I never read Slate because I always find it overstuffed with ads and really irritating to navigate, but I regularly tune in to three of their podcasts, the Culture Gabfest, the Political Gabfest and the Double X Gabfest. Relatively relaxed and unorganized, their approach is a welcome difference to the way NPR presents the same kinds of subjects. When I first started listening I was a little surprised as to how much real information I took away from shows, which can feel haphazardly put together. It made me wonder, for news, political analysis and cultural analysis, how does the style and structure (or lack of structure) of the discussion affect how much we absorb and understand? I find that I easily tune out monotone voices and uninterrupted, flat sounding dialog. On NPR, despite the attempts to give a naturalistic quality to the conversations and reports, it's still hard to escape the fact that a lot of their content is written content which is then read aloud. This is very different from spontaneous conversation where the participants speak mostly from memory, and it's hard to fake that. For something that's very simply produced, the Slate podcasts deliver a lot of interesting shows.
Here's a clip from the Slate Double X gabfest from September 23rd, 2009 about recent studies on female happiness. (Please note, these clips take awhile to load):
Listening to Double X gabfest made me realize I hardly ever listen or watch anything with all women (or all men for that matter) on tv or radio.
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