I was on edge weekly waiting for the next episode of Gizmodo’s 6-part podcast The Gateway. Journalist Jennings Brown investigates the dangerous effects of Youtube guru Teal Swan on her loyal Facebook followers. Teal, who has no degree or professional experience, admits to using SEO and tags to target depressed and suicidal people and has created her own therapy practices to treat them. She is hypnotic and alluring and adamant she is not the leader of a cult, although her followers do call themselves the Teal Tribe. There’s much more to this story that I can’t give away, and it made me wish this podcast would never end. — CD 

I greatly enjoyed this episode of my long-time favorite BBC podcast, In Our Time: The American Populists. It describes an earlier rise of populism in America around 1880, an era I knew nothing about, but one that has a few parallels with and lessons for the current outbreak of populism in the US. — KK

To encourage me to take a long-term view, I’m a regular at the Seminars for Long-term Thinking hosted by the Long Now Foundation (where I am a founding board member). The hour-long talks (plus 30 minute Q&A) happen once a month in San Francisco. The topics are surprisingly diverse, ranging from ancient history to speculative futures, from food to nuclear power, from Silicon Valley to the Silk Road — all with a slant to the next 10,000 years. Several hundred past talks are archived and available to the public as free podcasts. For those outside San Francisco, or disinclined to travel unnecessarily, a membership to the Long Now gives you access to a real-time streaming version of each talk; you can even ask questions live. — KK

You know about Song Exploder, yes? It’s this amazing podcast that takes one well-known song each week and explodes it into its separate components. The musicians who wrote and perform the song take it apart track by track, sometimes beat by beat, explaining what they were thinking as they created the pieces: what challenges and dead-ends they met along the way, how the song changed as they worked on it, and why they like the final version. It’s the x-ray into music I always wanted. — KK

Supreme Court decisions can be monumental in their consequences, but they often hinge on very specific, sometimes messy cases. More Perfect is a super podcast from the folks at Radio Lab that burrows deep into the specifics of Supreme Court cases, in order to illuminate their logic and meaning. All the episodes are fantastic, but a recent one on the Commerce Clause in the US Constitution — One Nation, Under Money — is especially great. I was shocked how little I knew about this clause, and consider this audio lesson to be essential listening for any American. No matter what your political tilt you’ll be perturbed and educated. Afterwards, listen to the rest of the shows. — KK

Frank Ostaseski has accompanied over 1,000 people as they died in a hospice, and in this 60-minute podcast (recorded at a Long Now seminar), he distills what lessons the dying — and death — have taught him. Their wisdom is deep, complex, potent, intimate, and unexpected (not cliche). It will shift your relationship to life. Listening (or watching the video) will be one of the best hours in your life. — KK

I’m totally hooked on S-Town, an amazing 6-hour audio documentary from the folks that brought you the hit podcast Serial. Although it starts out like Serial, S-Town takes off as a deep dive into another America most listeners like me have never experienced. Plenty of plot twists amid a parade of local character and colors: Southern Gothic, redneck, Trump country blues. But at its heart it’s a story of one person’s attempt to make sense of his life. — KK

“No one reaches out to you for compassion or empathy so you can teach them how to behave better. They reach out to us because they believe in our capacity to know our darkness well enough to sit in the dark with them.” This quote comes from Brené Brown’s The Power of Vulnerability. Her talk and teachings on authenticity, connection, and courage, based on 12 years of research, inspired me to be a better friend to those in my life — to show up and be present and hold a space of empathy for those in need. Available as a 6-hour audible download or audio CD, listening to her is like listening to your funniest friend, who’s also a doctor. — CD

A really great podcast episode well worth listening to is 17 Great Questions That Can Change Your Life, by Tim Ferriss. This is an audible extract from his book Tools of Titans. In this session he lists the 17 questions that he asks himself on a regular basis in order to get the most from his life. They are very effective probes. This podcast is a good introduction to his book, which is also very useful. — KK

I’m late to the party, but I’ve been enjoying the sweet sounds of the now popular group Pentatonix. It’s a five-voice a cappella choir. One voice is a great beat-box artist who supplies the instrumentation. Somehow their arrangements get everything right. They do originals and covers and I can listen to them for hours. They found their audience on YouTube. — KK

A new podcast I am enjoying is Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History. You get typical Gladwellian reporting, voiced by Gladwell himself. His theme is the re-telling of things everyone knows, so that these “official” stories are inverted, reversed, undermined, or in some way seen new. It’s contrarian by design. If you like his books, you’ll like his podcast and vice versa. — KK

An awesome podcast episode that I loved is “The Man of the People” on Reply All. In only 42 minutes it tells the nearly incredible true story about a charlatan who made millions by surgically implanting goat testicals in men, almost became governor of Kansas to escape censure, moved to the Mexico side of the border to broadcast in the US without US oversight, made country and western music a national thing, by his quackery provoked the creation of the AMA (American Medical Association), and invented commercial radio. This podcast has the distinction of being the first podcast to be turned into a Hollywood movie, starring Robert Downey Jr. If you want to know what podcasts are about, try this one. — KK

Some of the best music being written these days is for movie soundtracks. Because they usually lack dialog and lyrics, I find movie scores easy to listen to while working. If you want some suggestions to start with, this is a decent list of the best scores since the start of this century. Quite a few of them are available on Spotify. — KK

Get free, high-quality sound effects of almost anything you can think of for your podcasts, apps, or movies at Freesound. — MF

I’ve been using the SoundHound smartphone app for years to identify songs, but my 15-year-old told me to switch to Shazam. She’s right, it’s much easier to use the features that I need. My favorite way to use: If I’m in a store or a coffee shop that’s playing unfamiliar music that sounds great, I just press the large button on the screen and it will grab the title and artist of every song and save it for later. I can then easily add the songs to Apple Music (you can also save to Spotify) and save them to my library. — MF

The free NaturalReader smartphone app (iOS and Android) converts text to speech. To use it, open the app, select a document from DropBox, Google Reader, or a website. NaturalReader will upload it and read it in a voice of your choosing. — MF

VoiceBase takes audio recordings and turns them into text. It also analyzes the text to identify subjects and keywords, and can play back the audio as it highlights the text. It’s not as good as a human transcriber, but it does a decent job and is much cheaper (2 cents a minute compared to $1 a minute for a human).You get $60 in free credit to try it out, too. — MF

I do most of my writing and editing in Google Docs. Sometimes, though, I am asked to edit a manuscript in Word. In those cases, I don’t really use Word because it is bloated and clunky. Instead, I use a free Word-compatible word processor called Bean (for OS X only). It’s snappy and the “full screen” view creates a distraction-free editing experience. — MF

Sometimes my eyes deceive me when proofreading. I came across this blog post and now I’ve been double-checking long paragraphs by right clicking on them (using Chrome) and selecting Speech > Start Speaking. If it sounds off, it usually means I dropped a word. — CD 

I use Evernote for work and personal note keeping, but I have to admit Bear, which is referred to as the “beautiful writing app”, is more enjoyable to use on my phone. It’s so clean and pretty and easy to format. I’ve been using it as a daily journal and for poem writing. — CD