How exactly does one judge a carefully crafted story that took weeks to report and put together but is only 15 minutes long against a 90-minute two-man back-and-forth full of digressions and absurdity with no real point? Well, you just do, basically. Which is better, The Simpsons or The Wire? I have no idea, but they’re both TV shows, and that’s a fun argument to have. When it comes to podcasts, we’re 10 years into a vivid, crucial artistic medium. The time to have such arguments has arrived.

I find the idea of this list to be preposterous (the authors do as well; it’s the thesis of their introduction, in fact); I’m not even sure you can make a list of the twenty five best episodes of WTF (spoiler alert: the no. 1 episode on this list is an episode of WTF). But I’m linking to it because it might serve as a gateway for those looking to get into podcasts in general. I do, after all, regularly listen to eleven of the twenty five shows represented here, so I guess they got something right.

Except for Ricky Gervais, of course. Rick Gervais anything just plain sucks.

Joe Stracci