The best thing about podcasts is that you can listen to them while you’re doing other things: Washing dishes, going for a run, coloring, and especially, driving. But there are so many podcasts these days that it’s simply impossible to keep up. New ones are debuting all the time, and it’s hard to know whether they deserve a spot in your feed.
Every week, we highlight new and returning podcasts we couldn’t put down. Whether you’re looking for the latest and greatest or you’re just dipping your toe into the vast ocean of podcasts, we’ll find you something worth listening to. This week, we’ve got podcasts about the restaurant biz, a mysterious condition, and Ronan Farrow.
It’s not always a guarantee, but anecdotally you’ll often find that people who have worked in food service will tip well barring almost anything. The food arrives cold or the waiter is surly, and they’ll still leave 20%. Waitstaff often get blamed for factors beyond their control, and the money they make that night could mean the difference between paying the electric bill or not.
It’s also pretty common knowledge that restaurant profit margins are thin, and there are a lot of invisible costs that go into the burger’s price tag on the menu. Katy Osuna is trying to shed some light on what goes on behind the scenes in season two of Copper & Heat. In the first episode, she explains the profit margins at State & Lemp, a now-closed restaurant in Boise, Idaho. Episode two is all about staffing issues. The industry relies heavily on immigrants, and good help is so hard to find, that owners are willing to look the other way when it comes to workers who are undocumented.
Every couple of years, there are news stories about someone turning orange from eating too many carrots. No one freaks out, because it’s a harmless condition, carotenemia, with a known cause: An excess of beta-carotene.
Episode one of Tycho Newman’s new audio drama, Black Friday, is titled “Acute Spontaneous Melanization.” It’s a very scientific name for a fictional condition. If the name Sam Gregor makes you think of the main character in The Metamorphosis — Gregor Samsa — it’s likely not a coincidence. Sam awakens to find he’s undergone a transformation. His skin has darkened overnight. Everything else is the same, but now he looks like a black man. At first, the world seems to treat it with the same nonchalance as it does carotenemia, though there doesn’t seem to be any clear cause for Sam’s increased melanin. It barely rates a mention on the local news. But Sam has to navigate a world that treats him differently, and, the first episode hints, he’s not alone.
Ronan Farrow is 31 years old and has written two books, to which I say a hearty congratuwelldone. His latest is Catch and Kill, and there’s a new companion podcast.
While investigating accusations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein, Farrow had some frightening experiences. He was being followed, and in the first episode, Farrow speaks with Igor Ostrovskiy, one of the people doing the spying. Ostrovskiy became a source for Farrow and appears in the book. The podcast gives more of the private investigator’s background, explaining why surveilling reporters made him uncomfortable. Future episodes will feature more audio Farrow taped along the way, including what he recorded when he said NBC tried to squash his story on Weinstein.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.