Did you know that when you apply for a relief loan through the Small Business Administration, you have to certify that you don’t “present live performances of a prurient sexual nature”? I sure didn’t. This is one of almost innumerable obstacles for the modern sex worker; it’s also one of the topics Parker Westwood hopes […]

“It’s not really easy to be an open LGBTQ person in Russia,” says Kristina Vazovsky from the other end of the Zoom call, where the just-risen sun is making her squint. Vazovsky, founder of podcast company ТОЛК (“TOLK” in English), is thirteen time zones away. She is not in Russia — not anymore. Even if […]

At one point, The World According to Sound was a podcast. A 90-second, narration-less podcast, but a podcast. It captured sound, not stories, like the slurp of a mudpot. Born from Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff’s frustration with the conventions of narrative audio, it eschewed information transmission for pure sensory experience. And when the pair […]

These days, podcasts might not sound as crisp as they used to, with many audio producers relying indefinitely on guests and sources recording themselves from home under pandemic conditions. Not long into the initial lockdowns last spring, Caroline Crampton asked in this newsletter: “When should in-person tape syncs resume?” Now, almost a year later, the […]

As most listserv arguments do, it started with a simple question: “Best way to learn ProTools?” Almost thirty email replies later, audio reporter Emily Guerin had stockpiled plenty of answers: LinkedIn Learning, private lessons, YouTube tutorials. But she was also left with another question: Is Pro Tools even worth it in the first place? Pro […]