'The Memory Palace' Is on The 100 Best Podcasts of All Time
We tend to think about history through the lens of major events, notable names, and distinguishable causes and effects. But Memory Palace , created and produced by Nate DiMeo and part of the Radiotopia collective, puts a poetic wrinkle into that framework. The storytelling podcast and occasional radio segment features short, narrative, nonfiction essays and vignettes told in DiMeo's solemn voice and set to soft background music, shedding light on the forgotten moments and people of America's past—the second woman to cross the English Channel, the laborers who built the Brooklyn Bridge, the structures on Coney Island. Since it debuted in 2008, Memory Palace has earned widespread acclaim and drawn steady praise for its time-travel storytelling. In 2016, DiMeo was named a Peabody finalist and, last year, compiled the best stories from his hundreds of episodes into a book.
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Los Angeles Times
11-08-2025
- Los Angeles Times
‘Somebody Somewhere' showed Joel's ‘naked and real' truth — and Jeff Hiller's too
'I know it's a cliche to say I wasn't expecting it, but I was not expecting it,' says Jeff Hiller of his surprise Emmy nomination for his supporting role in the HBO comedy 'Somebody Somewhere.' One could forgive Hiller's low expectations. Starring Bridget Everett as Sam, a single, middle-aged woman navigating small-town life in Kansas alongside her best friend, Joel (Hiller), the critical darling was named one of the AFI's best TV shows of the year in 2023 and won a Peabody in 2024, yet failed to earn attention from the Television Academy. And in a crowded field of comic competitors — Emmy winners 'Abbott Elementary,' 'The Bear' and 'Hacks,' plus the celeb-stuffed 'Only Murders in the Building' and 'The Studio' — it seemed unlikely for the small-town dramedy to break through in its final year. 'No one had said, 'I bet it's gonna happen,'' says Hiller. Which is why Hiller wasn't tuned into the Emmy noms announcement last month, and even ignored the call from his manager that morning. 'I was on the phone with my sister, and I was like, 'They'll call back.'' says Hiller. When that conversation was interrupted by another call, this time from his agent, Hiller assumed that he was in trouble. 'I [was about to] shoot a movie, and I thought, 'Oh, crap. Am I supposed to be in Boston right now?'' As for how he clinched the nom, Hiller's best guess is the timely publication of his comic memoir, 'Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success,' which hit bookstores just two days before Emmy voting opened in June. Among his cohort of Emmy-nominated performers, the rest of Hiller's day may have been the most humble of them all: 'I hung up with my agent, went to the airport to go to Boston and spent the night alone in a Residence Inn.' But there's something perfectly thematic about a no-frills Emmy nom celebration, particularly for the actor playing 'Somebody Somewhere's' sweet and lovable sidekick Joel. A local of Manhattan, Kan. — where Everett's Sam returns following the death of her sister and, over time, builds a chosen family of misfits and weirdos — Joel is the best friend everyone would want, someone who is supportive to a fault and often pushes Sam to find joy in the everyday. Just as the show introduces Joel and Sam in the pilot, Hiller was a fan of Everett's before they began their collaboration. Both actors moved to New York and established their own chosen families around performance: Everett in the downtown cabaret scene, centered on Joe's Pub at the Public Theater; Hiller at Upright Citizens Brigade, where he taught and performed improv. While Everett made a name for herself with her bawdy shows blending rock ballads and blue humor, Hiller appeared on and off-Broadway and steadily won bit parts in film and TV, often playing gay waiters, assistants and salesmen. Their worlds in New York naturally overlapped, and it was Everett who reached out to Hiller about an audition for Joel's character in 2019. Compared to the smaller roles that populate Hiller's IMDb page, Joel — one of the more nuanced queer characters on television in recent years — is more finespun. Having grown up in a Lutheran family in San Antonio, Hiller recognized a lot of himself in a 40-something gay man who attends church, even if a queer Christian may seem unfamiliar to metropolitan viewers on either coast. 'I know people in Texas who are gay and who go to church every week, and that's where they found their community — that's the place that is nice to them,' he says. 'I know this guy so well. I would have been this guy if I hadn't moved to New York.' Hiller commends series creators Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen (who, alongside Everett, earned an Emmy nomination this year as writers of the series finale) for Joel's complexity and for building a world in which its marginalized characters aren't constantly burdened by what makes them different. 'I'm sure there are small-minded people in Manhattan, but our show just wasn't focused on that part,' he says. 'That takes a lot of work in the storytelling for a mainstream audience. I kind of [worried] we'd never get picked up.' But Joel is much more than 'a gay guy who goes to church,' as evident in his Season 3 arc, which sees him settling into a relationship with the equally sweet, if more introverted, Brad (played by Tim Bagley). Entering his first real relationship at middle age is bittersweet for Joel, who always imagined achieving the typical milestones — including having kids. 'He's grateful for the life he's had, but he's also mourning the things he dreamed of having that he can no longer have,' explains Hiller. 'I found that to be true to me in my life. It's scarier to portray things that are so naked and real, obvious and truthful.' Joel also has a cathartic reunion with a childhood bully, spun from conversations in which Bos and Thureen asked Hiller what he would want to hear from his own past tormentors. 'That's for me and my therapist to discuss,' he jokes. While he's still processing his Emmy nom and planning for the HBO after-party ('Do they let you in even if you don't win?'), he treasures the experience of making 'Somebody Somewhere' as its own reward. 'If I could play a role like that for six weeks once a year, for the rest of my life? I'd be more than fulfilled.'
Elle
05-08-2025
- Elle
How Rugby and Improv Turned Lulu Miller Into One of Radio's Best Storytellers
Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. In monthly series Office Hours, we ask people in powerful positions to take us through their first jobs, worst jobs, and everything in between. This month, we spoke with Lulu Miller, the reporter and author behind some of radio's most revered shows. After starting her career—and getting a journalism crash course—at WNYC's inimitable Radiolab, Miller went on to launch NPR's Invisibilia alongside This American Life's Alix Spiegel; the two earned a Peabody nomination for the program in 2015. Miller is also known for her astounding off-kilter memoir, 2020's bestselling Why Fish Don't Exist, and her children's book, Trucky Roads. Currently, she's the co-host of Radiolab and the host of its made-for-kids spin-off, Terrestrials, and you can catch her doing live versions of both shows at New York City's Little Island this week. Below, the former rugby player-slash-improv performer reveals the dream job she quit, the cold call that brought her to the mic, and the profound moment she discovered her own interviewing style. My first job was working for Pine Ridge Builders. It was a small construction company owned by my best friend's dad. When we were 15, the summer after our sophomore year, we worked for him, mostly hauling junk into the big dumpster. He taught us how to do some shingling. We helped with decks. I grew up in the Boston suburbs, and both my parents were professors. There was a degree to which my life was really bookish, and [this job] was this incredibly satisfying, but also really hard, summer of getting to use my hands to both take apart and make [things]. No stretch, I see radio as incredibly sculptural. Every single piece, I listen to it, I take it on a walk, and the minute I'm away from the computer, I can hear it in this way where I'm like, 'Oh, the top—knock that off. This back end should be the front.' It suddenly becomes a physical puzzle. My worst job It's really embarrassing. I was teaching creative writing at [the University of Virginia], and it should have been a dream job. I was so lucky to have it. But I find the work of engaging 15 brains in the moment, and having to stand up in front of them and not care about their approval, [to be difficult]. It made me see how hard that work is, and this wasn't even a hard setting—these were nerdy college kids who wanted to take the class. But it required a set of skills I simply do not possess, and after the two years I had to do it, I put down my chalk and was like, 'I don't have what it takes.' I struggled sometimes with sadness and having a slightly chaotic house [growing up], and my dream was to spend my day escaping the world. I wrote tons of fiction stories as a kid. I'd lay down on my parents' bed while they were out and just write, write, write. It felt like sledding—not knowing where it was going to go. I had so much control, and it was so quiet. But then I didn't study English, because I didn't want to pollute it with school; I wanted it to be my private thing. My first job out of college, I was working for a woodworker in his shop, and we had radio and WNYC on all the time. Radiolab was just starting as a show; I heard that and This American Life. It was making me laugh, it was making me feel, it was doing what I had always wanted stories to do, but even more viscerally. It was literally a calling; I can't describe it any other way. So I reached out, and Radiolab said I could volunteer for a day. I learned how to do all the stuff that helps make the ship run. I got so lucky on timing, because no one really knew about the show yet. I got a job as their first producer, and I learned story by story. I listened to so many different reporters as they would interview people, and that was my journalism school. I watched how many ways there are to interview, so many different ways to open people up. We did a show about the way music interacts with the brain and becomes hooky. I interviewed this guy Leo Rangell, who was 94 and had full-bodied musical hallucinations. He had been a psychoanalyst, so he started analyzing the songs, like, oh, this one was when my wife... I suddenly realized the songs were his companions, because everyone [in his life] was dying; he had to cross all the names off his address book. He was telling a story about a song, and I was like, 'Oh, could you sing it?' Maybe that's inappropriate to ask an old man, but he sang it, and he started crying. It felt like this intimate space where I was really talking to him like me, and he was really responding to me as me. And there was this profound emotional connection. It was very powerful. I went to a great college, and I swear the best learnings were on the rugby field. I was an outside center, and I would get the pass and run, and it was so exciting to tackle. It was so exciting to be a part of a team. Now on Terrestrials and Radiolab, the magic is literally in passing the script back and forth. Rugby created this zone to think about different strengths; the way you get the ball down is with collaboration. It helped me stay in my body and out of my head, and it helped me be proud of—instead of afraid of—my own strength. That's really cheesy. I don't think I've ever said that out loud, but it's true. I was walking by the auditions, and they shouted, 'Hey, we need more girls to audition.' I was in my pajamas in my dorm, and I was like, 'Okay.' I didn't overthink it. Especially in college, or in those early years when you're out on your own, there can be a tendency to prove your worth and be a little lighthouse of eloquence or humor or whatever. But improv is all about listening and so is journalism. You show your worth by really tracking what someone else says and asking the next question. What you should do—in journalism, in social situations, in anything—is listen past where you're bored. Then you could start to get to something interesting. Still, when I cold call someone, when I begin an interview, I feel like I'm going on that stage for an hour. It was the first show on NPR that was hosted by two women. It freaked people out for real. So we didn't know if it was a good idea. I remember one of the comments was like, 'I might like this topic if you didn't sound like you were talking about going shopping all the time.' Somebody sent me an image of McDonald's french fries with mine and [my co-host] Alix [Spiegel]'s faces on it—vocal fries or whatever. I don't even think I have vocal fry. I don't even think vocal fry is real. I think it's the emperor's clothes that men invented to have a new way to hate on women. We just really wanted to explore all these different invisible things and feelings, which are often discounted but affect everything: behavior, economy, technology, politics. We wanted to tell these stories, and then we were very lucky with our timing. Invisibilia released six weeks after Serial finished, and people were like, 'I want [another] podcast,' and there we were. Our first season got 50 million downloads, and we got immediately on hundreds of stations. Doing science journalism in this moment where science is under attack has brought out a real sense of vitality and strength on the team. We've always cared deeply about what we do, but doing it right now, there's this urgency and excitement; we know that we are still a place a lot of people come to for science reporting. And I'm so excited about the work that's coming out this summer and fall. We're taking some risks. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
USA Today
05-08-2025
- USA Today
'The Daily Show' is on hiatus. Here's when it'll return.
Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" is on hiatus, but not for too long. The Emmy and Peabody award-winning late night comedy series is taking an extended break until September during its 30th season. The break comes after Jon Stewart, who propelled to fame during his first stint as host, returned as a one-day-a-week anchor in 2024. Trevor Noah (Stewart's first replacement) bridged most of the gap in hosting duties before leaving the desk in 2022. In addition to Stewart, episodes are hosted by comedians Ronny Chieng, Josh Johnson, Jordan Klepper, Desi Lydic and Michael Kosta. Lydic announced the break at the end of the latest episode in July. 'We're going on a production break for August, which was planned months and months ago. So don't freak out," said Lydic, alluding to the abrupt cancellation of fellow late night host Stephen Colbert's "The Late Show" on CBS. "Have a great summer and we'll see you in September when we can all freak out together," Lydic said. 'King of the Hill': How the show rediscovered its voice with new Hulu revival When does 'The Daily Show' return? The series is set to return to the air in September 2025 after a "pre-planned" hiatus, show representative Parker Moreno confirmed to USA TODAY. How to watch 'The Daily Show' "The Daily Show" airs weeknights, Monday through Thursday, at 11 p.m. ET/10 p.m. CT on Comedy Central. Viewers can stream new episodes the next day on Paramount+. Shark attack: Former NBA player's pregnant wife attacked in Puerto Rico When did latest 'The Daily Show' episode air? The series' latest show aired July 31 with Lydic assuming hosting duties, according to Comedy Central's website. The host spoke with actor Tony Hale while promoting the film "Sketch." "Sketch" actor @MrTonyHale shares how the film's story about a child's drawings coming to life was inspired by writer-director Seth Worley's sister Contributing: Anna Kaufman Natalie Neysa Alund is a senior reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@ and follow her on X @nataliealund.
