We seem to be liv­ing through yet anoth­er major moment for pod­cast­ing. Over the past two decades, the medi­um has gone from niche exper­i­ment to main­stream habit, becom­ing a reg­u­lar part of how we learn, enter­tain our­selves, and pass the time. The pop­u­lar­i­ty of podcasts—in an age of ubiq­ui­tous screens and per­pet­u­al distractions—speaks to some­thing deep with­in us. Oral sto­ry­telling, as old as human speech, nev­er real­ly dis­ap­pears. The medi­um evolves, plat­forms shift, dis­tri­b­u­tion changes—but the basic appeal remains con­stant. But the dif­fer­ences between this gold­en age of pod­cast­ing and the gold­en age of radio are still sig­nif­i­cant. Where the pod­cast is often off-the-cuff, and often very inti­mate and personal—sometimes seen as “too personal”—radio pro­grams were almost always care­ful­ly script­ed and fea­tured pro­fes­sion­al tal­ent. Even those pro­grams with man-on-the street fea­tures or inter­views with ordi­nary folks were care­ful­ly orches­trat­ed and medi­at­ed by pro­duc­ers, actors, and pre­sen­ters. And the busi­ness of scor­ing music and sound effects for radio pro­grams was a very seri­ous one indeed. All of these formalities—in addi­tion to the lim­it­ed fre­quen­cy range of …