This American Life #640: Five Women – I love anything that examines the deeper issues behind MeToo and behind our horrible societal understanding of consent, flirtation, and male/female relationships. For an even more in-depth and personal look at this, I highly suggest the podcast The Heart’s “No” series. But for those of you wondering “how could this happen? How could things get to this point?”, the stories here are a great description of how. The episode is of course highly triggering, so keep that in mind.

Here Be Monsters: The Brain Scoop – A weird confession is that I would LOVE to learn taxidermy. I just find it fascinating. So this episode is not for everyone because it is literally just someone describing the process of taxidermy as she does it, with sound effects included. I love it.

Who Shot Ya?: Female Protagonists in Sci-Fi – While I wish the hosts had gotten a chance to talk even more in-depth about female protagonists in sci-fi, I adore Who Shot Ya and loved to hear what they did have time for. I also agreed with all of them about Annihilation and it was fun to hear their thoughts on it. I will warn that there are VERY mild spoilers for the movie, so if you want to go in knowing absolutely nothing, don’t listen to this episode. Rhea Butcher made a fun guest here and I wish she was on the podcast more often, and after the main discussion, the sound editor from Blade Runner 2049 talks about the differences between sound editing and sound mixing, which I already knew but was still interesting to hear.

The Flop House: The Book of Henry – This movie sounded SO BAD. I like bad movie podcasts the best when they cover movies I know look horrible, but remained oddly curious about just how bad they truly are, so I was really excited to see this one come up. Anyway, it’s hilarious, and I say this as someone who is pretty selective about which Flop House episodes I bother with.