10 Best Podcasts of 2025

Monica Lewinsky has been through the ringer. After an affair with Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, the general public — including many prominent feminists of the time — scapegoated her for the president’s bad decisions, maligning her as a sex-crazed vixen who pushed him into a relationship. For years she struggled to rebuild her reputation, and in the mid-2010s, relaunched herself as an anti-bullying advocate. Now, with her podcast, she’s giving others with complicated backstories — from acquitted murder suspect Amanda Knox, to former child star Molly Ringwald, to outspoken comedian Sarah Silverman — the room to tell their stories fully.

The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team might be best known for helping to take down pedophiles in the Catholic Church, but that’s by no means the only kind of investigation they do. In this six-part series, crime reporter Dugan Arnett goes deep into police corruption in New Bedford, a small fishing town in southeastern Massachusetts embroiled in the war on drugs. It’s a wild ride of fake informants and bad cops, kingpins and bag men, all trying to survive.

It’s no surprise that Saturday Night Live alum Amy Poehler gets her guests to open up — she’s been a mainstay in comedy for more than three decades, acting in blockbuster movies and long-running sitcoms, capturing our hearts with a girl-next-door bubbliness cut with a sharp wit. Good Hang takes advantage of that, both because she’s able to bring in her friends — some of the biggest names in showbiz, like Maya Rudolph and Julia Louis-Dreyfus — and the video format allowing us to see the smirks and winks that give extra depth to the conversations. It’s like being at a dinner table with some of the brightest, and funniest, minds of our times.

Former daytime TV host Jerry Springer is one of the most complicated public figures of the late 20th century: An elected Democratic mayor who lost his office over a sex scandal, only to remake himself as the host of one of the most notorious television shows of the 1990s, only to again remake himself as a thoughtful and insightful public speaker. Leon Neyfakh (co-creator of the massive Slate series Slow Burn) takes the listener on a four-and-a-half hour journey into Springer’s life and times, talking to those who knew him, worked with him, and battled him. As an Audible Original, this isn’t available on the regular podcast feeds, but nonetheless is an excellent example of the way that longform audio can immerse a reader in a story. 

OK, so this isn’t exactly a new show — Breaking the Internet is the fourth season of Garret M. Graff’s incredible longform series Long Shadow, which explored how we ended up in this precarious moment in history — but it’s still one of the most impressive podcasts to hit the airwaves this year. His previous seasons have tackled 9/11, the rise of the far right, and America’s peculiar history with guns; this one turns the lens on the internet, tracking how a tool that was supposed to democratize the world ended up fracturing it, possibly beyond repair.

Longtime Nashville journalist (and Rolling Stone editor) Joseph Hudak is the host of this weekly interview show that brings Nashville’s biggest names into the studio for candid conversations. Want to know what Gretchen Wilson’s been up to for the 20 years since her hit “Redneck Woman” came out, or how Shooter Jennings found father Waylon Jennings’ lost tapes? Hudak puts his subjects at ease while offering his expertise into the subject, giving us some of the most revealing conversations in country music.