The Atlantic's 20 Best Podcasts of 2025: Essential Listening
The Atlantic's picks for the year's most compelling audio storytelling, from investigative journalism and cultural analysis to intimate personal narratives. These 20 podcasts represent the best in audio documentary, innovation, and reporting—ranging from Jad Abumrad's exploration of Fela Kuti's resistance music to intimate examinations of period pain, bathing in film, and Christian nationalism in America.
20 shows
Fela Kuti: Fear No Man
Higher Ground & Audible
In a world that's on fire, what is the role of art? What can music actually do? The series, created by Jad Abumrad, explores how Fela Kuti transformed his sound into a battering ram against the state—creating a new musical language of resistance called Afrobeat. It features over 200 interviews with family, scholars, and luminaries, and is presented as an Audible Original by Higher Ground and Audible.
CRAMPED
Kate Downey
One nerd's quest to find out why we know next to nothing about period pain. Tired of suffering from death cramps with no diagnosis for 20 years, Kate Downey has to look for her own answers. She interviews top doctors and researchers, and delves into topics from Greek history to sitcoms to TikTok wellness scams, all to figure out why menstrual pain is so often dismissed and untreated. What she finds will change how you think about your own body and the medical system.
The Selects Podcast
Selects
Selects is a show that brings you unearthed audio works we've found buried in web archives, radio streams, and old podcasts. They've come to us through the recommendations and inspirations of some of the most talented audio creators working today. Every two weeks we release a new episode right here and it is going to be something that you definitely want to hear.
No Such Thing As A Fish
No Such Thing As A Fish
The official channel for the show about everything: four dorks discuss the most amazing facts they've learned over the last seven days. The multi award-winning, globe-travelling, 600-million-download phenomenon. Hosted by Dan Schreiber, James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Ptaszynski.
A Tiny Plot
Snap Judgment
The series focuses on residents of Union Point Park who barricade their tent city, fighting for their own plot of land where they could live in community and set their own rules. It's a five-part documentary from KQED's Snap Studios, hosted by Shaina Shealy, exploring scarcity, community, and the complexity of building something new from the margins of a broken system.
Signal Hill
Signal Hill
Signal Hill is an audio magazine. Find out more at signalhill.fm
Charlie's Place
Pushkin Industries
Charlie's Place by Rhym Guissé tells the story of a Black man who ran an integrated night club in Myrtle Beach during the Jim Crow era, examining race, music, and resistance in the segregated South.
Why Is Amy in the Bath?
Why Is Amy in the Bath?
Why Is Amy in the Bath? investigates why actor Amy Adams appears in so many bathing scenes. Created by journalists Brandon R. Reynolds and Gabby Lombardo, the 6-part series examines bathing across 1,500 films, featuring interviews with writers, actors, and set designers. The show explores the deeper meaning of bathing while touching on wellness and Calgon commercials, hit thriller novels, consumer trends, sex in America, and the way nostalgia traps us in an endless now.
Forged
CBC + ABC
Forged explores the largest art crime fraud in the world, focusing on forged paintings attributed to Norval Morrisseau, known as the Picasso of the North. Host Adrian Stimson, an artist from the Siksika Nation, investigates thousands of forged paintings, millions of dollars in profits, multiple fraud rings, and even a suspected murder, traveling from Thunder Bay to Australia to uncover the scope of the scheme.
Embedded
NPR
Embedded is NPR's home for audio documentaries that brings untold stories to light through deeply reported narrative series. The channel focuses on exploring what's been sealed off, undisclosed, or overlooked – and the people at the heart of those stories. Recent series include Alternate Realities, exploring conspiracy theories within families.
A Whole Other Country
Marfa Public Radio
A Whole Other Country is a new podcast from the award-winning Marfa Public Radio Studios. Back in the '90s, in an off-the-grid neighborhood in the mountains of Far West Texas, a wannabe vintner started his own Wild West nation. Reporter and host Zoe Kurland drives the long, bumpy roads of the Davis Mountains to talk to a cast of neighbors and onlookers who watched the story of the standoff unfold in real time -- the myths of the frontier crashing violently into reality.
Our Ancestors Were Messy
Nichole Hill
A recap of the gossip, scandals, and pop culture that made headlines and then history in pre-Civil Rights Era America. Host Nichole Hill takes her guests through the story of an ancestor in search of opportunity, adventure, love, and a way to beat Jim Crow. Along the way, these ancestors make messes that land them in the gossip columns of Black newspapers.
Debt Heads
Jamie Feldman & Rachel Webster
A narrative podcast turning the concept of debt upside down. Season One launches March 18th, 2025.
Summer Album/Winter Album
Jody Avirgan & Craig Finn
On this podcast we believe that all albums are either summer albums or winter albums. But what defines them? The lyrics, the music, your personal relationship with the record? Summer Album/Winter Album is a musical debate podcast with Jody Avirgan (538, 30 for 30, Radiotopia) and Craig Finn (The Hold Steady). Each episode, Jody and Craig offer their opening arguments, and then with the help of a guest, explore one of the greatest records of all time.
Heavyweight
Pushkin Industries
Maybe you've laid awake and imagined how it could have been, how it might yet be, but the moment to act was never right. Well, the moment is here and the podcast making it happen is Heavyweight. Join Jonathan Goldstein for road trips, thorny reunions, and difficult conversations as he backpedals his way into the past like a therapist with a time machine.
When The Wolves Came
Meanings of Democracy Lab
When The Wolves Came examines how large swaths of evangelicals in the U.S. have embraced an extremist politics that threatens to turn our democracy into a theocracy. Through the lens of a Phoenix pastor, the series documents evangelical leaders working to resist this movement and connect with broader pro-democracy efforts. Hosted by Dr. Ruth Braunstein, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut who leads the Meanings of Democracy Lab researching resistance to Christian Nationalism.
The Coldest Shift
Hat Trick Podcasts
In 2020 at the height of the pandemic, only one continent remained Covid free - Antarctica. And it was the job of the British Antarctic Survey, and Dr. Rachel Varnam, to keep it that way. The Coldest Shift follows Dr. Rachel Varnam, the ships Doctor on board the Royal Research Ship James Clarke Ross on her final voyage to the Antarctic before being replaced by the RRS Sir David Attenborough. This series casts a unique ear on the oft-unseen realities of Antarctic medicine and life at sea on an polar vessel.
The Plot Thickens
TCM
Our sixth season is Cleopatra, a six-episode series about one of the most expensive and infamous movies ever made. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Cleopatra should have been a smash. Instead, it was a shoot plagued by medical emergencies, climate disasters, nervous breakdowns, and the most scandalous love affair to ever hit a movie set. Join host Ben Mankiewicz as he digs through his own family stories to understand how it turned out so badly for his Oscar-winning uncle.
Cannonball with Wesley Morris
The New York Times
Conversations about the culture that moves us – the good, the bad and whatever's in between. Every week, critic Wesley Morris talks with writers and artists about the moment we're in. Surprisingly personal and never obvious, new episodes drop Thursdays.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
Noiser
Titanic: Ship of Dreams from Noiser Podcast Network, narrated by Paul McGann, provides a definitive account of the Titanic disaster.