Image by Anthony Albright, available under a Creative Commons License
It’s a week of returns! I’m finally getting back to the business of writing about podcasts with my first Week in Review in a month and a podcast marks the return of The X-Files to television. Also, a giant figure in sports made a podcast appearance and more.
The X-Files Files
The episode of Kumail Nanjiani’s The X-Files Files fans have been waiting for arrived last week. Nanjiani, for those unfamiliar, is a die hard (DIE HARD!) fan of The X-Files, and to his great delight was able to secure an appearance in the upcoming X-Files miniseries starting later this week. During taping of the show, Nanjiani recorded a brief discussion between him and the stars of the show, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny. You can hear the activity on set as the three chat about the old show, including favorite episodes of Anderson’s and Duchovny’s. Duchovny for his part showed off an incredible memory for the old episodes and the actors that appeared in them. If you’re itching for the new miniseries to start, you can start scratching that itch by listening to this episode of Nanjiani’s homage to The X-Files (and binge the rest of the podcast episodes if you’d like).
Edge of Sports
Last Wednesday’s Edge of Sports featured an interview with one of the all-time basketball greats: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Since Edge of Sports is about the intersection of sports and politics, host Dave Zirin spoke with the basketball hall of famer more about his political activity off of the court rather than his accomplishments on the court. Zirin titled this particular episode “A Beautiful Mind,” and listening to Abdul-Jabbar speak, you get a sense for what Zirin was thinking. Abdul-Jabbar showed you can talk about difficult topics like politics, religion and race while being both calm and assertive in your beliefs. The discussion weaved through the historical (Abdul-Jabbar’s participation in the Ali Summit) and the current (the political candidacies of Trump, Sanders and Clinton), the serious (terrorism) and silly (Abdul-Jabbar’s role in the movie Airplane). It’s a fascinating interview well worth a listen regardless of whether you’re a basketball fan.
Biz Please
The Mashable business team launched a new podcast last week called Biz Please. Hosts and Mashable business writers Jason Abbruzzese and Seth Figgerman, joined by editor Heidi Moore, talked about a number of current news items in business and technology, from the recent State of the Union address to the up-and-down stock market to Sean Penn’s interview with El Chapo. The group also used the opportunity to start their podcast and the new year with a few predictions for 2016 and beyond. If you’re a fan of Evernote, like me, you may want to skip this last part.
Call Chelsea Peretti
Few podcasts can be as hilarious and cringe-worthy as Chelsea Peretti’s, and last week’s episode was no exception. Actor and comedian Nick Kroll visited Peretti for a new episode, though it wasn’t long before Kroll and Peretti were dispatched in favor of their characters Bobby Bottleservice and his girlfriend Farley. The two disgusting characters proceeded to take calls from a long line of poor podcast listeners, throwing insults at them, propositioning them for threesomes, and calling out the college educated, all while going in and out of their own relationship issues. Plenty of laughs and cringes to go around.
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