Are you on a plane, train, or automobile this Thanksgiving? Taking a quick walk outside to digest all your Friendsgiving food? Inject a new podcast into your existing listening habits with Nashville Public Radio’s staff 2025 podcast recommendations.
As is our tradition, we asked our staffers for their favorite podcast episodes throughout the year and compiled a list for your listening pleasure, traveling distraction, digestive companion.
It’s worth noting that our podcast, The Country in Our Hearts, was a Nashville Scene Best Of 2025 pick for Audio Storytelling this year. So not technically our recommendation, but a worthy addition to your podcast queue. Julianne Akers of the Nashville Scene notes in her description: “The four-episode series details the tragic history of conflict in the region of Iraqi Kurdistan and how Nashville became home to the largest Kurdish population in the U.S. Gilbert traveled to the region and sorted through decades of archived materials to chronicle this story through the lens of one Nashville family, painting a larger picture of America’s current immigration landscape.”
Let’s dive into the list!
Links below to listen, or check them out in this Spotify playlist.
The Alabama Murders
I am not a true crime buff or Gladwell stan, but when a friend mentioned this podcast I knew Malcolm had made it for me. Not only was this set within 90 minutes of where I grew up in northern Alabama, it’s a great 101 on the death penalty and concerns around accuracy and execution methods. Something I really value good reporting on. Filling out my bingo card for this series, though, is Nashville’s own Lee Camp (also a native Alabamian and host of No Small Endeavor). In the first episode, Lee intimately lays out the history and pains of the small Christian (non) denomination I grew up in — the Church of Christ. I felt seen and understood in a way I didn’t know I needed.
— Tasha A.F. Lemley
New Yorker Fiction Podcast
Aleksandar Hemon reads ZZ Packer
I ran a marathon last spring, and this podcast is what got me through long hours of training. It’s not simply writers reading their work (that would be the New Yorker’s “Writer’s Voice” podcast). Rather, writers who have published in the New Yorker select other works published by the New Yorker, read them, and talk about why they selected them. I love the two-part element — you get maybe half an hour of falling into a story, and then you get to hear some of the most qualified people in fiction (a New Yorker author plus longtime fiction editor Deborah Treisman) dissect the story in ways I have, often, never considered.
You really can’t go wrong with any episode, but this was a recent listen and lives large in my memory. Plus, ZZ Packer is a professor at Vanderbilt!
— Cynthia Abrams
Unexplainable (by Vox)
This was one of those stories that broke my brain. What do you mean, we don’t have an agreement on what a music note sounds like????? Emily Siner goes into some ancient music lore to a story about musical notes that involves Nazis, jazz, and rogue classical music note influencers. It’s pitch perfect.
— Justin Barney
American History Hit
“Who Was the Worst President Ever?”
This year, American History Hit had a lot of episodes with Tennessee connections, but to me the standout was the finale to their series of profiles of U.S. Presidents. They did one episode debating who was the best president (living veterans of the White House were excluded from consideration) and another debating the worst. Spoiler alert, all three from Tennessee (Jackson, Polk, Andrew Johnson) made it into one or the other of those conversations. What sets this particular episode apart for me is the discussion of what we want (and don’t want) from a president and, fascinatingly, how that’s changed dramatically over time.
— Nina Cardona
How Wild
Last year I got certified as a Master Naturalist and it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I’ve reconsidered my relationship with “all things nature” and this podcast by Marissa Ortega-Welch was eye-opening in terms of understanding the nature of “untrammeled”, how wilderness is defined, what wilderness management entails and the complexities of balancing human impact on spaces that are designated to be free from human intervention.
— Megan Jones
This Is Nashville
By far, this was the most downloaded show of 2025 for This Is Nashville. Since airing, I’ve found myself talking about Roger Williams University a dozen times as an example of how building a community requires us to be curious about our shared history. The school started alongside Fisk and Meharry right after the Civil War to educate formerly enslaved people. It thrived for a time and moved out West End to a campus alongside Vanderbilt, which had just gotten started. The school’s buildings then burned in two suspicious fires in 1905, and the fortunes of Roger Williams faded into history over the following decades. Until now, all that has been left is a pair of historical plaques on what is now the Peabody campus of Vanderbilt. Hats off to producer Mary Mancini for landing this episode that struck a chord with so many.
— Blake Farmer
Outward
“1: Setting The Table | When We All Get to Heaven”
When We All Get to Heaven is a ten-part series from Slate’s Outward. Drawn from 1,200 cassette-tape recordings, the podcast chronicles a gay church—Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco (MCC-SF)—during the AIDS crisis. Through preserved sermons, conversations, and moments of care, we hear people facing loss, hope, fear, and faith in real time. The voices of those who lived and died make the story deeply humanizing. The series also challenges the idea of religion as only exclusionary for LGBTQ+ people; these tapes reveal a spiritual community that offered sanctuary, belonging, and imaginative hope when despair seemed insurmountable.
— Ray Curenton-Dillinger
On the Media
“Brooke talks AI with Ed Zitron”
On the Media is my weekly companion. And from all its episodes this year, I’m still thinking about this January interview with Ed Zitron. It would be an understatement to call Zitron a generative-AI skeptic. In this conversation, he describes AI benchmarking tests as kayfabe, dubs the industry’s leading man Sam Altman a “nasty little man,” and reminds us that “the only thing that grows forever is cancer,” referring to silicon valley’s unquenchable appetite for growth capital. As all bells ring in the coming of the AI revolution, it is refreshing – and important – to hear from someone with a more cynical take on the industry’s claims of innovation and inevitability.
— Jesse Strauss
Hard Fork
I’m generally opposed to podcasts of the “two men bantering on their mics” variety, especially about tech, and especially about AI — but, I admit, I’ve been won over by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton of the New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast. They are hilarious together, and they bring sharp and incisive reporting about the world of AI. I particularly love when they ask tech leaders tough questions, like in this episode about AI’s environmental impact. I’m still referencing this episode all these months later.
— Emily Siner
This American Life
“The Hand That Rocks The Gavel”
As a criminal justice reporter, I know first hand how difficult it can be to get access a part of the system that impacts so many people — the court. There are a lot of rules about where we can and cannot record inside a courthouse, forms to fill out and hoops to jump through. This episode of This American Life takes listeners behind the scenes, getting wildly candid reactions from immigration judges who are having their lives and careers rocked by changes from the federal government.
— Paige Pfleger
Women Like Sex
Ep. 2: The Revolution is Cuming
Why are there so many myths about female orgasms, and what are the tangible and psychological consequences? Award-winning reporter and former WPLN contributor Natasha Senjanovic explores these ideas in a delightfully witty conversation with sex expert Dr. Laurie Mintz. Both women clearly have such admiration for each other’s knowledge and dedication to changing language that devalues women’s sexuality, excludes LGBTQ populations, and contributes to the “orgasm gap.”
Society often defines “sex” as penis-in-vagina intercourse. In this context, Dr. Mintz says it overvalues men’s most reliable route to orgasm while undervaluing women’s most reliable route to orgasm. If the script was flipped, foreplay (a word Mintz thinks should be junked) would be called sex, and intercourse would be called post-play. Instead, she suggests that each sexual act should be called what it is — and sex should describe the whole of an encounter.
— Caroline Eggers
Music Citizens
Never stop learning. That’s a sensation I get when listening to Music Citizens and the surprising behind-the-scenes music tales that it unearths. And let me be clear: I’m not talking about sordid war stories from famous musicians. Quite the opposite: These are the stories and wisdom of the unsung heroes of our music industry. The Tuner is Brent Arledge, the most prolific piano tuner in the city (if not the world). You’ll venture into some famous spaces and discover a distinct multi-generation Music City story.
— Tony Gonzalez
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