Category Archives: Podcasts

The best podcast you can find: The Rest is History

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Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, hosts of “The Rest is History.”

I’ve previously mentioned my favorite podcast ever: “The Rest is History.” I’ve only mentioned it in passing, though, and have meant for some time to say more about it in a separate post.

And now I have the perfect news peg for doing so.

Apple, which provides the podcast app through which I listen regularly to hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, has named this brilliant gem its 2025 Show of the Year.

And rightly so. I had never heard it before this prize-winning year, but I can attest that what I have heard stands far above any podcast I’ve heard previously. As Apple said:

Apple is proud to celebrate The Rest Is History with the Apple Podcasts Award for Show of the Year, a recognition that honors a show that demonstrates quality and cultural impact in podcasting. Produced by Goalhanger, the series has captivated a global audience with its witty, insightful, and endlessly entertaining exploration of the past, becoming the first UK-based show to be named Show of the Year.
Hosted by acclaimed historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, The Rest Is History has become a fixture at the top of the charts worldwide by bringing history’s biggest moments to life. From the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, to the sinking of the Titanic, the hosts blend deep expertise with gripping storytelling and unexpected humor to make complex subjects accessible and compelling for millions of listeners…

Absolutely. I don’t know about those millions of listeners, but I certainly love it. And in my opinion, their audience should be in the billions — or at least, whatever the number of people who can understand English well enough to follow.

And not just because I think everyone should enjoy the same things I do. As I’m always saying, the failure to understand history is possibly the greatest problem facing our country today. Not that Americans were in general great historians in previous generations. But the gross ignorance today is more dangerous than ever, because we live in a time when dimly-perceived history is one of the favorite weapons of the warring tribes into which our once-great society has been divided. The armies of left and right charge again and again into battle waving their opposing misconceptions like so many heavy, dull swords.

It’s not about names and dates, or about which tribe got wronged by which other tribe in the past, but about understanding. It’s about perceiving and accepting, on a deep level, the people who came before us, and lived normal human lives day after day, just as we do. They’re not black and white object lessons, they’re people, like our families and friends.

And their stories are fascinating. And sometimes hilarious as well. Apple mentions these guys’ “unexpected humor.” Well, it’s not unexpected at all once you get to know these guys. They are brilliant historians, and so comfortable with their material that they fully appreciate the human comedy they are telling about. And while they don’t neglect the serious stuff, sometimes they go off on wonderful digressions about the really fun stuff.

You’ll hear that if you listen to this one short (half an hour, compared to the usual hour) episode they released this week to celebrate their award. They review some of their favorite episodes this year such as:

I became besotted with this show in April, when I ran across it in the middle of their four-part series on the year 1066, a year that of course has tremendous meaning to these two Brits. I immediately found that the site allowed me to go back and hear the previous episodes in the series — and for that matter every one of the more than 800 episodes since the show began.

I hadn’t listened long before I signed up to become a member of the show, which means I don’t have to “tune in next week” to hear the rest of the current series. I also get to hear their bonus episodes either riffing further on the current topic, of going far off the track on something they enjoy talking about.

All that is well worth $6 a month. Go give it a listen. You’ll be glad you did. You’ll also walk away smarter. You could start with the one celebrating their award.

Oh, and as Americans, don’t be put off by their constant “Bully for England” shtik. They worry about that a bit, although it doesn’t stop them:

Tom: What makes us particularly humble is that we are the first non-American show ever to win show of the year. So it’s a victory not just for us, but for Britain.

Dominic: Yeah, in a very real sense, for Britain.

Tom: Yeah. So Dominic, I’m a bit worried that our tone of British smugness may have scared away lots of readers who are tuning in wondering what the fuss is all about, and they’ve never actually listened to us before, so why don’t we just talk a little bit about what we do….”

Which they go on and do. Then, to celebrate the giver of the award, they riff on the Top Five Apples in History. Give it a listen…

Hey, y’all, help me check something out

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See if you can tune in the signal…

Lately, I’ve heard it said a couple of times on NYT Audio that their content — or some of their content — is free to nonsubscribers.

It might just be the blogs, like “Matter of Opinion,” and “The Ezra Klein Show.” I’m wondering whether it might also apply to the newspaper’s other content (like The Daily and Headlines), and to some of the stuff they carry from other publications, such as The New Yorker.

This matters to me because so much of what I read and hear — and would like to share with you, so we can have a fully informed conversation about the things I’m thinking about. Which is, you know, what a blog is about — unless I just cut off comments and write a “personal journal” that I simply allow others to read. Or not. Which I’ve thought about.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that I include quotes to an extent that some might say goes beyond Fair Use (I would not say that, but we all have our own views, don’t we?), too often the conversations don’t go any deeper than the headlines, which means they don’t go beyond the usual conversations people have about politics or culture or anything in this social media age. And every statement is drawn directly from the current talking points from the two sides — the only two sides too many people perceive.

And if we don’t get beyond that, there’s little point to blogging.

So… let’s see if this works. Here are links to some recent items from NYT Audio. I initially tried to give you something from each category — blogs, opinion and news content from the paper (some read by the writers, some by ersatz voices), and some from other sources.

I’ve also tried to share a variety of topics. But after the first two or three, I ran into a bit of a challenge. Read on:

OK, that was more complicated than I thought. I couldn’t even find links to most of the dozen or so items I wanted you to listen to. And I’m pretty sure that the last of those three goes to the text content, not the audio. NYT Audio doesn’t give, on the app, direct URLs to specific content. So I was trying to grab those from the browser on my Mac. And even then, I couldn’t find links to outside content that appears on the app, such as The New Yorker and Foreign Policy.

Bottom line: You may have to download the app onto your phone or other device. It’s obvious they want everyone to do that. It’s worth the effort if they give you free access, because there’s good stuff there on a wide ranged of topics and interests. Here’s where you download it.

You would be rewarded by being able to listen to some of these other pieces I was originally going to link to here:

  • Carlos Lozada: Stop Pretending Trump is not Who We Are
  • The New Yorker: The Improbably Rise of JD Vance
  • The Culture Desk: Why Was 1999 the Best Movie Year (No, that’s not a typo; the second 9 wasn’t supposed to be a 3. But as silly as the proposition sounds, it’s an interesting listen while walking.)
  • NYT Interview: Al Pacino is Still Going Big
  • Foreign Policy: What a U.K. Labour Win Means for the Global Left
  • Hard Fork: Apple Joins the A.I. Party, Elon’s Wild Week and HatGPT
  • The Daily: A Conversation with President Zelensky

Or maybe you’d be thus rewarded. I can’t tell from my end, since they recognized me as a subscriber. But still, if you have any success with anything I’ve offered above, please let me know. I’d really like this blog to feature deeper and more intelligent discussions about … whatever the subject at hand might be… than are likely to be fueled by free media…

I’d mention 9/11 today, but I don’t want to show my age

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Hey, remember when this old movie came out? It was the same year the Iraq War started — and yet it was in COLOR!

Yes, you are meant to laugh at that headline. I certainly did, at the thing that made me write it.

I’m not used to laughing right out loud while walking down a quiet street, but this time I did.

Speaking again of NYT podcasts, I’m also fond of Ezra Klein’s programs, and had fallen behind on them. So while walking in the neighborhood a couple of days ago, I listened to this one from Aug. 15: “This Conservative Thinks America’s Institutions ‘Earned’ the G.O.P.’s Distrust.”

It was pretty good, and most of it wasn’t funny. But part of it was.

Remember my recent post about the accelerating acceleration of our sense of time as we grow older? I was trying at that time to remember some examples of the absurd (to me, and what other perspective do I have?) things I hear young people say. I wish I’d had this one to mention.

Ezra was out, and his substitute was Jane Coaston, who is currently the host of a podcast I used to listen to, “The Argument.” And she did fine, until she got to the point of saying something about recent current events.

What she said began with, “I’m old enough to recall the events that led up to the Iraq War…”

I didn’t just laugh out loud when that came through my hearing aids (which Bluetooth allows me to use like earbuds), it was a kind of sharp, piercing sound that carries. I stopped immediately, and glanced about to see if I had any neighbors standing stock-still out in their yards, staring at the demented hyena.

Fortunately, I did not.

When I was listening, I didn’t realize who the substitute interviewer was. When I looked back at the transcript just now to see, I thought I would check out Jane Coaston’s LInkedIn page, and while I don’t know her age, she received her bachelor’s degree in the same year that my newspaper career ended after 35 years. (For the sake of you young folks, that was about four years after I started this blog.)

So the difference in time perception is perfectly understandable. And as I say, she did a fine job overall. But she would have done better not to have expressed the reference to her memory quite that way. Usually people use that rhetorical construction when they mean, “I remember back this far, so you should trust my experience and wisdom.” But what she communicated was, This kid is so young she thinks that was a long time ago…

Anyway, if anyone wants to offer memories of 9/11 today, you could do it here. But beware — if you have personal memories of it, that might make you even older than Jane, and folks may start offering to help you cross the street….

A great extended quote from ‘Matter of Opinion’

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Y’all may remember that years ago — like, pre-COVID — I happily shared with y’all the fact that I had finally figured out something painfully obvious: that the best time to listen to podcasts, which I had been meaning to do, was during my long walks each day.

Anyway, at the time, I mentioned that one of my favorites up to that point was “The Argument,” a New York Times podcast. In fact, I linked to a specific episode from those days. That program was very good when it featured David Leonhardt, Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg. Then those people started falling away from it, and the topics started to be things that didn’t interest me, and I got out of the habit.

I’m only recently discovered an adequate substitute for it. It’s called “Matter of Opinion,” with Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen. It has only one former Argument participant — Douthat — but it very much has the same kind of thoughtfulness and intellectual heft that The Argument once had. And it has one other essential ingredient: civility. Here are people who are about as wide apart as you can get on issue after issue, and yet they not only discuss these differences in a civil manner, but they enjoy each other’s company. It’s rather like another NYT feature in that regard: “The Conversation,” featuring Gail Collins and Bret Stephens.

In other words, it offers the kind of vibe I am determined to have on this blog.

Anyway, the most recent one was headlined, “The Woke Burnout Is Real — and Politics Is Catching Up.” I frankly did not fully understand the phrase “woke burnout” at first, partly because it didn’t start with any sort of formal statement of the topic. Who was burned out? The right? The left? And why? (I very much hoped it would be for good reasons.) But I think what is meant is what is said in the subhed, “It’s time to start asking if the culture wars actually matter to voters.”

Then, when I looked at it on my PC — seeking the transcript — I found this intro:

Classrooms have been a key battleground in the so-called woke wars for years now. But could the debate over how schools teach history, race, gender and sexuality be coming to an end?

That explained it.

And part of it was wonderful. Especially when Carlos Lozada said that:

… for the last couple of days I’ve had this deep dread and despair weighing on me, knowing we were going to talk about this. The discussions over woke, and anti-woke, and culture wars are soul sucking to me. I think it’s good to have specific debates over affirmative action in college admissions, the problems with boys, the way we teach history. I mean, that’s terrific. And we’ve had that on this podcast, and we should continue to have it. But when we talk about the culture war, that’s not about debating issues. The culture war is about joining a side. It is about picking a team. And the problem with picking a team in the culture wars is that you inevitably end up with lunatics on your team. And the craziest ones are often the captains of the team. And they may want to go much further than you might want to go.

Carlos Lozada

But you’re on the team, and you don’t want the other side to win. So you end up supporting what the team is defending. So you end up fighting vociferously over things you may not know a lot about. You end up policing language and dogma with the zeal of the convert.

And you end up speaking not just for yourself, but for this amorphous community that never necessarily granted you the rights to speak for it. There’s so many great writers and thinkers who get baited into this, and then they have difficulty writing about anything else because they’re no longer making an argument or exploring an issue. They are defending turf.

The irony of the culture war is that the purpose of the war is not to win it. It is to continue to wage it. You are never going to hear a culture war activist saying, you know what? The cause is won. The fight is over. Let’s close up shop. I don’t need any more funding. It’s like a business lobbyist saying, our profits are pretty healthy. I don’t need more loopholes in the tax code. That’s not a thing that happens in a culture war. The fight is never over. The stakes are always rising. There’s a new front, a new trench you have to dig, a new hill you have to die on.

And it becomes a reason for being. It becomes your emotional, and your financial, and your intellectual sustenance. And that’s why I limit the amount of time I write about this or think about this because it is incredibly frustrating to me…

I heard all that as I was arriving back at my house from a walk, so I didn’t hear the rest of the podcast. I need to go back and do so, but there are so many things in the world I keep saying that I need to go back and do that I may not.

But before this fades from my memory, I wanted to share with you what Lozada said. Almost every line of it is a view I deeply hold, and it goes to the heart of why I say so many things I say on this blog. In fact, these ideas are pretty central to why the blog exists. So I wanted to make sure I shared them with you, before I move on to the next subject…