 40-like ballads and an attractive promise of love and absolution. Unfortunately, the gospel is not so sweet for Jonathan — the hip-seeming church is truly conservative, and non-belief, abortion, premarital sex, and gay sex will each earn you a one-way ticket...
Baratunde Thurston: "How To Do a Data Detox In a Zillion Easy Steps"
June 27, 2018 17:00For our second episode, futurist, comedian, and activist Baratunde Thurston joins the podcast with a word — and then some — on big data, big tech, and his own data detox. In his story "How To Do a Data Detox In a Zillion Easy Steps," Baratunde takes us through his jarring encounter with the hoard of personal information collected by the 300+ apps on his phone. That's right, 300 apps with digital records of his photos, notes, contact lists, minute-to-minute location, and more, all for the b...
Roxane Gay: "What Fullness Is"
June 13, 2018 17:20 - 41 minutes - 37.9 MBFor the first episode of our first-ever podcast, there was only one guest we had in mind: bestselling author Roxane Gay. Her powerful and devastatingly honest essay “What Fullness Is” is one of the most read stories on Medium this year. In the piece, Roxane discloses her decision to undergo bariatric surgery — from the instant in her car when she made up her mind, to the painfully awkward moment with the nurse post-surgery, to her fears about how her fans might respond. It’s the type of stor...
Welcome to Medium Playback
June 05, 2018 01:16 - 2 minutes - 2 MBAt Medium, we love a good story. So when we were dreaming up our first podcast, we knew it should center on what our readers come to Medium for — compelling, insightful stories and the people who write them. We’re launching our flagship podcast, Medium Playback, next week, and this is the trailer for season one.