JANUARY 15, 2026

Readers,

Since watching Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for review, I’ve developed a strong urge to finally hit up Medieval Times, which I’ve somehow never done. There’s only one in Canada, apparently, located in Toronto. Really, British Columbia would’ve been a better spot. British is in the name!

Anyway, hit me on my profesh Instagram for all my Vulturious and NYMagian activities. Please and thank you. And as always, feel free to write to tell me what birds you cooked recently: nicholas.quah@vulture.com. 

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THE INDUSTRY

After 28 years and 1,083 episodes, Melvyn Bragg is leaving his popular BBC podcast In Our Time. His replacement, Misha Glenny (above), is hoping you’ll stay for the next 1,000. Photo: Teresa Waton

Misha Glenny remembers the episode that pulled him into In Our Time: plate tectonics. The BBC Radio 4 program he’s now taking over aired it in 2008, about a decade after Melvyn Bragg first launched the show. “All I knew about the subject was what you learned in school: occasionally two plates move and San Francisco collapses,” Glenny tells me. “I was about to leave the house for a work appointment when the program came on, and I just sat down, completely astonished. Plate tectonics are, in some respects, the foundation of life. Without plate tectonics, there is no life.”

Few things are more delightful than an unlikely enduring institution, and In Our Time is very much one of them. Over nearly three decades and 1,083 episodes since its debut broadcast on October 15, 1998, it has built a devoted audience by doing something faintly perverse: convening a small panel of academics on a single subject — often esoteric like The Iliad or the historical concept of the Rapture or fungi or the abstract notion of time — and simply letting these nerds cook. The presentation is austere; there are no sound effects, no clever narrated interjections to tidy up explanations. It’s just a moderated conversation unfolding within an hour. The show’s topic selection is gloriously anti-news. “Melvyn coined the phrase ‘never knowingly relevant,’” Glenny says. “The genius of that phrase, and of the program, is that while that’s true, it’s almost always unknowingly relevant.” Indeed, I find something almost religious about the experience of tuning into the show weekly. In its refusal to wrestle with the present, the program creates a space to step outside of time, evoking a grand sense of eternity.

Today, In Our Time reaches more than 2 million listeners a week and routinely ranks among the BBC’s most consumed on-demand programs worldwide. Its popularity is improbable by virtue of its unapologetic intellectualism, increasingly alien in a highly anti-intellectual era. Much of that endurance comes from Bragg, a broadcaster of uncommon range who has lived several professional lives. (A favorite fact: Among his many accomplishments, he co-wrote the screenplay for the 1973 film adaptation of Jesus Christ Superstar.) As a host, Bragg was both inviting and impatient, genuinely curious about his guests’ ideas but intolerant of digression or indulgent nerding out. Bound by the broadcast clock, he kept conversations moving, producing a show that flows as much as it instructs. Sarah Larson, writing in The New Yorker, once captured this quality by singling out Bragg’s famously brusque introductions: “Hello, if you were to point a reasonably powerful telescope at the surface of the moon at latitude 17.9 degrees, longitude 92.5 degrees, you’ll find yourself looking at the Al-Biruni crater.” No pauses, no affectation. It’s incredible.

Through sheer talent and faith in his listeners’ curiosity, Bragg, working closely with producer Simon Tillotson, turned In Our Time into an institution. But Bragg is now 86, and, as nature insists, he announced his retirement last year. In December, Glenny was named his successor.

 ➼ No surprises at Sunday’s Golden Globes. Good Hang with Amy Poehler winning fits neatly with the Globes’ longstanding starfucker instincts, especially given that the category’s inaugural status leaves little larger idea or purpose to interpret. What’s striking is how many opportunities this choice managed to waste at once. Strategically, the podcast category could have been an opening for the Globes to acknowledge digital-native talent like Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper, or to gesture beyond the Hollywood ecosystem entirely by honoring someone like Mel Robbins, or to include a somewhat incongruous form relative to its usual picks, as in the case of NPR’s Up First. Instead, the award went to Poehler, who could just as plausibly have been recognized in a more traditional category for a different project in another year. 

The irony is that the Globes’ bid for relevance through novelty only underscored its internal exhaustion. It opened space for the podcast category in the broadcast, but at the expense of Best Score, which was shunted to an ad break, a choice that neatly encapsulates the ceremony’s broader decline-of-civilization vibes.

The Golden Globes were never an arbiter of good taste, but at least, in the past, their boozy wild-card energy at least allowed them to stumble into bold or interesting decisions. (My colleague Nate Jones wrote a good column about this earlier this week.) Not so much today. Since the reformation and corporate transfer to Penske, the show has worked hard to project legitimacy and expanded relevance, yet has somehow emerged feeling even cheaper. The Polymarket and UFC integrations certainly didn’t help.

➼ As scheduled, Netflix’s podcasts went live on Sunday after the Golden Globes — and more importantly, the grind-o-rama Chargers-Patriots Wild Card match — with a live broadcast of The Bill Simmons Podcast. We know from ample reportage that apparently large numbers of people watch YouTube on their televisions, and that many of them regularly watch video podcasts there as well. Presumably, then, a meaningful audience is already consuming video podcasts on TV more or less as they’re currently produced. In that light, the inaugural live Bill Simmons broadcast on Netflix shouldn’t register as especially novel, but rather as an expansion of something that was already there.

Still, in the case of The Bill Simmons Podcast, we’re talking about a split-screen of Simmons and Cousin Sal staring straight into the camera as they talk to each other remotely, resulting in two oversized talking heads looming directly into your living room. The visual effect is strange (borderline unsettling?), though it’s not entirely unprecedented. ESPN has long filled its channels with programming that amounts to live, televised versions of radio shows (see: Pat McAfee, etc.), generally on the assumption that a sizable portion of the audience is half-watching with the TV on in the background. But as deliberate, foregrounded living-room programming, the composition feels oddly aggressive, and perhaps signals an opportunity to rethink, or at least spruce up, the visual grammar of video podcasts on TV.

➼ Elsewhere on the Netflix front, Big Red announced that it’s launching its own original video podcast programming. Two for now: a twice-weekly sports talk show with NFL hall-of-famer Michael Irvin, and a shoot-the-shit show with Pete Davidson. One way to read this move is as Netflix pushing further into two familiar territories: sports on the one hand, celebrity-driven programming on the other. Another reading, however, is more skeptical. comedian Chris Gethard told my colleague Jesse David Fox: “Are you telling me that a video podcast hosted by an A-list celebrity where the video has exclusive distribution on Netflix is in the spirit of podcasting? What is that except a nonunion television show?” Speaking of which, you should read that piece!

➼ From our cousins at Intelligencer: “The YouTube vibecession.”

➼ And from our cousins at The Cut: “Did The Diary of a CEO Take the Red Pill?” Oh boy.

➼ Here’s something interesting: amidst a sea of job listings for video producers at the New York Times, the Popcast and Hard Fork are now seeking “Senior Video Journalists.”

➼ Dan Bongino, now no longer running a major United States’ law enforcement agency, is set to return to podcasting next month. Naturally, apparently.