You know, they’re almost exactly the same as last year. Which makes for a short blog post, and some self-reflection.

Reading what I wrote in 2024, I was right to predict that the QAA podcast would be essential listening in our new and worse era of Trump. What I – and they – couldn’t have predicted is the Epstein Files, and how the reality was far, far worse and even more lurid than the pizzagate plots imagined by Qanon’s most ardent believers. The irony that it implicates their own white knight – Trump – has not been lost on these expert conspiracy watchers.

Meanwhile, in 2025 one of the Worst of All Possible Worlds hosts, Josh Boerman, teamed up with The Onion’s June Sternbach for Ill Conceived, a podcast about natalism. From Promise Keepers, and Elon Musk, to Focus on the Family, Eugenics, IQ, and the rise of Tradwives and Quiverful, this podcast spent the year exploring the “have as many white kids as possible” through lines between the Christian Right, blood and soil fascists, tech billionaire psychopaths, and other American Nightmares.

Probably my favourite podcast of the year, though, was once again Bad Hasbara. Their twice-weekly takedown of Israeli propaganda – but with jokes! – has helped maintain my sanity in an increasingly bonkers media ecosystem for those, like me, who think that ethnostates, ethnic cleaning, and genocide are all pretty bad ideas and should be reported on truthfully.

Increasingly, the subscriber model, whether through podcasts and Patreon, or newsletters and platforms like Substack, is the only way to support people reporting on things like, say, the wholesale and accelerating annexation of the West Bank by Israeli settlers, the kind of issues the corporate “The Rest Is Politics” style podcasts wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

As 2025 melts away and 2026 prepares to be born, I am trying to spend less time listening to podcasts, and more time listening to music and reading books. Podcasts have taught me a lot, but a lot more information stays in my brain if it comes in via the page.

I still frequently use podcasts to help me sleep, a crutch I’d like to move beyond, especially as sometimes they merge with my dreams and give me nightmares, unsurprising perhaps given the unremittingly grim topics they cover.

They’re such an intimate medium. It’s wild to stop to think how long I’ve been listening to Trashfuture, or Well There’s Your Problem, say. Their hosts are like old friends, in a way that’s more parasocially discombobulating than any relationship I’ve had with musicians or radio presenters over the years.

I’ll still be listening, but hopefully a bit less often, as I try to allow space in my free time and my mind for other beautiful things.