aviansoph archive

One of my absolute favourite podcasts!!! Lingthusiasm is a gem. It describes itself as a podcast for anyone who's enthusiastic about linguistics. It's an educational podcast hosted by two linguists who are very thoughtful about the pedagogical design of the podcast to make it both an entertaining and educational listening experience, and they're SO good at that. They both clearly and obviously adore thinking and talking about language, and I always come away from an episode going "wow that's so cool!" about the things I learn from them! The usual episode is about 30-50 minutes in length. I love every single episode.

This is also a podcast with really well done transcripts. They pay someone with a linguistics background to write careful transcripts that read clearly and have all the specialized vocabulary accurate, and laid out in a way that's coherent in text form even if the original was intended to be understood through listening to sounds in your ears. I followed this show solely via transcripts for years before I finally transitioned into being able to listen to it regularly!

Recommended if: you like good podcasts; you think language is interesting; you like learning things; you need podcasts to have good transcripts; you enjoy having enthusiastic people talk to you about their enthusiasms.

One of my other favourite podcasts! The first podcast I really fell in love with, once I transitioned to a regular podcast listener. This is a conversational/educational podcast with two hosts who take turns to do a deep-dive research journey into a particular topic and then tell the other host all about it. The podcast is specifically focused on topics around wellness trends and weight loss bullshit, and they are here to tell you the full history and science behind this stuff. It's not always a debunking.....but it's usually a debunking. They want people to have good and accurate knowledge about what will ACTUALLY be worth spending your energy focusing on, instead of being taken in by grifters and societal lies.

Aubrey and Mike have a very fun rapport with each other and a deep passion for the topic, and I will happily listen to them talk to each other for hours about literally anything they decide to focus on. (the episodes are actually only about 1 to 1.5 hours usually.)

Has ok transcripts.

Recommended if: you are a person who lives in or has grown up in a fatphobic society; you enjoy listening to people talk about things they're passionate about; you like learning things; you like to just hang out listening to cool people having fun talking with each other.

An antiques podcast hosted by two queer millennial nerds. my people <3.

The standard episode, 15-30 minutes in length, involves Dee (a professional in the field of antiques) explaining a specific category of antiques to their friend Ken. The back-and-forth dynamic between Ken and Dee is a big part of the appeal of the show, but the antiques content is always interesting as well. Dee regularly starts an episode like, "well I didn't know anything about this thing before I started researching, and now I want ten" and is very good at explaining to the audience what is appealing and interesting about collecting any given antique, along with giving the history of the item.

There are occasional special episodes with a guest, such as interviewing someone who's an expert in a particular field (eg silver hallmarks, or architectural salvaging), or special episodes involving reading some or all of a victorian-era book, with commentary (eg on the art of decorating with electricity, or the art of dressing well as a man, or a dictionary of nautical slang). These tend to be longer episodes and can be half an hour to an hour, or occasionally even up to two hours.

They also occasionally cross-post old patreon-only episodes to the free feed, and since their main patreon project for years has been reading their way through the victorian penny dreadful novel "Varney the Vampire", that means that there's now several dozen chapters of varney available on the free feed. varney is a total hoot.

I love every type of episode the antiques freaks care to share with us! I have listened through their entire archive!! though I will say I had to skip a few of their old episodes due to perpetuating common misinformation, like the one on corsetry....sigh. but thankfully that's pretty rare. And everything else is wonderful enough that I forgive them.

No transcripts are available.

Recommended if: you like listening to cool nerds who have a fun and funny dynamic with each other; you like antiques; you like history; you like listening to people talk about stuff they're passionate about.

This is an unusual podcast in my collection in that it is a lot more like a highly edited radio show than like a "person talking at a mic" podcast. It's an excellent podcast that explores concepts of empire, colonialism, museum collections, and world history, through investigating the stories of specific objects that are held by British institutions that come from elsewhere in the world.

Each episode is about 30 minutes and focuses on the story of one object, exploring where it came from, what it is, how it ended up in British hands, and what it means to people.

I love this show. It's so good. I want so much more of it! But it runs for only a short season once a year and the last episodes were in summer 2023. I hope we'll get a season this year too.

No transcripts are available.

Recommended if: you like history; you like frank discussions of colonialism and its continued impacts; you like a well-edited listening experience.

As the subtitle says, this is a Chinese history podcast! The host is Taiwanese, and I appreciate the perspective this gives him, with more attention to Taiwan than many resources about China bother with.

The episodes are usually 15-30 minutes in length. Each episode tells one self-contained story from somewhere within Chinese history. The podcast is interesting, thoughtful, and well presented, and is my favourite Chinese history podcast!

I will warn you that if you try listening to older episodes, the podcast began with the conceit of the host explaining things to a friend of his, a french journalist. Those episodes are very difficult to listen to: meandering and poorly paced. Some podcasts thrive on a conversational style but not this one! Once the podcast transitions to just the host presenting a pre-prepared script, it is immediately excellent.

No transcripts are available.

Recommended if: you like history; you like learning about other cultures; you want to know more about China.

A podcast about birds, created by Canada's biggest bird conservation charity! I love this podcast. It's by and for bird nerds, about a wide range of bird topics.

A fair number of episodes are focused on species at risk, which is a pretty upsetting thing to be constantly thinking about so I have to pace myself on those episodes, but I'm slowly making my way through the archives.

The format is usually one of having the host or hosts interview a guest about the episode topic, and episodes can range from 5 minutes long to an hour long.

No transcripts are available.

Recommended if: you like birds; you want to like birds; you care about environmental conservation work; you like listening to people who are passionate about their topic.

It's been long enough since a new season of this one that I'm a bit fuzzy on some of the details at this point lol. But I have listened to the entire archive and enjoyed the whole thing!

It's a podcast where the hosts interview currently working academics who study the lives of ordinary people in ancient greece and rome. I really like the focus on non-elite people in history, and getting people to talk about specific details they're experts in. The usual length of an episode is 25-35 minutes, and the hosts are good at getting their guests to talk about things in ways that are interesting no matter how much or little knowledge the listener has about the subject going in.

Has good transcripts.

Recommended if: you like history; you like learning things; you like listening to people who care a lot about very niche things.

A media criticism/comedy podcast featuring three trans people as the hosts. The initial premise was that they watched every single one of the james bond movies, one per episode of the show, and talked through what the movie was doing and then analyzed it and gave it a score on the SCUM system (how much SMARM does the movie has, how CULTURALLY INSENSITIVE is the movie, how much UNPROVOKED VIOLENCE is there, and how much MISOGYNY is there). They eventually made it all the way through bond and moved on to other action movies and spy movies and movies that have things to say about masculinity in general. And they'll never run out of movies to talk about with that as their mission!

Kill James Bond is enormously fun to listen to, it always moves to the top of my queue when a new episode comes out, and I just find it refreshing to hear conversations that are entirely trans people instead of entirely cis people! also one of the hosts, Abigail Thorne, is in fact an actress herself so that adds extra layers of interesting perspective on movies as the podcast dissects them. Episodes are usually 1 to 1.5 hours in length.

No transcripts are available.

Recommended if: you're trans; you enjoy having a parasocial relationship with cool people; you're interested in media criticism through a gender lens.

A Chinese history podcast hosted by one immigrant to the usa from mainland china and one american with half white and half japanese ancestry. I think the hosts are partners?

The podcast has more focus on recentish chinese history, especially the 20th century, and covers a diverse range of topics. I've been bouncing around through the archive to listen to whatever sounds interesting and there's some great stuff!

Each episode focuses on a specific topic which one of the hosts has done research on to explain to the other host, and is very conversational in style. The episodes are generally around an hour in length.

They also occasionally do episodes about important chinese movies or books, and are engaging in a long-term reading project of The Water Margin. I haven't listened to any of the water margin episodes yet but I'm interested to try them.

No transcripts are available.

Recommended if: you are interested in history; you want to know more about china; you like listening to people who know each other well having a chat about stuff.

A Southeast Asian history podcast with a focus on women in history. Each episode, usually 15-30 minutes in length, focuses on a particular woman or a particular culture's ideas of womanhood. The host is a southeast asian woman herself.

I know remarkably little about SEA history so sometimes this podcast assumes I have more context than I do for what it's saying, but it's nonetheless a fascinating look at stories that are too often ignored. I've listened to the whole archive and I hope we'll get more episodes again someday!

No transcripts are available.

Recommended if: you are interested in women's history; you want to learn more about southeast asia.

A podcast that's all about dissecting bad pop nonfiction books of the sort you might expect to pick up at an airport. It's fun and satisfying to listen to, and to start to see the commonalities between a lot of this sort of book. The episodes are usually about 1 to 1.5 hours long.

This one is not a topic of podcast that would inherently draw my interest. I started to listen to it because one of the hosts, Mike, is also a cohost of Maintenance Phase (discussed above!) and I really enjoy listening to him. He's very charismatic and I love how he cannot stop himself from doing deep dives into things!

Overall a fun podcast but one that I simply listen to because it's entertaining, not because I get anything deeper out of it.

Has ok transcripts.

Recommended if: you've already listened to Maintenance Phase and you're itching for something to fill your heart while waiting for the next episode; you enjoy listening to snarky nerds.

A media criticism podcast that's interested in examining the stories that get re-told over and over and over again. This podcast is still relatively early in its existence so it's only had one season, about Phantom of the Opera, but the host is interested in exploring lots of other stories (all from western storytelling traditions, it looks like). Each episode is about 20-30 minutes and covers a different adaptation/version of the story, contextualizing it in where it's coming from both in terms of the culture of the time and the previous versions it is drawing on itself. It's interesting and fun to think through, and I'm looking forward to seeing where else it goes!

Has good transcripts.

Recommended if: you enjoy media criticism; you enjoy thinking about storytelling as an artform; you're interested in the history of the stories we tell.

This is a podcast that has officially retired, but the whole backlog is still available to listen to! Featuring two indigenous women who are good friends and big nerds, who watch SFF tv and movies and talk with each other about indigenous representation in what they're watching. A really great and important perspective to think about and listen to, and it's cool to see how the focus of the show changed over time as well. Each episode is about 1-2 hours long.

No transcripts are available.

Recommended if: you're an SFF nerd; you want to know more about indigenous futurism.

This is the first podcast I ever listened to, back in the days before I figured out how to make podcasts work better for me. At that time it worked because the episodes are extremely short, as podcasts go! Its usual length is around 10-20 minutes, often closer to the 10 minute end of that range.

Each episode tells a small and personal story from some point in American history, usually focusing on people or events that aren't much talked about, as a deliberate antidote to great man history. Its point is to give you an emotional connection to the past, I think. The stories are just snippets, really, but they're well-crafted glimpses into a particular moment, a particular life.

I am irritated by the host's determination to not let you know what an episode is actually about via show notes or title; you're supposed to discover through listening to the episode and having it slowly revealed. And I do also get irritated by every single story being from the USA as well. And sometimes the deliberate framing of the story to get the listener emotionally invested comes across to me as being too obviously/deliberately emotionally manipulative.

But it is a podcast that's very good at doing the specific thing it's doing!

No transcripts are available.

Recommended if: you like history; you like emotionally connecting with stories; you like short podcast episodes.

A paleontology podcast, deliberately written and presented to be comprehensible and educational to a lay audience, so it's a great podcast to dive into if you want to learn more about the ancient past.

The format of the podcast is that each episode (usually 1-2 hrs long) will begin with a news section covering four recent pieces of paleontology news. The majority of the episode then consists of a specific topic which the hosts will cover in detail, such as an overview of a species or clade, an event, or a trait. The podcast covers far more prehistoric life than just dinosaurs, but dinosaurs do of course feature as well.

There are also fairly frequent special episodes about paleontology in popular culture, such as discussing movie representation of prehistoric creatures, and doing speculative evolution for popular monsters and supernatural beings. I skip all these episodes so I can't speak to their quality.

The hosts speak pretty slowly and don't have super tight editing so this is one of the few podcasts I listen to at an increased speed. The hosts are two cis white men who do their best to be good allies but have their obliviousnesses, and their sense of humour is "making a reference to popular nerd culture is the same thing as making a joke."

The hosts might not be my ideal hosts but I appreciate the wealth of material they spread out before me with this podcast, and they're very good at breaking topics down in a way that's clear and comprehensible and interesting. I love listening to this podcast because of how much I learn from it! Even if I can't handle listening to many episodes of it in a row.

No transcripts are available.

Recommended if: you think the prehistoric world is neat; you were a dinosaur kid and want to be a dinosaur adult also.

Another paleontology podcast, this one featuring three academics who get together to read and discuss two recent paleontology papers for each episode. Episodes are usually 1-2 hrs in length.

The conversations can get very discursive, and sometimes the hosts can forget to explain or define things for the listeners, and sometimes the male hosts especially can go a little too far into saying absurd/offensive things as jokes.

But it's very interesting to listen to people in the field arguing over relevant modern paleontology topics, and get a sense of what the field of study is currently engaging in. And you can learn some very weird fun facts!

Also, one of the hosts, Amanda, studies birds in particular. So I always love it when she goes off on a bird tangent. Birds are great.

No transcripts are available.

Recommended if: you are a huge paleo nerd; you love academia.