Podcast Rodeo #2: Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything & the Auteur Theory of Audio

Podcast Rodeo is an occasional series here on TOUCHED WITH FIRE DOT AUDIO in which I muse on one of the 44 podcasts (the actual, current number) that I subscribe to.

View fullsize

The logo of Ben Walker's Theory of Everything. I find it very cool.

1. In Which Are Discussed Gilmet and Radiotopia, Their Differences

    Last time here on Podcast Rodeo, we talked about Gimlet Media’s flagship show, StartUp, and its growing pains. Gimlet was launched in the late summer / early fall of 2014, and rapidly became the gold standard of for-profit podcasting networks, hosting not only the popular (if artistically somewhat lost) StartUp, but also Reply All (a personal favorite), Mystery Show, and several other much-downloaded offerings. I have no idea if Gimlet impresario Alex Blumberg is getting rich off of it, but it appears to support his burgeoning family in New York City, and they’re hiring new people all the time. (Despite several applications, I have never been one of these hires. I never really expected to be, though.)

    The world of narrative audio — which is pretty much what Gimlet does — there is one personage, and one show, that hovers ever-present behind every discussion: Ira Glass, and his ever-changing, mould-shattering, first-of-its-kind show, This American Life. TAL pioneered the style that dominates narrative audio storytelling: casual, music-rich, accessible, funny. Glass, with his nasally, very Baltimore and very Jewish voice, did not sound like the other people on public radio; he stuttered his lines, had an essayist’s eye for detail, was unafraid to laugh or go on the air with bronchitis or come off as less than authoritative. It can be hard to understand how unusual this was back in the mid-late 90s, when TAL first came on the air, because Glass made it part of his mission to get unusual voices on the air. Early regulars included Sarah Vowell, whose nasal, girlish voice is so odd she eventually lent it to a Pixar character; David Sedaris, whose lispy, faintly southern speech was unapologetically homosexual in its affect; and Scott Carrier, whose haunted monotone was by far the biggest influence on my own radio line readings.* Spiritual heirs include Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me’s Peter Sagal; Live Wire’s Luke Burbank; Snap Judgement’s Glynn Washington; Invisibilia’s Alix Spiegel (a TAL alum) and Lulu Miller; and Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad. In short, without Glass and his show, the world of audio we know now just doesn’t exist. We are all kicking against its pricks and stealing its tricks.

*Not to brag, but I actually have a classic radio voice, and my Carrier imitation is actually a method of making myself sound less authoritarian and intimidating.

    I mention this here not only because Blumberg’s Gimlet shows are the clearest progeny of TAL’s revolution — Blumberg himself might be the Glassiest radio host other than Glass himself, but other shows on the network are hosted by other TAL alums, and Blumberg has clearly decided to coöpt his former show’s breezy, upbeat style (one, in fairness, he helped create) and use it to make relatable, listenable output that will keep his company profitable. I mention it also because I want to talk about another network, one that is home to many of podcasting’s most self-consciously artful and challenging listens: Radiotopia, which launched a couple of months before Gimlet. The thing is, Radiotopia is home to a bunch of great shows, and it resists Gimlet’s tendency to make all of its shows sound the same, and it has several creators who not only had nothing to do with TAL but actually predate and influenced that show themselves, such as the legendary Kitchen Sisters — and still, much of of its output is completely impossible without This American Life and the way it opened up audio storytelling to new vistas. This is true of Radiotopia’s flagship show, 99% Invisible, which as broadly about “design”, but is largely about its own production and sound design; it’s true of Phoebe Judge’s Criminal, which is a great true crime show that comes out of North Carolina; and it is especially true of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything, an indescribably weird catchall show that encompasses science fiction, philosophy, futurism, tech industry inside baseball, autobiography, and more straightforward narrative storytelling.

2. Benjamen Walker and the Auteur Theory of Audio

    As Walker freely admits, Theory of Everything is a show that cannot be easily packaged, pitched, sold, or advertised. Recent episodes include:

    + “The Future”, which features an interview with a tech journalist who may have been the inspiration for an old TV show of which Walker is a fan.

    + “A light touch and a slight nudge” [sic], including fiction about Donald Trump as CIA plant, and nonfiction about conspiracy theories and why people believe them.

    + A series called “Instaserfs”, in which ToE intern Andrew Callaway — who may or may not actually be an intern — takes a series of “sharing economy” jobs in the Bay Area, including driving an Uber, delivering food, and doing duty as a manservant. This is then followed up by a definitely fictional storyline in subsequent episodes in which Callaway becomes an instacelebrity for his exploits.

    + Another series called “Dislike Club”, which is basically about what a horrorshow the internet is.

    You can see why the show is hard to describe. It’s discursive and uneven; the fictional aspects, in particular, tend to be less effective than the rest of the show. But it is undeniably fascinating, and it appears to be the product almost entirely of Walker’s warped imagination — well, that, and his ability to find interesting stories in strange corners of the world.

    One of the things I find interesting about it (and several of the other shows on Radiotopia) is that it is clearly intended to have one, specific author, in a way that even This American Life, whose guiding light was always the inimitable Mr Glass, never did. Walker finds the stories, he conducts the interviews, he edits the tape, he digs up the music, he does the sound design, and he writes the narration, which veers between philosophical musing, memoir, and speculative fiction, often in the course of just a few lines. The only way I can think to describe this is the squishy, nonspecific word sensibility, which I often try to avoid because it seems to me like a bullshit dump. Walker’s sensibility drives the show’s twists and turns. His level of inspiration seems to dictate the production schedule. He usually churns out a new episode every two weeks . . . or every three weeks . . . or every month or so . . . it’s hard to tell. This is actually a model that kind of only works with, not only an on-demand form of media consumption, but one like podcasting, where several episodes can pile up in a row and not take up too much time or space for you to ever catch up.

    I was talking (well, kibbitzing on Facebook) with some friends about authorship and why people are so desperate to believe in it when it comes to works of collaborative art. (The convo was inspired by Beyoncé’s new record, Lemonade, but equally it could have been inspired by pretty much any movie ever made, or This American Life, or any of a number of other things.) Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t really have a lot of use for most postmodern theory, and I don’t take “the death of the author” particularly seriously; but it is true that in our perpetual search for that elusive (and probably non-existent) concept, authenticity, people really, really want to impute works of art to a single creator if at all possible. I think this probably has something to do with evolutionary psychology and our need for clean, cause-and-effect stories that flatter the instincts that keep us alive (and allowed us to build this culture we all dig on so much in the first place). I have some tedious thoughts on what this may or may not have to do with various notions of God that I won’t bore you with, but suffice it to say that it seems to me that people are looking for a single creator almost as soon as they’re aware that something has been created.

    I think this has done a lot of damage over the years, including the radical disempowerment of the screenwriter in filmmaking.** It’s also done many great things, including empowering writer/directors to take control of a medium was once engineered and make corners of it creative. It’s a really complicated move, and I could probably write a whole book about it that nobody would read. But what I find interesting is that it’s only just now starting to crop up in audio.

**NB that I’m the brother of a screenwriter, so I may not be wholly impartial here.

    While on the one hand I think this has some bad effects — the conflation of Ira Glass with his show in the popular imagination has really taken a lot of credit from a lot of creative people who helped him make the show what it was, as Glass would probably tell you himself — it also indicates, I think, that the genre is growing up a little bit, and people are starting to take it seriously. It’s right there in the title of Walker’s show, the full name of which is Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything. On the one hand, this title is completely tongue-in-cheek, as no doubt the diffident and modest Mr Walker would avow. At the same time, it’s an accurate representation of the way the show is sculpted and directed, as Walker himself, irrespective of whether or not he ever really had an intern, is definitely ToE’s homo magnus and guiding light in a way that even Glass couldn’t be at TAL.

3. Radiotopia and the Theory of Everything

    The interesting thing that Radiotopia does that Gimlet doesn’t is treat its creators as artists, more or less. I have no doubt that Alex & PJ at Reply All, or Starlee at Mystery Show, genuinely do operate their shows largely as they see fit; but at the same time, they are indelibly Gimlet, always accessible, chatty, music-rich. I don’t want to denigrate these shows, because Reply All in particular may be my very favorite show currently going; but they are recognizable, and they’re similar.

    On Radiotopia, the auteur is regent. Walker’s show sounds nothing like Nick van der Kolk’s Love + Radio, which sounds nothing like Lea Thau’s Strangers, which sounds nothing like Nate diMeo’s Memory Palace. Much like Theory of Everything, each of those shows defies classification, other than that it has a controlling creative consciousness who runs the show (with some subordinates). Even the more clicky, pitchy shows, like 99% Invisible, offer unique sounds that are related to, but not the same as, the obviously TAL-inspired fare available on Gimlet, or on public radio shows like Planet Money or Invisibilia. I sometimes wonder how they make their money; the product is much harder to market than Gimlet’s, which I think both the Gimlet guys and the Radiotopia guys would tell you they’re proud of. But I’m glad they’re around.

Recommended episodes of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything:

“New York After Rent” — about Air BnB, the musical Rent, and the gentrification of NYC

“Secret Histories of Podcasting” — three versions of how the podcast became an artform

“Dark Karma” — an extended interview with a man who grew up in a cult

Some Failures

    I probably ought to be seeing a shrink. This has been apparent to me for a long time, but the fact of the matter is that I’ve had bad experiences with shrinks over the years and I’m not deeply motivated to repeat those. I also don’t want to go on antidepressants, because in the past they’ve made me fat, caused trouble with my sleep, and screwed up my sex life — all without seeming to do much for my mood. Three different times I’ve been put on one SSRI or another, each for about a year, and the only thing I have to show for any of those experiences was weight gain.

    But I’ve got habits that need modification, and I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to do it on my own, having not worked yet, is not likely to suddenly start working now. These habits include (but are not limited to): eating too much, drinking too much, never quite quitting smoking, talking myself out of pitching radio stories, getting angry in the supermarket, and being a dick to people on the internet. I’m told that this new-fangled cognitive behavioral therapy can be useful for these sorts of things. I’d like to give it a shot.

    But part of the problem with having difficulty with motivation, social anxiety, and depression is that these things make it hard to take the necessary steps to get help. I just really, really don’t want to call a shrink to make an appointment, to the point that I will put such a thing on a to do list, and eventually hide the to do list so that I don’t have to see that item on the list.

    That’s it. I would go on, but you’ve heard it — and probably felt it — before. Plus I might have exhausted my writerly gas tank by pushing through that too-long tangent I was talking about the other day. It’s finally done, at about 10,000 words, which is about 8500 words longer than it should be. But the only way out was through; now we’re through. Now I have to go back to writing the real book. Which I’m feeling a little bummed out by.

    My feet hurt in a really specifically familiar way. I’m worried I’m not going to be able to run this marathon.

    I’ve been obsessing about things that make me unhappy.

    I just remembered that I was going to write about Livewire in this post. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll remember tomorrow.

L’esprit du jogging

    In attempting to remember some other French, I just encountered a fact that I had once known but since forgotten: French for “jogging” is jogging, pronounced with the soft J. I believe — correct me if I’m wrong — that the verb form is faire du jogging. Meaning, “I go jogging” would be rendered, Je fais du jogging. I don’t know why this tickles me so much, but it does. France is sort of officially butt-hurt about its language's loss of stature in the post-WWI period; once the language of diplomacy, it has been thoroughly displaced by English.* There’s a cadre of old white dudes who gather in a room somewhere in Paris to issue official directives about what is and what isn’t the French language. One of the things these guys get hot-and-bothered about are loanwords. I’m not hot-and-bothered about them at all, but I do find them hilarious, especially in contexts like this, in which a resolutely ugly English word has been Frenched up a little bit. It also has to do with faire’s status as an all-purpose verb that means something like “do”, but also means “make”, and a bunch of other stuff — anyway, a transliteration of Je fais du jogging might be, I make some jogging. Which . . . anyway, you get it.

*Here I’ll plug Helen Zaltzmann’s podcast, “The Allusionist”, especially the episode “The Fix (part 2)”, which is about the bizarre pidgin spoken by EU bureaucrats.

    There were a lot of reasons I was looking this up, but one of them is is that I often have really good ideas for this blog when I’m out running, and one of two things happens: they leak out of my head, or when I get home it turns out they’re actually pretty stupid ideas. For obvious reasons I can’t give you any examples of the former. The latter usually boil down to dyspeptic screeds that lack much substance. The one I was thinking about today was an incident this morning at the store. I had hot food in my hand, and got in the shortest checkout line. Only two people. I figured I was fine. Instead, the checker spent several minutes having a conversation with the person she was supposed to be checking out. I have this thought often when simple tasks are going undone due to lack of efficiency or dilligence on the part of people who do things like operate cash registers for a living: Yes, I realize we’re all very stupid here, but this is beyond the pale. I had been thinking that for a while before I realized — this cashier wasn’t too stupid to operate her register. She just didn’t care to. I stood there burning my hands because she was just having a fine ol’ time with somebody else.

    See, what’s the value in that, other than to further my ongoing project of making sure my loyal reader doesn’t think too highly of me? There is none. But there you have it. This is the kind of thing that seems like a good story when I’m out running.

    I assume you’re seeing what I’m seeing here: if the ideas I do remember are so bad, what are the odds that the ones I don’t remember are any better? And rationally, I’m with you. But there’s something tantalizing about those esprits du jogging that wink out of existence as soon as I’ve had them. I can’t help but think that there’s great work just leaking out of my ears a lot of the time, leaving me with hostile drivel like the cashier story. When I was younger I carried notebooks with me all the time, and wrote down my every stray thought. Sometimes this seems like a terribly self-centered practice, to assume that your every errant thought is worth writing down. At other times, it seems like simple good practices for a writer. Maybe I should be doing that again.

    Anyway. Here’s a list of podcast episodes I’ve listened to this week: Love + Radio — “The Red Dot”; Fangraphs Audio — “Dave Cameron Extends a Metaphor”; TBTL — 2.5 episodes; Home of the Brave — 4 episodes, including the first two of “A Tour of Burned Churches”, which I highly recommend; Vulture TV Podcast; You Must Remeber This — “MGM Stories, Part 3: Buster Keaton’s Biggest Mistake”; A Way with Words — “Burn Bag”; The Allusionist — “The Fix (part 2)” (good), “Dancing about Architecture” (boring); Criminal — “No Place Like Home”; The Gist — 3 episodes; On the Media — “Pope-ular Opinion”; Freakonomics Radio — “How Did the Belt Win?”; This American Life — “Return to the Scene of the Crime” (parts — I skipped Dan Savage because sometimes he annoys me)

Some Thoughts on Social Isolation

    I haven’t done a very good job of integrating back into Portland since I came back here. Some of that is that I haven’t really been here very much — I’ve spent maybe half of the last year in Bend, actually — but most of it is that every time I start building up a head of steam, I let it collapse. I fell out of the rotation at XRAY, the radio show I was helping out with seems to have petered out, I don’t fit in terribly well at the other radio station at which I work. I had gotten used to thinking of myself has having recently got back to town — but once you “get used” to that idea, doesn’t that mean it’s not true anymore? It’s been almost a year and a half since grad school ended, and almost nine months since I started paying rent on my place in Portland. And still I’m in a kind of socially isolated world, where the only people I really see are the people I buy stuff from, and occasionally my brothers.

    It’s a very, very dull mode of living, especially when a lot of the work you do (ie writing) requires solitude as well. Evenings, in particular, are a problem. Unless I’ve got a date — suddenly almost never, in the last couple of months — I have little to do but read, watch TV, and desultorily play video games. It’s not terrible, but it’s lonely. And lately, it makes me feel like I’m failing to reengage with my life, though the reasons seem a little obscure.

    I’ve always had a vague sense that I make a bad first impression. Probably this is mostly social anxiety — but the cruel irony of social anxiety is that being worried about making a bad impression can lead to making a bad impression. Occasionally it filters back to me that such-and-such a person finds me chilly and remote. I think this is because, especially when I’m out of practice, talking to people I don’t know very well stresses me out so much that I opt out of it. That’s where chilly and remote (or, depending on the interlocutor, stuck-up and full of himself) seems to come from.

    Now, I’ve made friends before. Not that long ago, even. But I feel like I’ve forgotten how. It’s dismaying that such an essential skill can go missing, even if only temporarily. What if it never comes back?

    I’ve been trying to take some steps to make myself do it. I bought a ticket to next week’s Moth. I used to do the Moth all the time; it’s how I made most of my friends in New York, who are generally among my favorite people. Somehow, though, that has felt trapped in amber to me, a thing that a younger, skinnier, more outgoing person who lived in New York would do. I wonder if maybe I was putting the cart before the horse, or something.

    And — let’s be honest about this — a fair amount of it has to do with my weight. I have been struggling to lose weight for the last few months, with much less success than I anticipated from resuming serious distance running. I managed to shave off somewhere around 15 pounds so that I’m now merely overweight, as opposed to geniunely fat. That’s nice, I guess, but all summer I’ve been running, and trying to be good about my food and beer intake (with less success), and the fact of the matter is that not another ounce has come off me. Sometimes it seems like I’ve actually gained weight in the last few months. Who runs 25 miles a week and gains weight? Me, I guess.

    When I’m not feeling good about how much I weigh, it gets in the way of everything. It exacerbates the social anxiety. It makes me not want to get up onstage. It means that I get up every day and the first thing I do is look in the mirror and think, “Well, you certainly are a fat sack of shit,” which is not exactly the kind of thing one thinks to himself before he strikes out and makes deep inroads in the social world of a new (or new-old, as the case may be in PDX) town. It means that I’m reluctant to fill out a profile at a dating site, which is the easiest way of meeting women in a new place, in my experience.

    Live Wire comes back in a couple of weeks; that’ll be good. And I’m trying to remember a story from my life that fits the theme “Betrayal” so I can go in the hat next week, but the fact of the matter is that I’m not a very complex social animal, and I don’t know that I’ve ever been betrayed, per se, because to be betrayed one would have to have a whole bunch of complicated balls in the air and have something go awry, socially-speaking. I’m sure I’ve betrayed other people, but I’m too fucking dumb to know when it might have been. Maybe I’ll have to go out and do something shitty to someone in the next few days so I’ll have a story to tell. Anybody want to volunteer?

    And now that we’ve reached the bottom of this well of self- pity, I’m going to wrap this up. I don’t have a bow to tie on this little rant, other than: maybe I never should have moved away from New York.

Dos and Don’ts, Week of 21 August 2015

Do

Watch Wet Hot American Summer (both the movie & TV show)

Watch Hurricane of Fun, about the making of Wet Hot American Summer (I’m not kidding about this)

Listen to this spellbinding episode of Love + Radio, “Greetings from Coney Island”

View fullsize

Walk somewhere you would normally drive to

Read Joan Didion’s The White Album

Read Sarah Hepola’s Blackout

Watch the trailer for the mountain climbing doc Meru:

Vote Deez Nuts in 2016

The only candidate who is taking this election seriously enough.

Don’t

Sleep in and miss the sunlight

Refer to your pet as your “son” or “daughter”, or yourself as its “mom” or “dad”

Foist reggae onto the customers at your coffee shop

Refer to yourself as “a creative” because you write or draw or do macramé

Worry too much about Donald Trump, there’s nothing you can do to change him or it or anything

A Star Is Born

    “Joseph, you wanna anchor the news?”

    It took me fully thirty seconds to realize that she meant tonight. Did I want to anchor the news tonight? I had volunteered to do it eventually, at some nonspecific future date, but I’d never even seen a radio newscast happen live, let alone try to anchor one.

    I am not, it turns out, a prodigy. I always sort of wondered if maybe I’d step into the studio and discover that I was just preternaturally good at being on the radio, but it turns out that there’s some technical stuff I’m not very good at. When you finish reading a news story, you’re supposed to point at your co-anchor, or at the engineer, so that they can know you’re done and it’s time to fire some tape or read the next story.

    The worst . . . no, the second-worst. The second-worst was when I got caught up trying to remember who I was supposed to point to and flubbed the hell out of a really long story about something. It was pure vertigo, like a dream in which you’re riding shotgun in a car that’s crashing, but then you realize, no, I’m not riding shotgun, I’m supposed to be driving this thing! I have no memory of what the story was about. But I did get through it. Eventually.

    I’m not sure I made it all the way through any single story without stumbling. I imagine this is the sort of thing that improves with practice, but I kept getting stuck on simple words, words I say all the time, having to say them once or twice before they made sense to me. The feeling of vertigo did disippate after a while. That was good. Eventually I kind of forgot that there might be people listening, which I imagine is both good and bad.

    The worst, though, was launching into a story that either (A) I had written, only to discover it had been substantially altered on edit; or (B) I had written, only to discover that someone had just thrown away the copy and re-written it, worse. I mean, composition class-level bad sometimes, verbs and nouns not agreeing, subjects of news stories referred to by their first names . . . I almost wish I could just brandish one of my degrees at someone and go, Yo. Don’t fuck with my story. I already wrote it better than you could ever imagine.

    My co-anchor — who am I kidding, she was really the anchor, I was just there to fill up space while she was gathering her thoughts — turned out to be a local Catholic school product who graduated a year after I did. After we did this, we eyed each other for a while, and collectively decided we might have known one another once, almost twenty years ago. Not very well. That was strange. It’s a small town, this.

Learning to Breathe.

    It’s hot. There are six of us in a funky little apartment, six of us and a dog that barks unpredicatably. There’s no air conditioning — there usualy isn’t, in Portland — and the windows don’t have screens on them, so they’re shut. We’re talking about how to talk on the radio.

    “Talking low in your register,” says the woman, the one who has taken voice lessons and is trying to impart their wisdom to us, “that thing they call vocal fry, listen. You can hear me doing it.”

    I can. Her vocal cords subtly grind out a stacatto series of notes as she speaks. It’s so common these days that I don’t usually notice it, though I know a lot of older people do. They notice it, and they complain about it a lot.

    “It’s a lazy way of speaking. No good for your voice. Also — also. It’s hard to breathe when you’re talking like this.”

    It’s so fucking hot in here. It’s not even that hot outside. What’s going to happen when it gets really hot? It’s supposed to be in the high 90s and low 100s every day for the foreseeable future. This is impacting my ability to pay attention, no doubt.

*

    Vocal fry is a big deal in certain circles these days, a front in a cultural battle about negotiating the place of women in media and, more broadly, the world. All of my female friends in radio, at least the ones under 40, have caught some kind of flak for it. One told me she got an email saying she sounded like “a stoned thirteen-year-old”. Another gets people writing in claiming to be worried she’s hurting herself with the way she talks. Another, one who is on the radio here in Portland, might not even know the flak she’s caught — because it was from my mom, and otherwise lovely person who she’s never met:

    “She sounds like she needs to clear her throat.”

    I’m not going to spend a bunch of time trying to explain the why or how of vocal fry. The going theory as to why people do it is that we take people with deep voices more seriously. I know a couple of people who “hate that idea”, but then, hating an idea doesn’t actually mean it isn’t true. It just means it’s unpleasant. Anyhoozy.

    Just so you can get a sense of what vocal fry sounds like, here’s an example: This American Life’s Zoe Chace . I picked her because I’ve noticed that she comes in for a huge amount of criticism for the way she talks. And let’s not pretend that her way of speaking isn’t distinctive, because it obviously is, with her thick Noo Yawk accent and burnt alto voice. There’s no one else on the radio that sounds like Zoe Chace. I’ve always admired that about her, since she first showed up on Planet Money years ago. But there are a lot of people who find her mode of speech some kind of affront to . . . I don’t know, something.

    And here is an example of a guy vocal frying: Robert Redford doing the narration for A River Runs Through It. I chose this advisedly, not least because I have spent most of my life as a storyteller / radio guy trying to sound as much like Robert Redford in A River Runs Through It as I can. But also: do you imagine anyone has ever come up to Robert Redford to tell him he sounds like he needs to clear his throat? That he sounds like a stoned teenager? That they’re worried he’s hurting himself when he talks like this? He’s talked like this his whole life. Go back to the role that made him a huge star, in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Part of what helps him radiate that stoical cool, what makes him so magnetic, is the low, rough way he talks. Much like Zoe Chace, there’s nobody else who sounds quite like Robert Redford.

    I think you see what I’m driving at here. It has always seemed to me that people who complained about vocal fry were mostly, if subconsciously, just finding another way to bitch about how young women talk without actually listening to what they’re saying. I don’t think there’s anything malicious or purposefully hurtful about this. But I do think that American society has a real problem with reflexively trying to hit the mute button on young women. (*cough* gamergate *cough*)

*

    And so it isn’t entirely the heat that has me tuning out this talk on vocal lessons, because — whether she’s done it on purpose or not — it seems to me like this woman has internalized a lot of politicized messages about how young people, especially women, talk, and then allowed someone to tell her it’s wrong for professional and “health” reasons.

    But then she has us do the breathing exercises. Breathe deep, through the mouth. Blow your stomach out, no matter how unattractive that might feel. (I’m wearing a shirt that you might call optimistically sized — viz, it works as long as I suck in the ol’ gut, and will probably be fine in about a month if I keep losing weight.) Speak as you exhale. And try, as best you can, to speak out of the top of your throat, so that your voice almost vibrates in your sinuses, and you don’t vocal fry at all.

    I mean. I’m inhibited about it at first. And it feels funny. Then, for a few seconds, as I try to talk like this, I have difficulty controlling the impulse to sing. But after a while — somewhat to my dismay — I discover that my voice is coming out brighter, stronger, and I’m enunciating better. I’m an inveterate mumbler, and a fast-talker, so this is a positive result for me. Then she has us say the Pledge of Allegiance. We all get through it in one breath. A couple of guys have enough breath left to carry on a droll conversation for a few sentences afterward. That’s another problem I have. As a runner, and no longer a regular smoker, I have pretty powerful lungs. But I feel like I’m always gasping for air when I’m doing vox on a radio piece. This seems to cure me of that.

    Now I’m in a conundrum.

    Here’s the thing: all of that political stuff about vocal fry and the way people try to hit the mute button on women? Still true. Still believe it, and will still throw down with people who complain about the way young female reporters talk on Planet Money and This American Life and Radiolab and Invisibilia and every other show on earth.

    But trying to sound like Robert Redford? I dunno, man. I still find that voice really compelling. And here’s another little secret — talking like that is more than just an aesthetic choice for me. It’s adaptive. Because when I sit up straight, breathe deep, and enunciate, I have what we in the biz call AN INCREDIBLY LOUD VOICE. It’s the voice of a cop, a drill sergeant, a dock foreman. It’s intimidating and off-putting. I talk the way I do in an attempt to get people to, you know, like me.

    I guess what it comes down to is that I can talk however I want — if I find that drill sergeant voice useful sometimes, maybe I’ll use it — but it’s not up to me to tell other people how to talk. Even if it is true that people who vocal fry are impacting their ability to breathe while voicing, or keep their throat intact for an entire day, that’s not really my business. Or anybody’s but the person doing the talking.