Hello, fellow podcast lovers!

• Jazmine Sullivan's album Heaux Tales and the Object of Sound episode with Sullivan as an interview guest are a great queue to have, back to back. Sullivan's music is a balm to my soul, thanks especially to her interludes. Interludes in music albums are classic ways to craft personal and overarching story, and Sullivan's are, quite simply, earth-shattering.
• An article about audio about U.K. podcast companies who want to move away from the structures imposed by the BBC, and develop an audio industry and space that looks more like the U.S. independent production space.
  • I suggest pairing this with Broccoli Content's Anthems, specifically Sophia Thakur's POWER episode.

• This video is Zoe Bee's The Minority You've Never Heard Of: Why "Illiterate" Adults Deserve Respect. If you follow me on Twitter, you might know that I have a lot of thoughts about digital media literacy, and therefore also about literacy in general. For anyone working in media and entertainment, yes including audio, this is mandatory watching.
• One of my favorite Booktubers is Cindy and in February, she released the video What happens when you try to be inclusive, but mess up anyway?. It's a look at the book Deadly Education, at systemic oppression in publishing, and canceling with an incredible discussion about children of immigrants and biracial families.
  • Obviously, you should pair this with Cancel Me, Daddy.

• Daniel James Belnavis' essay The Unraveling of a Dream is about his time as a Black gay man with mental illness in the ensemble cast of Hamilton during their first national tour. It addresses a fundamental question about storytelling: who gets to tell their own stories? What happens when everyone in production is white, directing and producing and managing a racially diverse cast? Hint: it's anti-Blackness, compounded by a lot of other things.
  • There's a Still Processing episode from last year that talks about media criticism of Hamilton, and why it's important that we sit with discomfort.
• Who wants cool science and history all tangled up together? In 1926, 5,000 dead letters -- letters unsent because their authors could not pay postage -- were discovered in a trunk belonging to Simone and Marie de Brienne, 17th century postmasters who delivered letters all over Europe. One of those letters has been unfolded for the first time ever, and you can see the animation and learn how it works over at Sarah Wells' article Virtual Unfolding Reveals the Past. These are old forgotten stories, difficult to parse but thanks to technology, a step closer to returning to the light while preserving their intactness for cultural heritage.
  • Some gorgeous epistolary and epistolary-adjacent podcasts to indulge in the sound and power of a letter: love letters podcast, dear, Midnight Radio, The Pasithea Powder, 
• This 2017 article There is no diverse book by Chad Everett is always relevant, and mandatory reading for understanding how diversity centers white heteronormativity, and new ways to think about a continuum of representation. Put a pin this essay, too -- I'll be referring to it again in a future issue.

• Input Mag publishes some incredibly cool experimental, interactive articles, like this review about the game Loop Hero. It's a game where you control a world after a devastating apocalypse around the protagonist, creating complex loops back around to base camp in order to defeat monsters and rebuild the world. What happens to how you approach disaster recovery and rebuilding when you're purposefully setting out to spawn a boss?
• The RPG LATAM JAM is an indie RPG creation jam for Latin America RPGs, an incredible event hosted by M.A. GUAX that can genuinely support new voices and underrepresented ideas in the RPG industry.
  • I suggest checking out the episode of Pasión de las Pasiones on the One Shot Podcast -- it's an actual play based on Latin American telenovelas, created by Brandon Leon-Gambetta.

• Media 2070's An Invitation to Dream Up Media Reparations is an organization and movement "to transform who has the capital to produce their own stories by 2070." Central to this work at the moment is the 100-page research paper that investigates anti-Black harm in the U.S. media system. There's also a robust media section with explainers, blog posts, and links to articles where Media 2070 was mentioned.
  • Reclaiming Our Story with Media 2070 is a panel of Black journalists and activists discussing narrative power, and Media 2070's place in shaping our timeline.
  • One of the guests on that panel is Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet. I highly suggest you start with her internal series, DISINFORMED, which I just caught up with yesterday.