Amid a sea of news, true crime, and celebrity interviews, these alumni bring a humanist’s ear to podcasting as they produce shows that are silly, serious, and sometimes both.
Whoa!Mance – Isabeau Dasho, AM’17, and Morgan Lott, AM’17
When Morgan Lott and Isabeau Dasho were in their first quarter of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH), Lott hosted a party “wherein she made cocktails and narrated the cultural significance of The Bachelor,” Dasho recalls. That was how Dasho became a Bachelor fan. She returned the favor by recommending something to Lott: a romance novel, Tessa Dare’s A Week to Be Wicked.
Lott hadn’t read many romance novels and was bowled over. “I loved it so much and wanted to talk about it endlessly,” she says—and in a way, she’s gotten to, through her and Dasho’s podcast, Whoa!mance. In each episode, the cohosts discuss a different romance novel and declare it either a whoa-mance or a no-mance. (“It’s utterly subjective,” Dasho says. “Please don’t ask us our rubric for that.”)
Whoa!mance’s North Star is the notion that romance novels—an often maligned and dismissed literary genre—can, in fact, be taken seriously, and can be substantive enough to withstand critique. Dasho and Lott always find plenty to talk about, and they’ve discovered an audience of fellow romance readers eager for rich analysis.
“The thing that is most exciting for me is hearing from listeners,” Lott says, whether they “very loudly disagree with us, or agree with us, or are grateful that someone said something.” In return, she and Dasho often highlight listener-recommended books on the podcast.
As cohosts, Dasho and Lott bring distinct points of view. Dasho has been reading romance novels since she was a teenager and knows the genre deeply; Lott has more of an outsider’s freshness of approach. Lott will notice things like a book’s imprint “and then do a massive internet search and discover that, indeed, Playboy had a romance imprint,” Dasho says. “And down the rabbit hole we go.”
Their relationships to the romance genre have changed over the three years they’ve been making Whoa!mance. Lott, once the neophyte, has become pickier. “Now I have very strong opinions about what I want to read,” she says. And Dasho, the insider, has become more able to interrogate the things she likes. “It forces me to be critical,” she says, “in a fun way.”
Elucidations – Matt Teichman, AM’09, PhD’15, SM’18
Podcasts, in Matt Teichman’s view, possess a “secret superpower. You can learn stuff without it taking any extra time,” he says. “It’s like a trick.”
He discovered this superpower as a graduate student in philosophy, filling his ears with every podcast related to his field he could find. “I just thought it was amazing that I could listen to podcasts for 15 minutes and get the lay of the land in some area of philosophy”—all while washing the dishes, he says.
With his long-running podcast Elucidations, Teichman pays forward that favor to other philosophy-minded dish-doers, bus stop–waiters, and putterers of all stripes. Since 2008 Teichman has interviewed 144 people “of philosophical interest,” according to the show’s description (some are philosophy professors, but plenty are not).
Teichman’s favorite episodes include his conversations with Georgetown’s Quill Kukla on reproductive risk (“it brings together all this really interesting stuff about science, trust in scientific results, and how to make decisions on the basis of your nonexpert understanding of scientific results,” he says); UChicago teaching fellow Emily Dupree, AM’14, JD’19, PhD’21, on the rationality of revenge; and Notre Dame’s Patricia Blanchette on formal logic (“I think we should light every logic textbook on fire and just have her rewrite them all”).
The show is meant for everyone—a goal Teichman has worked hard to achieve. “I definitely don’t want to [make] a podcast that you’d have to be doing a PhD to understand,” he says. “I’ve had a few cases where someone started out in conference mode, and then I just asked them a normal question, like ‘What do you think of hamburgers?’”
Elucidations is “about modeling the kind of communication that I think would be good for public outreach but also internally to academia itself,” he says. “When you state your thing in plain English, it’s a win-win.”
Unsolved Death Murder Crimes, A Mid-Semester Night’s Dream, The Kiss, and Up a River (with Danielle Evenson) – Heather Huntington, AM’99
Heather Huntington and Danielle Evenson’s first podcast was a joke—literally. Unsolved Death Murder Crimes, which they cowrote and coproduced, was a Christmas-themed true crime spoof investigating whether Grandma really did get run over by a reindeer.
The two comedy writers quickly discovered that podcasts have one nice advantage over film and television. Making movies and TV shows is slow and expensive and relies on the fickle whims of producers and studio executives. With podcasts, by contrast, “it’s sort of the Wild West right now,” Huntington says. “There are a lot more yeses.”
In the last two years alone, they’ve been able to write and release three original podcasts with two different studios: A Mid-Semester Night’s Dream and The Kiss with Meet Cute and Up a River with Aural Stories. “It was so fun,” Huntington says. “And fast,” Evenson adds.
Unlike screenplays, where “you need to hit your dark night of the soul by ‘this’ page,” Huntington says, “there isn’t really a prescribed format” for the podcasts she and Evenson write. They learned as they worked, experimenting with episode lengths and story formats. “Writing for the ear is so much different than writing for the eye,” Evenson says. “It takes a while to hone.”
Though the medium was new to Huntington, some of the subject matter harked back to her time in the MAPH program at UChicago. A Mid-Semester Night’s Dream—an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in a graduate program—“is very loosely based on my experience at UChicago,” she says, and is a nod to her thesis adviser, the late David Bevington, whose Shakespeare classes she loved.
“MAPH directly contributed to that podcast,” she says. “And I feel that it’s a very ridiculous surprise that, for such an academic place, what I wound up doing from my time there is writing dirty jokes for podcasts.”