New and notable podcasts for March

The MeidasTouch Podcast

(MeidasTouch Network)

The Joe Rogan Experience has met its match, said Julia Ornedo in The Daily Beast. While Rogan and other Trump-friendly hosts still hold most of the top slots on Spotify’s daily podcast chart, brothers Ben, Brett, and Jordan Meiselas—all progressive warriors—have shot to the No. 1 position in Podscribe’s monthly ranking and now vie regularly for the daily crown. The brothers’ MeidasTouch podcast more than doubled its reach in the weeks following Trump’s inauguration, while Rogan’s audience was declining by 32 percent. But progressives shouldn’t get too excited about MeidasTouch’s surge, said Dustin Rowles in Pajiba. The Meiselases are media professionals who for several years have been flooding social media platforms with political content funded by their own Super PAC. “They’re basically a rapid-response team for the DNC, if the DNC were run entirely by clickbait merchants.” Looked at another way, “they’re podcast equivalent of that liberal aunt who posts on Facebook every half hour. In person, she’s great! Online, she needs to chill out.”

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Besides fronting The Smashing Pumpkins, ’90s rock hero Billy Corgan is now also a wrestling promoter, café owner, and video podcast host, said Dean Fields in American Songwriter. With The Magnificent Others, he’s out to celebrate overlooked or misunderstood artists, relying on shared professional experiences to coax unique insights and stories from guests such as Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and Gene Simmons of Kiss. “I would like to think that my interview with Gene, which is 90 minutes, is going to be a far different interview than any interview you’d see with Gene,” Corgan has said. It has proved “inspiring” to hear Corgan handle these long interviews and create a conversation he thinks is worthwhile, said Anagricel Duran in NME. In upcoming episodes, he’ll present one of the last interviews with recently deceased soul legend Sam Moore, as well as Mark Laita, host of the YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly. Keep an ear peeled for his chat with singer Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons, which Corgan says generated the show’s craziest story so far.