Travel The World With Your Ears
At this level in the summertime — and the pandemic — the need to flee to a spot distant could be overwhelming. Even with so many borders closed, podcasts can transport you elsewhere, making them different to actual, out-of-the-house journey. Here’s a set of immersive audio experiences which are virtually as immersive as exploring the good large world on the market.
If a spot on a map may give a TED Talk, what wouldn’t it sound like? That’s what the host Saleem Reshamwala seeks to search out out in every episode of TED’s newest podcast, “Pindrop.” Join him on his international expedition for startling, hyperlocal tales like a deep dive into the radio station in Bangkok that serves as the encircling space’s emergency hotline, discover board and misplaced and located. Or meet the Mexico City-based masked vigilante defending his fellow residents from visitors accidents. Stop by a ironmongery shop in Mantua Township, N.J. the place paleontologists are at work excavating dinosaur bones and defending the land from growth. The present is a unique form of journey podcast — it introduces folks world wide who’re creatively working to make their communities higher.
This NPR podcast guarantees to “take you places,” and because it debuted in 2017, that’s precisely what it delivers. Each episode exhibits listeners how the identical topic is perceived somewhere else world wide, like a cultural kaleidoscope of present occasions. Take one of many controversies du jour within the United States — over some folks’s refusal to put on face masks. In the “From Niqab to N95” episode, the host Gregory Warner dives into how that debate is enjoying out in France, the place, earlier than the coronavirus made masks a public well being necessity, the dialogue over protecting one’s face in public was extremely politicized and tinged with Islamophobia.
After several months of staring at your own four walls, you might start to feel as if you need to get away to the most remote place in the world, fast. Enter “Extremities,” a podcast that takes you on an odyssey to some of the most distant reaches on Earth. Season 1 is a six-episode journey to Pitcairn Island, a dot in the South Pacific Ocean between Chile and Australia; season 2 goes to the Svalbard archipelago between continental Norway and the North Pole; and the most recent season chronicles a sojourn to the South Atlantic island of St. Helena. Travel with the host Sam Denby to learn the histories and local legends of each territory and even have dinner with residents, all through your earbuds.
Most of us will never climb the world’s highest mountains. But if you’re curious as to how you’d go about it if you could, consider this show, an audio diary hosted by a married couple as they travel to and through Nepal and the Himalayas. In 16 episodes, Jason Moore and Anne Dorthe bring you along on every step and bump of their adventure, which unfolded in 2014; join them on their hikes and as they visit Kathmandu and Tibetan Buddhist villages. With both tribulations and transcendent moments, Moore and Dorthe grant you access to a trip of a lifetime.
Join The New York Times Podcast Club on Facebook for more suggestions and discussions about all things audio.
