For big fans of James Cameron’s Avatar, the 13-year wait between the original and this year’s sequel probably felt near interminable. But die-hard fans might have counted with a bit more agony and say it’s actually been vomrra zìsìt, or “15 years.”

I’m not implying that Avatar rots the brain. Rather, the blue-skinned Na’vi people, who inhabit the planet Pandora in Cameron’s universe, have four digits per hand. As a result, their language—painstakingly built from scratch for the movies—uses base-eight counting instead of the human base-10. Fifteen in Na’vi actually means eight plus five (as opposed to 10 plus five in English), making it the equivalent of our 13.

During those “15” years, Paul Frommer—the business professor and linguist who developed a complete Na’vi language for the first movie, including its octal counting system—created a distinct dialect for the reef-dwelling clan introduced in Avatar: The Way of Water. Only a few snippets are audible in the three-hour sequel, and Frommer is waiting to release more details to the small but passionate community of Na’vi speakers here on planet Earth—he wants to give them the opportunity to puzzle over its lexical and syntactical variations first.

Commissioning an entirely new language, which felt special for the first Avatar, is becoming a staple for immersive science-fiction and fantasy worlds. We’ve seen the invention of Dothraki and High Valyrian for HBO’s Game of Thrones, spoken and sign languages for the recent Dune remake, and bloodsucker-speak for Vampire Academy, to name only a handful. These languages are as functional as English, with internally consistent rules. In turn, neuroscientists have been able to harness them to better understand how the human brain processes constructed and natural languages, giving us new clues into what, exactly, constitutes a language to begin with.

Whereas the sounds and syntax of natural languages evolve over hundreds of years of unscripted conversation, many invented languages of similar complexity are quite literally scripted, pieced together on short timelines of months or even weeks. It all raises the question: Just how does someone build a fictional language?

The earliest recorded constructed language, or “conlang,” was created in the 12th century by a German nun, Hildegard of Bingen. Scholars still puzzle over the purpose of Bingen’s lingua ignota, preserved in a glossary of about 1,000 words, but its categories and hierarchies, with God and angels on top, suggest religious motivations.

The documented history of sustained, systematic language construction really begins several hundred years later. In the 1600s, as the ideas that would eventually produce the Enlightenment were gaining momentum, philosophers sought to create an ultrarational mode of communication. “The purpose was to find the truth of the universe by finding a language in which you could only express the truth,” says Arika Okrent, a linguist who wrote the landmark history In the Land of Invented Languages.

To create a universally true language would require the categorization of every possible thing and idea. That’s exactly what the British polymath John Wilkins set out to do when he created his “philosophical language,” among the most famous of these attempts, in which he broke down the universe into its most basic units of meaning and laid them out in a monstrous conceptual map. When it came time to link written words to those concepts, Wilkins sought a “real character” composed of symbols that were not surrogates for words or sounds, but that produced meaning through their form. Each word was essentially a coordinate for a concept’s location on Wilkins’s map. The philosophical language translation for “shit,” as Okrent tracks down in her book, is a stringing together of the scriptural representations of category XXXI, or motion (“ce”); subcategory IV, or purgation (“p”); sub-subcategory 9, or gross parts (“uhw”); and finally, the opposite of vomiting (“s”)—all of which combine to form cepuhws, or “shit.”

Efforts like Wilkins’s were brilliant, even beautiful, and laid the foundation for modern taxonomy. But their high standard for conceptual precision made the actual languages unusable because “you have to know what you want to say before you can put your words together,” Okrent told me. Intellectuals soon lost interest.

[Read: Only English would try to shorten a word this way]

Two centuries later, the search for another mode of ideal communication began, more practical but no less lofty in its ambition: a common language that would serve as a vehicle for international peace. Esperanto, invented in 1887 by a Polish ophthalmologist, is the most famous example and is still in use. But that quest, too, was abandoned after horrors throughout the 20th century made clear that linguistic divides were not the root of humanity’s enmity and bloodshed.

The model for modern language creation lies not in philosophy or international relations, but in the work of the Lord of the Rings author, J. R. R. Tolkien—that is, in fantasy. Tolkien, a philologist who helped work on the Oxford English Dictionary, did not design languages for his fictional world and histories, but built a universe around the multiple tongues he had been making since about 1910. (A common misconception is that Elvish is a language; rather, it is a language family, something like Romance or Sino-Tibetan.) The next well-known effort was Star Trek’s Klingon, designed in 1984 to sound as alien as possible by creating sound combinations not found in any human language. Yet “conlanging” remained fringe, even among nerds and linguists, for decades. As Okrent wrote in the opening line of her book, which came out in 2009, Klingon speakers inhabited “the lowest possible rung on the geek ladder.”

The debut of 10-foot-tall blue aliens in theaters that same year morphed conlang condescension into fascination. In 2005, Cameron had sent out a request for a linguist to construct a unique Na’vi language, and Frommer, then teaching business communication at the University of Southern California but with a linguistics Ph.D., got the job. There were a few constraints: He needed to incorporate 30 or so words Cameron had already come up with and make the language learnable by humans.

Frommer also suspected that a subset of enthusiastic viewers would want to explore the language, and so he designed it to stand up to scrutiny. He began with the basic sounds and sound system of Na’vi, some parts of which were inspired by various human languages, “but others are very unfamiliar,” like the fng and tskx consonant clusters, Frommer told me. Then he considered the formation of words and their relation to basic grammar, also known as morphology. The prefixes that indicate a noun’s plurality aren’t limited to indicating “one” or “many,” but have different forms for “one,” “two,” “three,” and “four or more”; verbs have in-fixes (as opposed to pre- or suffixes), insertions into the middle of a word to modify its meaning. Last came syntax, how words combine into phrases and sentences, with some innovations Frommer has not encountered in any natural language. For instance, expressing “I am here” in Na’vi requires a transitive verb—tok, literally “to occupy a space”—signifying how “your existing in the place has changed the place,” he said: Oel fìtsengit tok (oel tok fìtsengit or tok oel fìtsengit are also acceptable—Na’vi word order is very flexible).

[Read: Avatar: The Way of Water puts most modern blockbusters to shame]

As important as these technical aspects, Frommer said, is “how your language is going to conform to and be appropriate to the environment in which it’s spoken, and to the individuals who speak it.” The octal counting system is one example, constructed to match how Na’vi would naturally have evolved given the physical characteristics of the beings speaking it. Frommer also created various idioms to reflect the Pandoran planet, such as na loreyu ’awnampi, which means that someone is shy but literally translates to “like a touched helicoradian”—a reference to large, spiraling plants (well, technically plant-animals) that coil up when brushed against.

Similar principles apply to nonverbal communication: The deaf actor CJ Jones created an underwater sign language for the reef-dwelling Na’vi in The Way of Water by imagining “how the Na’vi would communicate underneath the water,” he said in an interview with IGN. “And so I decided to create, use the feeling, and get into their soul.” Creating languages for Cameron’s films, then, required conjuring a sort of avatar—imagining the Na’vi people and their environment by putting oneself in their bodies and world.

Only two years after the first Avatar, the debut of HBO’s Game of Thrones series—with complete languages such as Dothraki and High Valyrian and which, across all seasons, generated an estimated $285 million in profits an episode—firmly established invented languages as a benchmark for immersive, well-constructed fantasy and science-fiction worlds. The show’s creators went to David Peterson, a linguist who co-founded the Language Creation Society, hoping he could flesh out the snippets of language found in George R. R. Martin’s novels.

Peterson, joined by the linguist Jessie Sams in 2019, creates conlangs professionally for television and film—“the top of the chain of the artistic conlang movement,” Okrent told me—and is responsible for the fictional languages in productions including The Witcher, Paper Girls, and Motherland: Fort Salem. Ideally they’d have six months for each project, Sams told me, but they sometimes have been given as few as 10 days. The success of several movies and shows with their own languages, combined with communities of fans facilitated by the internet, is part of what makes this business possible. “People look at it as not only an important way to build characters and build world, but to help build a stronger, better fan base,” Sams said.

Peterson embraces a kind of simulation to create his languages. He sets up a simple protolanguage that might exist in a given fictional universe, and then traces the kind of natural evolution that might take place in its sounds, lexicon, and grammar—as if the language’s path “recommends itself to you,” Peterson told me.

Every decision shapes and is shaped by the language’s overall structure; vocabulary and idioms should reflect the environment and history in which they will be used. “A fleshed-out history is what separates languages that are good from languages that are excellent,” Peterson wrote in his 2015 book. Locating a language in space and time, then—fitting it to an embodied communicator and physical environment, as well as to a point in its evolution—may be the key to its success.

When executed well, fantasy and science-fiction languages don’t only mimic the structure and evolution of natural forms of spoken communication; fMRI scans reveal that the brain seems to treat them the same as real languages.

Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive scientist at MIT, has for years studied how the brain behaves when an individual speaks different languages, and has discovered that “some basic features of the neural mechanism for language are similar” across languages, she told me. The same neural machinery fires when the brain processes any of the 45 languages, across 12 language families, that her lab has studied. Fedorenko also previously found that the parts of the brain that process literal language are not active when people engage in cognitive activities often metaphorically described as “languages,” like solving math problems, listening to music, or programming.

Her lab wanted to apply the same method to conlangs to see if, for example, a fluent Na’vi speaker listening to the language would use the same parts of the brain as a Mandarin speaker listening to Mandarin would. Constructed languages haven’t evolved over hundreds of years via organic conversations, after all: “So the question then arose, does the brain treat it as a language?” says Saima Malik-Moraleda, who worked on a study of Esperanto, Klingon, Dothraki, High Valyrian, and Na’vi. “Or will it be like computer languages, where it’s processed in these other networks?” Their research, which has not yet been published, found that it was the former—all five of the languages studied activated the brain’s language network.

“It seems like languages provide us with mappings between forms and meanings,” Fedorenko said. English and Na’vi might lead the brain to associate words with objects and ideas in an attempt to communicate those meanings to others, whereas a line of code or sheet music helps with problem-solving or aesthetic expression; in other words, language and thought are not necessarily the same. Perhaps John Wilkins’s philosophical language, if difficult to use, had struck near the essence of language; centuries later, mapping symbols to an abstract meaning-space is similar to how cutting-edge AI translation programs work as well.

Beautiful languages are created without Hollywood’s backing, of course; Peterson is fond of Rikchik, a language created for seven-armed inhabitants imagined to live on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system. And in turn, enjoyment can arise even without a technically sophisticated conlang. The Game of Thrones novels were best sellers without fleshed-out Dothraki; the languages in Star Wars, one of the most successful franchises ever, are mostly gibberish, even if Han Solo claims to understand Chewbacca’s bestial warbling.

I’ll even admit to crying multiple times while watching Avatar: The Way of Water, in which, even as a fictional language makes the Na’vi world feel complete, most of the dialogue is in English. Perhaps, if someone had completed the quest to create a language of universal truths, or one that would foster universal empathy—or if you and I both had the distinct neural braids of the Na’vi people—I could precisely explain in only a few words why I connected with the blue-skinned CGI characters and make you cry as well. As is, you’ll have to watch all 192 minutes of the film before agreeing with or ridiculing me.

Parties were never on my mind more than when I wasn’t attending any. I avoided them for a couple of years, and my interest sharpened as a result. Parties were a very notable casualty of the beginning years of the coronavirus pandemic, though, it must be said, they were a pretty trifling one. Compared with the more than 1 million American lives lost, the lack of parties felt like something that was not worth grieving or complaining about. What is a party in the face of such anguish?

But there’s a sadness to be found in waiting for parties to resume. Multiple years spent under the shadow of the coronavirus have felt, at least to me, like years lived entirely within those last couple of hours before a party you’re throwing is scheduled to start—years of pacing, of overthinking certain details, of nervous questioning: Who will show first? Will anyone come? What’s worse, these feelings have intensified with time, developing sharper edges. Mild social anxiety has blossomed into full-fledged fear. A party, after all, is a gamble; it courts both opportunity and disaster. This is why some of us find parties thrilling. It’s also why many of us dread them.

[Read: Haunted by the ghost of 2019]

I think, for example, of all the parties I have ever attended that I didn’t want to attend, or attended only to devote much of my time to questioning why I was there. Parties are supposed to present opportunities for celebration and joy, yet many are weighed down by other considerations, including those that arise from feelings of social responsibility. Sometimes a party is something we want, long for, and look forward to. But sometimes it can feel like something else: a duty, an obligation, even a punishment.

This article has been excerpted from Sheila Liming’s forthcoming book, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. (Melville House)

Throughout the first several hundred years of the word’s existence, party primarily referred to parts of a whole. It stems from the old French parti, which meant a “part, portion.” Later, the word party also came to refer to groups of people who had something in common, such as an opinion or a political cause. The history of the term is thus marked by a tension between communion and partition, with the word sometimes favoring one or the other side.

The history of parties is tangled up with a history of privilege, which is to say, of economic class. When we think of the great partyers of history, we tend to think of those who commanded opulence and wealth, like Marie Antoinette. These historic persons, true to party’s etymology, used their wealth to set themselves apart, to create space and erect fortifications between themselves and others. A party is a device to unite and join, but it is also one that can be used to create or reinforce conditions of separation. An invitation beckons to its target audience and, at the same time, announces to others that they are not welcome.

No wonder parties have the power to make us anxious. They are from their very roots, and even on the level of language, steeped in the stuff of anxiety.

Yet parties persist, in difficult times and even when they’re not supposed to. If parties may be viewed as high points of living—as apexes of hanging out—then it stands to reason that we might look to them when life proves particularly hard. But how does one do that? How is a person supposed to muster the energy and enthusiasm for a party when faced with all the immediate concerns presented by hardship?

The writer Henry Green offers a cautionary tale of how certain frivolous types of people use parties as a form of distraction. Written during the Great Depression, Green’s novel Party Going is about a fictional group of 20-somethings associated with the “Bright Young Things” set. This was a name given to real-life, elite revelers whose exploits filled the British tabloid magazines of the 1920s and ’30s. In Green’s novel, the group is on its way to a party, but becomes stranded at a London railway station on account of fog. They wait out the weather at the station hotel, where they gather in “desperate good humour” and try (but not too hard) to have a good time. That involves fending off a series of existential crises that result from not being at a party. The irony of the situation, of course, is that Green’s characters are all there together. They constitute a group, a faction, a party, in a technical and pure sense. But they are not where parties are supposed to take place for people like them, and this makes them miserable. They while away the hours in stylish despair, blocked from the aesthetic richness that they think makes life more meaningful or, perhaps, that shields them from the meaninglessness of the lives they have built for themselves.

[Read: A mathematical formula for the right time to show up at a party]

Green’s snapshot of this era appears glitzy and composed, at least at first glance. His characters, who are essentially overgrown children, engage in witty debates about superficial concerns. They complain about the “tiresome” fog, viewing it as a personal affront to their plans, and one character considers the social acceptability of helping oneself to a host’s liquor and making a cocktail while that host is absent. But all that repartee serves to disguise feelings of social awkwardness and ineptitude. By the time the fog lifts and the trains start running again, the hours spent together in close quarters have caused many of their relationships to sour, making the prospect of the party they were bound for feel less attractive. Their party-going, Green suggests, has been revealed for what it is: a means of evasion. What they were really seeking, all along, was not a good time, or even a respite from the world of the Great Depression, but activity for activity’s sake, to keep them busy. Their ceaseless quest for distraction ends up exposing them to the vacuous truth of normal life.

But seen through the lens of a period such as the Great Depression, a good party may look not simply like a means of distraction but also like a survival mechanism. A party instills a pause that, sometimes, works to delay the inevitable and allows its participants to rest and plan. A party gathers people together and grants them temporary shelter within the space of that pause. A party cannot solve the problems of the world, of course, but it can be the spark that sets the fires of courage burning for the people who must face those problems.

Another way of saying this is that parties are about exercises in wishful thinking. We throw parties in order to fashion containers for the preservation of hope. Even the verb we use to encapsulate that action, throw, might suggest tossing a life preserver into open water. A party is a place to park our dreams. We stuff our parties full of the things that we desire most from the world: sex, desirability, social companionship, indulgence, freedom from consequences. Then we go back to the real work, which is the work of living, and we wait for the next one to come around.

Back when I was in college, I think our parties were all about hope. They were where we practiced and performed our skills as fledgling adults. They included elaborate themes and costumes because we were in Ohio, a place that forces a person to make her own fun, and also because dressing up is sacred to the work of performance itself.

I recall, for instance, one of the last parties I ever attended on campus. Some friends of mine had concocted a plan for a final costume party. Its theme was pointedly aspirational: Dress as the person you will be in 10 years.

Rain poured down that night, the sort of rain that used to bend the lilacs to the ground and scatter their blossoms across the campus sidewalks. I was dressed in all tweed, having cobbled together a Goodwill outfit. I showed up soaking wet, wearing what felt like 10 pounds of sopping wool. A friend of mine was dressed like a kindergarten teacher, in a smock that had finger paint smeared all over the front of it. Last I heard, she’s teaching preschool in Portland.

We were using these costumes of ours to communicate and advertise our hopes for the future. I hoped that in 10 more years, I would have realized my dream of being a college professor. I had dressed up as something I was not in order to reveal something that I wanted very badly, something I was scared of trying for, because it is a very terrifying thing to have to try.

At that party, I felt exposed, because I knew that I was announcing my intentions in a very public way. I had dressed in a heavy woolen three-piece suit, on a hot and stormy May night, not because I had ever seen a college professor of mine actually wear one but because I knew the outfit spoke in the way I wanted it to and said the things I was still afraid of saying out loud, to myself or anyone else. But my fears proved smaller than the seductions of hope. I wanted to gather with my friends, to squeeze into a dorm room one last time and bask in those collectively generated currents of optimism. I was using a performative gesture in order to feel the weight of the future in my hand, to test whether it might be possible after all.

That’s why we need parties, even as we might dread them. They force us to make time to envision our desires and aspirations. If parties are about fantasy, then to live without them means to live without routinized opportunities for collective fantasy-building. Back during the peak of social distancing, parties felt impossible—and, sometimes, so did the future. Moving forward, we’re going to have to work to reclaim both.

This article has been excerpted from Sheila Liming’s forthcoming book, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time.

When the term Indian appears in the Declaration of Independence, it is used to refer to “savage” outsiders employed by the British as a way of keeping the colonists down. Eleven years later, in the U.S. Constitution, the Indigenous peoples of North America are presented  differently: as separate entities with which the federal government must negotiate. They also appear as insiders who are clearly within the borders of the new country yet not to be counted for purposes of representation. The same people are at once part of the oppression that justifies the need for independence, a rival for control of land, and a subjugated minority whose rights are ignored.

For the Finnish scholar Pekka Hämäläinen, this emphasis on what Native people meant to white Americans misses an important factor: Native power. The lore about Jamestown and Plymouth, Pocahontas and Squanto, leads many Americans to think in terms of tragedy and, eventually, disappearance. But actually, Indigenous people continued to control most of the interior continent long after they were outnumbered by the descendants of Europeans and Africans.

Much more accurate is the picture Hämäläinen paints in his new book, Indigenous Continent: a North American history that encompasses 400 years of wars that Natives often, even mostly, won—or did not lose decisively in the exceptional way that the Powhatans and Pequots had by the 1640s. Out of these centuries of broader conflict with newcomers and one another, Native peoples established decentralized hives of power, and even new empires.

In a previous book, The Comanche Empire, Hämäläinen wrote of what he controversially referred to as a “reversed colonialism,” which regarded the aggressive, slaving equestrians of “greater Comanchería”—an area covering most of the Southwest—as imperialists in ways worth comparing to the French, English, Dutch, and Spanish in America. There was continued pushback from some scholars when Hämäläinen extended the argument northward in his 2019 study, Lakota America. (The impact of his work among historians may be measured by his appointment as the Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University.)

What was most distinctive about these two previous books was that Hämäläinen so convincingly explained the Indigenous strategies for survival and even conquest. Instead of focusing on the microbes that decimated Native populations, Hämäläinen showed how the Comanche developed what he termed a “politics of grass.” A unique grasslands ecosystem in the plains allowed them to cultivate huge herds of horses and gave the Comanche access to bison, which they parlayed into market dominance over peoples who could supply other goods they wanted, such as guns, preserved foods, and slaves for both trade and service as herders.

[Read: Return the national parks to the tribes]

Hämäläinen treats Native civilizations as polities making war and alliances. In Indigenous Continent, there is less emphasis than in The Comanche Empire on specific ecosystems and how they informed Indigenous strategies. Instead, he describes so many Native nations and European settlements adapting to one another over such a wide and long time period that readers can appreciate anew how their fates were intertwined—shattering the simple binary of “Indians” and “settlers.” Indigenous peoples adapted strenuously and seasonally to environments that remained under their control but had to contend at the same time with Europeans and other refugees encroaching on their vague borders. These newcomers could become allies, kin, rivals, or victims.

Hämäläinen sees a larger pattern of often-blundering Europeans becoming part of Indigenous systems of reciprocity or exploitation, followed by violent resets. When Dutch or French traders were “generous with their wares” and did not make too many political demands, Natives pulled them into their orbit. Spanish and, later, British colonists, by contrast, more often demanded obeisance and control over land, leading to major conflicts such as the ones that engulfed the continent in the 1670s–80s and during the Seven Years’ War. These wars redirected European imperial projects, leading to the destruction of some nations, and the migration and recombination of others, such as the westward movement of the Lakota that led to their powerful position in the Missouri River Valley and, later, farther west. In this history, Indigenous “nomadic” mobility becomes grand strategy. North America is a continent of migrants battling for position long before the so-called nation of immigrants.

“Properly managed,” settlers and their goods “could be useful,” Hämäläinen writes. The five nations of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) confederacy established a pattern by turning tragic depopulation by epidemic into opportunities for what Hämäläinen calls  “mourning wars” attacking weakened tribes and gaining captives. They formed new alliances and capitalized on their geographic centrality between fur-supplying nations to the west and north, and French and Dutch and, later, English tool and gun suppliers to the east and south. Hämäläinen insists that their warfare was “measured, tactical,” that their use of torture was “political spectacle,” that their captives were actually adoptees, that their switching of sides in wartime and the Iroquois’ selling out of distant client tribes such as the Delaware was a “principled plasticity.” This could almost be an expert on European history talking about the Plantagenets, the Hapsburgs, or Rome.

And there’s the rub. Hämäläinen, a northern European, feels comfortable applying the ur-Western genre of the rise and fall of empires to Native America, but imperial history comes with more baggage. Hämäläinen seems certain that Comanche or other Indigenous imperial power was different in nature from the European varieties, but it often seems as if Indigenous peoples did many of the same things that European conquerors did. Whether the Iroquois had “imperial moments,” actually were an empire, or only played one for diplomatic advantage is only part of the issue. Hämäläinen doesn’t like the phrase settler colonialism. He worries that the current term of art for the particularly Anglo land-grabbing, eliminationist version of empire paints with too broad a brush. Perhaps it does. But so does his undefined concept of empire, which seems to play favorites at least as much as traditional European histories do.

If an empire is an expanding, at least somewhat centralized polity that exploits the resources of other entities, then the Iroquois, Comanche, Lakota, and others may well qualify. But what if emphasizing the prowess of warriors and chiefs, even if he refers to them as “soldiers” and “officials,” paradoxically reinforces exoticizing stereotypes? Hämäläinen is so enthralled with the surprising power and adaptability of the tribes that he doesn’t recognize the contradiction between his small-is-beautful praise of decentralized Indigenous cultures and his condescension toward Europeans huddling in their puny, river-hugging farms and towns.

Hämäläinen notes that small Native nations could be powerful too, and decisive in wars. His savvy Indigenous imperialists wisely prioritized their relationships, peaceful or not, with other Natives, using the British or French as suppliers of goods. Yet he praises them for the same resource exploitation and trade manipulation that appears capitalist and murderous when European imperialists do their version. In other words, he praises Natives when they win for winning. Who expanded over space, who won, is the story; epic battles are the chapters; territory is means and end.

And the wheel turns fast, followed by the rhetoric. When British people muscle out Natives or seek to intimidate them at treaty parleys, they are “haughty.” At the same time, cannibalism and torture are ennobled as strategies—when they empower Natives. Native power as terror may help explain genocidal settler responses, but it makes natives who aren’t just plain brave—including women, who had been producers of essential goods and makers of peace—fade away almost as quickly as they did in the old history. As readers, we gain a continental perspective, but strangely, we miss the forest for the battlefields.

[Read: Rez life]

It’s already well known why natives lost their land and, by the 19th century, no longer had regional majorities: germs, technology, greed, genocidal racism, and legal chicanery, not always in that order. Settler-colonial theory zeroes in on the desire to replace the Native population, one way or another, for a reason: Elimination was intended even when it failed in North America for generations.

To Hämäläinen, Natives dominated so much space for hundreds of years because of their “resistance,” which he makes literally the last word of his book. Are power and resistance the same thing? Many scholars associated with the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association find it outrageous to associate any qualities of empire with colonialism’s ultimate, and ongoing, victims. The academic and activist Nick Estes has accused Hämäläinen of “moral relativist” work that is “titillating white settler fantasies” and “winning awards” for doing so. Native American scholars, who labor as activists and community representatives as well as academics in white-dominated institutions, are especially skeptical when Indigenous people are seen as powerful enough to hurt anyone, even if the intent is to make stock figures more human. In America, tales of Native strength and opportunistic mobility contributed to the notion that all Natives were the same, and a threat to peace. The alternative categories of victim and rapacious settler help make better arguments for reparative justice.

In this light, the controversy over Native empires is reminiscent of what still happens when it’s pointed out that Africans participated in the slave trade—an argument used by anti-abolitionists in the 19th century and ever since to evade blame for the new-world slaveries that had turned deadlier and ideologically racial. It isn’t coincidental that Hämäläinen, as a fan of the most powerful Natives, renders slavery among Indigenous people as captivity and absorption, not as the commodified trade it became over time. Careful work by historians has made clear how enslavement of and by Natives became, repeatedly, a diplomatic tool and an economic engine that created precedents for the enslavement of Black Americans.

All genres of history have their limits, often shaped by politics. That should be very apparent in the age of the 1619 and 1776 projects.  Like the Declaration and the Constitution, when it comes to Indigenous peoples, historians are still trying to have it both ways. Books like these are essential because American history needs to be seen from all perspectives, but there will be others that break more decisively with a story that’s focused on the imperial winners.     

Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2022” coverage here.

Widespread remote work may have changed where people listened to podcasts, but many are back to their prior routines and hitting “Play” like it’s 2019. Fittingly, certain trends from yesteryear have stuck around for this resurgence: The audio space is still packed with true crime, which is often entertaining yet rarely remarkable. Shows about right-wing extremists and conspiracy theories are still popular. (Now, though, we’re finally hearing about the left’s fringe, too.) But a lot of what’s emerging in 2022 seems to be a rebuttal to two years of vegetation.

Dating shows have guests who are meeting in person again, and the latest podcasts are heavy on the fieldwork. Makers went back out into the world; some revisited their hometowns, some headed abroad, and others journeyed through ungoverned waters. We also observed the inverse of travel—burrowing deeper into one’s own headspace. Podcast hosts read poetry or, like so many people, came to terms with sorrow and grief, both private and shared. One thing remained constant: The best material we heard subverted popular tendencies or flat out surprised us.

This list contains 35 podcasts, not our usual 50 from years past. The audio space has become so creative and crowded that the bar for a standout entry has necessarily gotten higher. We’ve chosen only the podcasts that managed to cut through the noise, slide into our heads, and stay there. (As in prior years, we’re recusing ourselves from ranking any Atlantic content.) These shows don’t gawk at tragedies so the audience can rubberneck along. They don’t merely recap movies or shows or current events. Instead, they provide as much inspiration as they do provocation. We offer them as a balm for loneliness, a call to adventure, and a blueprint for the future of the art form.

35. My Unlived Life

Where book lovers’ and arm-chair psychologists’ interests intersect, you’ll find My Unlived Life. According to the host Miriam Robinson, life is made up of small choices—you could’ve gone left but you went right, and so on. She invites guests to pinpoint one such decision and imagine, step by step, what life would’ve been like if they’d gone down the other path. They consider big choices such as having children or moving to New York, but also more seemingly mundane ones, such as attending a pool party or auditioning for a play. Hearing these guests, many of them writers, reimagine their own story in real time will inevitably inspire listeners to reflect on their own what-ifs and forks in the road. But instead of the worry that can often accompany such rumination, Robinson and her guests arrive somewhere closer to catharsis. Yes, life could be different, but you’re always on a road that leads to yourself.

Gateway Episode: “Irenosen Okojie”

34. My Mother Made Me

Part golden memory, part real-time conversation, My Mother Made Me is Jason Reynolds’s collage-style ode to his alive-and-well mother, Isabell. (He jokes that she forced him to make the podcast—hence, the title.) Sifting through their shared past, he contemplates his relationship to not only his mom but also life in general. The topics can get heavy: He ruminates on his mother’s scare with cancer, his brother’s alcoholism, and his grandfather’s gambling. Yet this audio diary relies on lyricism and the joy of wordplay, which makes listening a unique pleasure. My Mother Made Me may approach even its most serious themes with a gentle beauty, but underneath its velvet touch is hard-earned wisdom.

Gateway Episode: “I Can Do Anything”

33. Can I Tell You a Secret?

Not long after Facebook arrived in Northwich, England, Matthew Hardy started stirring up conflict. He assumed fake but plausible identities on the platform, then messaged people that their boyfriend or parents were cheaters. He commented on what people were doing or wearing in real time and escalated his behavior to sexual harassment. His schemes made for one of the most extreme cases of cyberstalking that a Google search will retrieve. One could argue that the most compelling part of Can I Tell You a Secret? is its horrifically juicy fare. But in the hands of the host and Guardian reporter Sirin Kale, the show also provides a clear-eyed analysis of modern-day stalking, the damage that can be caused without any laws being broken, and the ways in which a nonviolent person can still cause physical harm. Can I Tell You a Secret? leans slightly into salaciousness, but only enough to pose important questions about how far the legal consequences of a virtual crime should go.

Gateway Episode: “The Beginning”

32. Til This Day

For his playful conversations with prominent artists, thinkers, and comedians, Radio Rahim adopts a format inspired by his career as a boxing journalist. Rather than spanning a single episode, each interview is broken up into three chapters. That structure riffs off three-round bouts but also mirrors the gradual way we tend to get to know people in real life. Auto-Tuned voices, music, and sound effects dramatize key moments. Rosie Perez’s voice is made to echo as she recalls the intensity of working 12-hour days while choreographing In Living Color, and heavy-metal music and crowd noise kick in while Jon Stewart explains the terror of a mosh pit. Rahim also had a tête-à-tête with Bob Saget: The interview, recorded in 2021, was published shortly after the comedian died, and it serves as the perfect homage to a beloved American figure. Rahim is an agile and clever host, always ready with a follow-up question that hits the mark.

Gateway Episode: “Michael Che: Ch 1”

31. Réunion: Shark Attacks in Paradise

This show takes listeners to Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean that saw an alarming rise in violent shark encounters in 2011. The resulting beach shutdowns affected tourists, surfers, and business owners, not to mention local politics. The host, Daniel Duane, mostly interviews the island’s residents and discusses patterns in shark encounters—the surface-level stuff listeners might expect for a shark-attack show. But the podcast ventures deeper too: One surfer legally hunted and killed a shark, which sparked outrage from other surfers. Another gives a play by play of how a bull shark bit his leg off and of the unexpected relief that came when it finally did. Duane shows how the increased presence of sharks is a symptom of bigger issues and a problem in its own right while also depicting how many surfers have to play mind games with themselves in order to keep doing what they love.

Gateway Episode: “Bienvenue au Paradis”

30. School Colors

Some call the borough of Queens the most diverse place in the world, and yet its schools aren’t integrated. This podcast’s second season tracks the implementation of a “diversity plan” for District 28, only no one will tell the parents what the plan actually is. Recorded in 2019 during a packed school-board meeting, the first scene will disabuse listeners of idealized notions about modern integration in the classroom. To understand the racial dynamics, the hosts Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman offer a history of the community going back more than 100 years. Additionally, comments by former Mayor Ed Koch and ex-Governor Mario Cuomo (made prior to their election to those positions) reveal how high-level politicians bowed to pressure from white constituents. Very little has changed since then, except that maybe the language of discrimination has gotten gentler. In a time when conspiracy theories about what powerful people do behind closed doors run rampant, here is an account of colossal American dysfunction hiding in plain sight.

Gateway Episode: “There Is No Plan”

29. Case 63

Case 63 (played by Oscar Isaac) is a psychiatric patient who claims he’s from the year 2062 and has come back to save the world from the latest lethal virus. He tells his psychiatrist, Eliza Knight (Julianne Moore), that after 2020, the world will go through many rounds of lockdowns and vaccinations, that people will grow more distrustful of one another and institutions, and eventually, a new disease will kill anyone who doesn’t take extreme caution. Case 63 is the perfect binge at under two hours total, which is about the right amount of time to sit with this brand of existential fear. Each plot twist bends the mind just enough to remind listeners that the show is science fiction, not prophecy (or is it?). Julio Rojas’s exquisite writing, adapted for English by Mara Vélez Meléndez, transforms fuzzy pandemic anxieties into crystalline conclusions.

Gateway Episode: “The Story I Grew Up With”

28. Welcome to Paradise

Anna Maria Tremonti is a broadcast journalist who’s covered conflict zones so dangerous that she had to write her blood type above her heart just in case. She posits that she was drawn to reporting on violence toward women because of the physically abusive marriage she survived and kept mostly secret for decades. Now, with the help of her therapist, she’s telling her story publicly. She sets the stage for Welcome to Paradise with: “Maybe we all travel towards hell and are fooled, lulled by pockets of paradise along the way.” Tremonti grapples, episode by episode, with how she became part of a statistic—one-third of women worldwide experience physical violence, many from a partner—and with her feelings of shame. Considering how rarely women discuss their own experiences of intimate-partner violence in public, Welcome to Paradise is an urgent roadmap, as moving as it is brave.

Gateway Episode: “One of Those People You Hear About”

27. Not Lost

Before the pandemic, the radio host Brendan Francis Newnam decided he needed new “creative meaning” and a dramatic change of scene. The result is the freewheeling travel podcast Not Lost, a series about communing with others—and living in your own skin—when you’re away from home. In each episode, Newnam is joined by a friend; his most frequent guest is the TV writer Danielle Henderson. They plan typical tourist activities, such as dance lessons in Mexico City, but the subsequent conversations take unexpected, introspective turns. (For example, Henderson says she’s too tall to dance, prompting both of them to chat about their bodies and abilities.) At every location, Newnam attempts to get invited to a dinner party by someone he has just met. That conceit pays off wonderfully, forcing him to win over strangers, at the risk of rejection. During a Valentine’s Day trip to Las Vegas in 2020, just before COVID shut down production, the dialogue frequently turned to not just love but also the meaning of being alone—an omen of things to come. Not Lost vividly captures the highs of travel as well as the longing and self-examination that come with exploring foreign territory.

Gateway Episode: “New Orleans: Anybody’s Gumbo”

26. Borderline Salty

Borderline Salty packs a lifetime of cooking into tidy 30-minute episodes. The hosts Carla Lalli Music and Rick Martinez field questions from listeners, usually regarding anxieties about foods and intimidating techniques (one listener asks about cleaning mussels, another about how to choose the best spicy-sweet dessert). At-home chefs will feel encouraged to take risks and create, because Music and Martinez are utterly committed to the inquiries. The hosts have a supernatural ability to bring meals to life with their words, a skill they probably perfected while working for Bon Appétit. Martinez describes a decadent refried-beans-with-chicharrónes dish as “pork on top of pork, on top of more pork, on top of lard.” Music describes cooking over medium heat and “listening to the fat sizzle on the coals, and the smoke in my hair.” Listening to them is a sumptuous experience; Borderline Salty is a feast of superior kitchen wisdom.

Gateway Episode: “Like a Kiss From a Chile”

25. Women’s Work

The reporter Ashley Ahearn takes listeners out West, introducing a round-up of ranching innovators, all of whom are women. Ahearn visits six states and covers the many sides of this business—the ecological, the financial—but her exploration of the land’s inherently contentious history makes the show a standout. Each episode begins with someone acknowledging the tribes that represent the ancestral land on which the show was produced. In one, someone rightly points out that many techniques described today as revolutionary have been used by Native Americans for millennia. And though a major conclusion of the show has to do with the current lack of creativity in the food system, Women’s Work delves so deep into its subject that nothing is left to the imagination.

Gateway Episode: “Waiting for Babette”

24. Slow Burn: Roe v. Wade

The repeal of Roe v. Wade demolished nearly 50 years of constitutional protections for a woman’s right to choose. This season of Slow Burn explores the judicial battles that culminated in the 1973 precedent. Revisiting this material today, when restrictive laws are back on the books, may seem like agony. However, this history—of the people who fought in court and won—demands attention. The podcast begins in the early 1970s, when the state of Florida prosecuted a woman named Shirley Wheeler for manslaughter for having an abortion. From there, the story expands out, to President Richard Nixon’s cynical propagandizing of the fetus for the sake of votes, and to the Connecticut activists whose case, Abele v. Markle, was studied by Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun before his majority opinion for Roe. Women are still treated as pawns in political games; Slow Burn gives us hope that we’ll restore federal protections.

Gateway Episode: “Get Married or Go Home”

23. Uncared For

A former reporter for MTV News, the host SuChin Pak is now a mother of two and podcaster. In Uncared For, she analyzes health care for pregnant people in the United States, where carrying to term, especially for Black people, has greater risks than it does in any other wealthy country. Pak kicks off the series by discussing with her postpartum doula the ways in which the American medical system disempowers pregnant people and how a lack of confidence, support, and trust can lead to dire consequences. In light of these realities, the show mindfully argues—via anecdotes, expert interviews, and plenty of statistics—that when pregnant people are centered, instead of the fetus, everyone benefits. We learn about how, in Germany, every pregnant person has the legal right to a midwife and how Dutch providers treat pregnant people as experts in their own body. Uncared For takes this last idea seriously, showing again and again that nobody knows your body better than you.

Gateway Episode: “America the Outlier”

22. Buffy

Buffy may be the most famous folk singer you’ve never heard of. This show argues that her relative obscurity, despite her many cultural contributions, may be a result of blacklisting by radio stations and industry executives. Alongside the Mohawk and Tuscarora host Falen Johnson, Buffy tells much of her own story—how she grew up in a mostly white neighborhood in Massachusetts, reconnected with her Cree heritage, and came up in the 1960s alongside Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. She was the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar. She brought Indigenous programming to Sesame Street. Elvis Presley, Barbara Striesand, and Cher covered one of her songs. But the show’s main draw is telling the story of how Buffy, an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, maneuvered for future generations. Her extraordinary legacy as a consummate protester offers a guide for Native Americans seeking to reclaim power.

Gateway Episode: “Javex, USA”

21. Normal Gossip

Pushing “Play” on Normal Gossip is like entering another world. In each episode, the host Kelsey McKinney shares a story that’s been submitted to her for discussion. Real names are scrubbed. Facts are unchecked. Though normal is in the title, many of the tales are scintillating. McKinney begins by chatting with a guest about their relationship to gossip, and why it matters to both of them. As the journalist Sam Sanders memorably quips, “It is a way for the powerless to have power.” The show perfectly re-creates how people gossip; McKinney dispenses plot points for dramatic effect but also adds some flourishes, such as choose-your-own-adventure-style questions. This series seeks to formalize the art of gossip, giving it the respect it deserves, tantalizing events notwithstanding.

Gateway Episode: “Spot the Scammer With Claire Fallon and Emma Gray”

20. We Were Three

Soon after the writer Rachel McKibbens, her husband, and children—all vaccinated—came down with COVID, she lost her father and brother—both unvaccinated—to the disease. At the time, she was estranged from the two of them because of their staunchly different views on medical treatments. Still, McKibbens struggled with the fact that COVID had destroyed her family. The veteran podcaster Nancy Updike and McKibbens explore this fraught divide, and the deaths of otherwise healthy people. By looking at a fascinating archive of text messages from the phone of McKibbens’s brother, We Were Three offers a taxonomy of the polarizing, sometimes fatal misinformation surrounding COVID. But the podcast is primarily a family portrait, one that illustrates, by turns, fierce loyalty, violence, love, survival, and something like closure too.

Gateway Episode: “Black Box”

19. Cover Story: Seed Money

The host Hanna Rosin takes listeners to Whitefish, Montana, a stunning town at the base of Glacier National Park, where a Silicon Valley venture capitalist named Mike Goguen started a company with his best friend, Matt Marshall, to conduct CIA-style missions. On the surface, Seed Money shows what someone with a superhero complex might do if given the opportunity, and in this way paints a somewhat embarrassing portrait of how billions of dollars can impact the male ego. When it’s revealed that Goguen has been depositing millions into women’s bank accounts around the country, what looks like nefarious power dynamics leads to a case study in what the show describes as “macho drama.” The podcast also uncovers a spectacular crime that, through a wildly entertaining investigation, lands someone in prison. In Seed Money, wealth is a red herring.

Gateway Episode: “Mind Your Own Business”

18. Dear Poetry

As a girl, the reporter Luisa Beck was riveted by Dr. Erich Kastner’s Lyrical Apothecary, a book that sorted poems by ailment. Dear Poetry takes its cues from that work: Luisa and a guest writer prescribe poetry to ease callers’ problems. Cheryl Strayed responds to a question about accepting the evil in the world with “Good Bones,” by Maggie Smith. Someone wondering how to stay connected to an ailing father who has alcoholism and Alzheimer’s is encouraged by Jane Flett to read “Bottom of the Ocean,” by Bob Hicok. Reproductive anxiety, romantic woes, and racial inequity are all treated with poems. Beck kicks off each episode with a lyrical interlude from her own life, and her guest writer reads the literary treatment. Then, they tie the verses to what the caller shared, reminding listeners that poetry has the power to heal. The show is as dreamy and transcendent as it sounds.

Gateway Episode: “Always Near Ends”

17. La última copa/The Last Cup

The soccer megastar Lionel Messi is the focal point of The Last Cup, but the host Jasmine Garsd’s fandom and personal history also underpin much of this saga, which starts with the economic collapse that forced her family out of Argentina. For many, Messi is a peerless goal-scoring machine, but back home, some fans think he is too privileged, too timid, and too European. (He moved to Spain when he was 13.) The series is a brilliant dissection of class, race, culture, and what it means to be an immigrant who idolizes the place where they were born. The Last Cup finds parallels between Garsd and Messi—they were both teenagers who left Argentina in the early 2000s, for instance—and connects both to the political turmoil in which they were raised. This podcast makes a global celebrity seem like the boy next door.

Gateway Episode: “The Goal”

16. Articles of Interest: American Ivy

The creator of Articles of Interest, Avery Trufelman, devotes an entire season to a type of preppy clothing called “Ivy,” and what its history tells us about class, race, and possibly everything we put on our body. Styles are supposed to ebb and flow, yet Ivy doesn’t go away. Though the subject of fashion may be opaque, Trufelman argues that navy blazers and chinos are essential to our understanding of ourselves. She tells two stories: one about the garments themselves—the uniform worn on campuses in the mid-century Ivy League—and another about a Japanese man named Kensuke Ishizu who may have single-handedly made the clothing a fashion staple. Interviews with industry experts, which can sometimes drag down a podcast, are spellbinding here. The stylist and author Jason Jules gives one. When asked by Trufelman about the meaning of cool, he tells her, “Sometimes I wonder if cool isn’t the perception of the outsider who aspires to this thing but can never actually reach it.” The genius of this season of Articles of Interest is that listeners will never look at a pink polo the same way again.

Gateway Episode: “American Ivy: Chapter 1”

15. Mother Country Radicals

In the early 1970s, Bernardine Dohrn was on the FBI’s 10-most-wanted list because of her actions as part of the Weather Underground, a radical group that used violent measures to protest the Vietnam War and the country’s treatment of Black people, among other social issues. She and the other “weathermen,” as they called themselves, believed that as white people, it was their job to stop these injustices, even if it meant resorting to illegal, dangerous tactics and hiding to avoid prison. But Bernardine was a mother too—and her son, Zayd Dohrn, is the host of this show. Mother Country Radicals takes you to the far left, then past it. The series grapples with the impact of bold choices on children and what it means to feel entitled to reproduce—to live freely—despite the consequences.

Gateway Episode: “Chapter 1: The Most Dangerous Woman in America”

14. Missed Fortune

This seven-year epic podcast begins with a riddle about a stash of gold, sapphires, and rubies hidden in the Rockies and one man, Darrell Seyler, who ruined (and redeemed) himself looking for it. The host and journalist Peter Frick-Wright accompanies Seyler to Yellowstone multiple times. On one trip in 2015, you can actually hear Seyler’s delusion, which is partly why, it seems, Frick-Wright decided to stop going into the field with Seyler, at least for a while. But the story doesn’t end until 2022. In Missed Fortune, listeners accompany Seyler and Frick-Wright on their search and as they interpret the nine clues in the riddle, which was designed by a man named Forrest Fenn to get people into nature. The show is full of magic, not to mention pathos when you consider the toll of devoting one’s life to an elusive treasure.  

Gateway Episode: “$1 Million”

13. The Sum of Us

The host of The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee, who also wrote a book with the same name, visits a cross section of America, searching for grassroots movements, whether those supporting voting rights for felons in Florida or protesting an oil pipeline under a Black neighborhood in Memphis. Because the show zeroes in on hyperlocal issues, it doubles as an audio travelog capturing regional values and personalities. The common thread of each episode is people coming together across racial lines to solve problems. These partnerships often require soul-searching and radical self-examination, which make for some gripping, if difficult, conversations. A white woman with a job in fast food admits that she used to believe she was better than her Black and Latino coworkers. A Black activist has to tell his white colleagues to stop interrupting him in meetings. The Sum of Us is a treatise on how to engage with people whom you want to persuade, making the age-old argument that all politics are local.

Gateway Episode: “Minden, NV: The Last Sundown Siren”

12. This Is Dating

This Is Dating offers the pleasure of eavesdropping on professional matchmaking. The show’s creators, including the behavioral scientist Logan Ury, determine matches based on personality, after coaching daters on their attachment styles and on avoiding pitfalls such as love bombing. In each episode, the audience listens to a potential couple’s online date, starting with their sometimes sweet, sometimes stilted first hello. The meetups are spliced with the producers’ commentary on subtle moments, such as when a man looks down after being asked out on an in-person date (a pretty good sign that he’s not interested). This Is Dating invites you to join in on the fun of deciphering whether two people are getting along—before you hear what they actually thought of the encounter. Romantic success frequently hinges on how honest the participants are with each other about their needs. The hosts politely nudge the guests—and, indirectly, the listeners at home—toward sharing their authentic selves.

Gateway Episode: “Love Bombing: Khan Date 1”

11. Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s

For more than a century, the U.S. and Canada stole Native American children from their families and placed them in residential or boarding schools under the guise of assimilation and support. But what happened was actually cultural genocide that often included unthinkable abuse—one school used a homemade electric chair for punishment. Surviving St. Michael’s zeroes in on one survivor, the father of the host and investigative journalist Connie Walker, and the intergenerational trauma that resulted from his experiences. Justice is rare, so Walker sets out to find the priest who allegedly abused him, her remit expanding with each episode as she uncovers the scale of atrocities committed at the school. But the care that Walker takes with survivors makes this show exceptional, setting a powerful example for how trauma reporting should be done. Under her watch, victims speak for themselves and perpetrators are named. In the end, it's her and her father’s Cree culture—which the government tried to erase—that saves them.

Gateway Episode: “The Police Officer and the Priest”

10. The Loudest Girl in the World

The Loudest Girl in the World begins by diagramming how the host Lauren Ober’s penchant for talking has manifested throughout her life. She almost constantly asks and answers questions, compulsively shares witticisms and critiques, can’t tolerate silence, and, you guessed it, is extremely loud. At 42, she decided to explore how these tendencies have caused friction in her life. She recorded her journey, starting at about the time she received an autism diagnosis. Ober gets to know herself all over again through the lens of this revelation while opening up to her family and finding support despite the various systems that fail autistic people. She includes a brief history of autism and several expert interviews alongside her still-unfolding personal narrative and infuses everything with an unparalleled level of charm and delight. The show is a hit because Ober also happens to be one of the loveliest people in the world.

Gateway Episode: “Talking: A Love Story”

9. The King of Kowloon

The King of Kowloon is a story of dispossession, that of both the titular artist, born Tsang Tsou-choi, and of the show’s host, the journalist Louisa Lim. Tsang started tagging Hong Kong in the 1950s, using calligraphy-style graffiti to mark land that he claimed Britain had stolen from his family. Lim grew up seeing those markings everywhere and wanted to uncover how the King of Kowloon had gone from being labeled a mentally unwell vandal to becoming a street-art icon. Eight years of reporting led Lim not just to the details of Tsang’s life but to Hong Kong’s complex history as a British colony and then a city with its own system of government. This six-part series explores the cultural impact of that liminal political space, as well as its uniquely high stakes, which are still felt today, not least of all for Lim. Because she criticizes the Chinese government throughout the show, she can likely never return home.

Gateway Episode: “Disappearance”

8. Sorry About the Kid

In 1990, Montreal police sped through an intersection outside a local high school, striking and killing 14-year-old Paul McKinnon. On Sorry About the Kid, his younger brother, Alex McKinnon, grapples with that tragedy by reporting on it and sharing personal narratives as well as on-air sessions with his therapist. Although Alex was 10 at the time of Paul’s death, he has almost no recollection of his brother before the day of the accident. Alex commits to recovering his lost memories and doesn’t shy away from interrogating the details of the killing, including researching the man who drove the cruiser that hit Paul. Yet even that investigation is in service of introspection, not retribution. Featuring forthright interviews with the rest of the McKinnon family and a teary, tender breakthrough, Sorry About the Kid builds a monument to Paul while guiding the host and the audience through a confrontation with buried grief.

Gateway Episode: “Where’s Paul?”

7. In Trust

At face value, you’d think it’d be easy to prove that the United States government has failed Native American people. But In Trust shows that even when this broader history is undisputed, veils of secrecy can still remain. The show delves into the mismanagement of a trust that led to the Osage people losing possession of their mineral rights and Osage County land. The host and reporter Rachel Adams-Heard follows the paper trail left by generations of Drummonds, white settlers whose family today owns the largest square mileage of the land in question. In Trust argues that white guardians and executors who were assigned to look out for Native Americans used price gouging and financial manipulation to take Osage people’s wealth after they died. The tug of war between Drummonds and the Osage people traces all the way to present time: Gentner Drummond is the current attorney general–elect for Oklahoma while Osage Nation is moving for self-determination.

Gateway Episode: “The List”

6. Chameleon: Wild Boys

Wild Boys depicts an encounter between a small town and two mysterious trespassers. In 2003, the brothers Tom and Will Green arrived in picturesque Vernon, British Columbia, looking shaggy and eating lots of fruit. The host Sam Mullins zeroes in on two of the locals who first got to know the odd but polite young men: a woman who cared for them and a cop who didn’t buy their story about growing up in the woods. Listeners will immediately get caught up in the intrigue of multiple plot twists. However, once the timeline flashes forward to the present day, and the point of view changes to the brothers’, the story evolves into something profound as the motivations behind the pair’s duplicitous acts are revealed. The brilliance of Wild Boys is that it shows the manipulative power of perspective.

Gateway Episode: “Arrival”

5. Bone Valley

With Bone Valley, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and host Gilbert King endeavors to free an incarcerated man named Leo Schofield, who was convicted of murdering his wife in 1989, by proving that someone else committed the crime. More than three years in the making, the show is a true-crime marvel, standing alongside “The Innocent Man,” by Pamela Colloff, in the pantheon of reportage about wrongful convictions. Bone Valley has important things to say about redemption, forgiveness, mental health, child abuse, the failure of criminal justice, prosecutorial misconduct, and the obsession that has consumed Schofield’s defenders (including a sitting judge, who appears in this podcast). But the mystery of who killed Michelle Schofield is the primary fixation. King knows how to paint a picture in your head: of the seedy lovers’-lane crime scene, the dirt roads and trailer parks of Central Florida, the courtroom showdowns—each will enter your mind’s eye with the power and vividness of a great novel.

Gateway Episode: “God Help Us”

4. BEING Trans & BEING Golden

So many podcasts offer people a platform to tell their stories that it may not seem like much of a departure that BEING claims to be “reality TV for your ears”—but it is. Each season follows four people with main-character energy in their everyday lives. There’s no host or narrator, just the protagonists and their communities. We listen as they navigate life while being trans in Season 1 and while being “golden” (a.k.a. older than 60 and chasing their dreams) in Season 2. Listeners tag along for moments that could be considered mundane, and yet the experience is quite extraordinary. Women in both seasons set up dating profiles. A comedian goes to the doctor’s office because he’s been procrastinating for years on getting the right testosterone dosage. A man’s adult son worries about how his father will earn a living, because his acting career doesn’t pay the bills. This is prestige reality, where the plot doesn’t stem from drama but, instead, from the simple passage of time.

Gateway Episode: “Let’s Get This Out of the Way” & “Why Can’t Dreams Happen at 70?,” respectively

3. Death of an Artist

The avant-garde artist Ana Mendieta confronted death in her work—by coating herself in blood, digging graves, lighting things on fire. She died young and under suspicious circumstances, just as her career was taking off. Death of an Artist serves as a retrospective, a reexamination of her untimely demise, and a scathing repudiation of the idea that we can separate the art from the artist. When Mendieta’s body was found in 1985, she had fallen 34 stories from the New York City apartment she shared with her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre. He was acquitted of her murder at trial, but the host Helen Molesworth explores his culpability. She’s a curator who once admired his work, but after Mendieta’s death, the rise of the #MeToo movement, and years of seeing galleries honoring “genius” white men, Molesworth is facing the industry’s shortcomings. Death of an Artist argues that, so often, what the art world is actually promoting is silence.

Gateway Episode: “The Haunting”

2. The Outlaw Ocean

Each episode of The Outlaw Ocean could be its own movie, such is the nature of the high seas and this cinematic show. It kicks off with the host and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ian Urbina telling the story of receiving a 10-minute video of unarmed men being killed at sea while their captors laughed. But the lens opens up in even more dramatic fashion from there—the show isn’t about one bad actor or a single agenda. In “The Dark Fleet,” listeners accompany Urbina aboard a Sea Shepherd vessel with a group of vigilante environmentalists; at one point, you hear them take control of the crew on an illegal fishing ship. The focus shifts each episode, from a boat that takes people out to sea to administer legal abortions to the horrific scale of slavery and human trafficking. The Outlaw Ocean demands that people contemplate the lawlessness of the world’s waters through vivid on-scene reporting, without ever leaving listeners feeling stranded.

Gateway Episode: “The Murder Video”

1. All There Is With Anderson Cooper

In All There Is, Anderson Cooper is sorting through his deceased mother’s home. When he was 10, his father died from a heart attack, and when he was 21, his brother died by suicide, so the task at hand actually involves his entire family’s accumulated belongings. Along the way, he speaks with people who have also experienced extraordinary loss, such as Stephen Colbert and the author Elizabeth Alexander, to help him make sense of it. The interviews are unexpectedly hopeful. They’re also raw. Cooper openly struggles with letting go of a lifetime of mementos that include posthumous notes from his mother and telegrams that Frank Sinatra sent her. The expository writing that weaves the podcast together rivals the best we’ve ever heard. But the real draw is seeing what grief has driven Cooper to question and contemplate. “I need to learn something from all of this … This can’t be all that there is,” he says. We know that Cooper succeeds, because his inquisitive, vulnerable show is proof.

Gateway Episode: “Facing What’s Left Behind”

At the end of the first episode of Harry & Meghan—the five-and-a-half-hour exploration into the tender center of everlasting love; rat-bastard English people and the nasty things they get up to; heady, “Goodbye to You” defection from the British Royal Family; and the reality-show-within-a-reality-show miniseries Fifteen Million Dollar Listing—I informed my husband that henceforth he should call me “C” and I would call him “R.” This would put us in league with the glamorous young couple, and also allow us to imagine that we are characters in a Victorian novel whose names must never be revealed, not even to each other.

This project was immediately undermined, because it is just about impossible to impose a new nickname on someone you’ve known intimately for three decades, and with whom—even in the early years, back in the rent-controlled apartment with your big dreams and your red wine—you have never achieved even an ounce of the “Band on the Run”/Sentence Finishing/Pillow Talk Spectacular of the famous couple. These kids are so in love that absolutely any obstacle—bad press, frosty English sister-in-law, mean American half sister-in-law, disappointing fathers, paparazzo in a boat—only makes their love more passionate, their need to review their wedding videos and photo albums more urgent.

I had settled in to watch Episode 2 when R said that he’d rather watch hockey highlights, a preference that produced in me a stab of the kind of minor, familiar disappointment that—stab by stab, year by year—amounts to a strong and unbreakable union. In this way, Harry & Meghan, though it depicts a couple married for only four years, is a statement on marriage itself: Isn’t the institution, at its essence, a union between two people making compromises and trying to avoid their in-laws?

Ultimately, however, this is a series shaped around a single question: Can these two titled but underappreciated lovebirds transcend their bad luck and learn to find happiness in a nine-bedroom mansion located in the most exquisitely beautiful place in the world?

This is a story about resilience.

The very first scene of this Russian novel takes place at Heathrow Airport and consists of a clearly careworn Harry looking into his laptop or cellphone—the couple have been advised by “a friend” to keep a video diary, because “one day it will make sense,” and also (presumably) because B-roll doesn’t grow on trees—and telling us, “We’re here.” Before you can ask yourself where, exactly, they are (a Starbucks in Terminal 5? A laptop-charging power pole in Terminal 3?) a chyron solemnly informs you that Harry is speaking from inside the WINDSOR SUITE, LONDON HEATHROW AIRPORT.

Let this be a reminder that whatever you or I think of as the better thing (the first-class lounge, the ramekin of warm nuts in business class, Boarding Group A) is merely a token in a game that the truly rich would never play. The Windsor Suite comprises eight “private lounges,” in which the champagne wishes and caviar dreams of the traveler come true, starting at $4,000 for two hours. It’s the bottle service of Departures.

You haven’t realized just how vile air travel has become and how deeply you have been demoralized by it until you’ve imagined what it would be like to be greeted at the curb by a doorman, whisked into a private elevator, and delivered into the capable hands of your own butler, who will be just a bell cord away to answer your every call.

This, then, will be the ongoing challenge of watching (and presumably making) Harry & Meghan: The show needs to provide a compelling enough account of their emotional injuries that we are moved by them, while also luxuriating in the unimaginable opulence in which the couple nursed their wounds. It’s been done before: Wuthering Heights; Harlequin romance novels; all 22 seasons of Kardashian content. We’ve all had our problems, but have we had them in the rolling hills and designer shopping malls of Calabasas? The poor little rich girl is a perennial. But watching Meghan Markle sitting in a grand living room while bravely explaining that as a senior royal she wore muted colors so as not to upstage anyone could try the patience of Malala. (The couple was interviewed inside someone else’s Montecito pleasure dome, now on the market for $33.5 million, presumably because they’re determined to safeguard their … privacy. Or could it be that their own $15 million spread is too down-market for the dream to endure?)

We will be introduced to a few themes in this 330-minute (plus hockey highlights) presentation, the first of which concerns what was apparently a shock to Meghan and an oversight of Harry’s: the overt racism that lingers among members of European royalty who live in castles and whose exalted status depends on convincing a populace that fairy tales are real.

At Meghan’s first Christmas lunch (an annual tradition in which the extended Royal Family gets together at Buckingham Palace before the seniors decamp for Sandringham), Princess Michael of Kent arrived wearing a white coat, on the lapel of which was affixed a large brooch, depicting a Black man wearing a golden turban, and decorated in colored gemstones. The figure was a “Blackamoor,” portrayed in a historical style celebrating the glory days of colonialism and combining exotica with the perennial theme of ownership: of the man, the continent, the gold, the gems.

Why in God’s name would this woman wear this ornament to an event where Meghan Markle was being introduced around? Let me remind you that Princess Michael of Kent is the daughter of a literal Nazi, and has spent years making viciously racist comments (“The English take the breeding of their horses and dogs more seriously than they do their children”) and then offering insulting “apologies” for them. But please don’t call her a racist, because she feels that as “a knife through the heart.” She has traveled to Africa and described in a TV interview her “adventure with these absolutely adorable, special people … I really love these people.” Moreover, “I even pretended years ago to be an African, a half-caste African, but because of my light eyes, I did not get away with it. But I dyed my hair black.” The apology for the jewelry is in a class of its own: “The brooch was a gift and had been worn many times before. Princess Michael is very sorry and distressed that it has caused offense.” In other words, everyone’s been cool about it except Meghan Markle, and this whole episode has victimized Princess Michael, who is now enduring distress.

Anyone can find themselves related to a racist, and the standard method of dealing with this fact is simplicity itself: You disavow them, you shun them, you block their phone number, and if anyone asks about them, you tell the truth. That’s not what the Windsors have done. Princess Michael lives in a grand apartment in Kensington Palace (owned by King Charles, on behalf of the nation), where, at various times, she has been neighbor to William and Kate, Princess Eugenie, and—for half a decade—Harry himself, who lived in a cottage on the palace grounds.

God knows Harry himself hasn’t been perfect. He dressed up as a Nazi (specifically as a member of the Afrika Korps—you know, Rommel and all that) for a costume party when he was 20, and he tells us during the show that it was one of the biggest mistakes of his life. But, he says earnestly, he atoned by meeting with the chief rabbi in London and traveling to Berlin to talk with a Holocaust survivor, which is apparently the Windsor Suite version of doing the work. What’s going on in that family that you need to have some champagne and me-time in Heathrow VIP and fly to Germany to learn that Nazis = Bad? Currently, Harry’s immersed in a wholehearted effort to unpack his “unconscious bias,” but that could be an endless enterprise, given the complex history of his own family.

This is the incoherence of the couple’s position. They had wanted to carve out a “progressive new role” for themselves within the Royal Family, a role they had seen as including more outreach to the Commonwealth nations, in particular the ones (principally in Africa and the Caribbean) in which the majority population consists of nonwhite people. But what could possibly be progressive about representing the crown—the entity, more or less, that perfected the concept of empire—to these countries?

In the other corner: M’s family.

As she has throughout this courtship and marriage, Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, remains a class act. In her interviews for the series, she shows grace and restraint, and an absolute determination not to sully herself or her daughter with the antics of either her ex-husband’s family or Harry’s family—two groups that seemed equally matched. You can clearly sense that having her daughter and grandchildren safely back in California, barely two hours’ drive from her home in L.A., is a tremendous comfort to her.

Meghan’s father—and the aforementioned half sister, Samantha, from his first marriage—turn out to be spectacular characters, an accurate portrait of whom would require the combined talents of William Faulkner, J. D. Vance, and the Wicked Witch of the West. The half sister turns out to be genuinely frightening, having once left Florida to show up uninvited at Kensington Palace in order to “deliver a letter” and later pitching a book on “the evolution of my biracial lens.” (She’s white, her parents are white, whatever biracial lens she possesses has been trained on her biracial half sister and the best way to make her miserable.)

The salve for having been raised among these various characters has been the intense and world-historical level of romantic love that bonds our principals and that provides the through line of our five and a half hours in their company. Have you ever been to one of those weddings where the bride and groom—although well into their 30s—each deliver a speech that includes so many cute and romantic and “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)” moments that you don’t know where to look and your face becomes a rictus of sympathetic embarrassment for the couple, and people start kicking you under the table?

Harry & Meghan is the eternal return of that experience.

The things the British tabloids had to say about Meghan’s race are beyond the pale, and that this kind of coverage sells papers in the U.K. was reason enough for Harry to take his wife and baby and get the hell out of there. The soundness of this decision was proved a few weeks ago, when The Sun published a column by a popular television commentator named Jeremy Clarkson: “I hate her on a cellular level. At night I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”

When I read that, I felt a stab of fealty and protectiveness more powerful than anything evoked by Harry & Meghan. The Sun withdrew the column and apologized for it after 20,000 complaints—but someone accepted it, someone approved it, someone published it online, and any number of people must have known that in addition to the people the column angered, there would be plenty of people who agreed with it. Who would like this kind of filth? Clarkson spells it out for us: “Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.” No kidding, old man.

The very top of the column set the tone. It said that everyone had known that Harry (whom Clarkson referred to as “Harold Markle”) was a “slightly dim” but fun-loving fellow, and Meghan had “obviously used some vivid bedroom promises to turn him into a warrior of woke.”

And there it is: The idea that women will use whatever wiles they have to castrate a real man and turn him into a eunuch who lives to serve her, no matter how much humiliation she serves up. People like Clarkson—and Piers Morgan, and so many other men of their generation—are apparently experts on the treachery of women. Many are also devotees of the notion that masculinity is best defined by military service, the ultimate test of manhood. Clarkson has made popular television documentaries about great battles of the Second World War, and apparently that, too, is an act of manhood. Except that it’s not.

Here’s the truth: Harry served two tours in Afghanistan with the British Army, the second as an Apache helicopter pilot—once apparently helping rescue American servicemen under Taliban fire—and fought with great valor, very much in the shit. He was held in the affectionate, ball-breaking high regard of his fellow soldiers. This wasn’t Charles getting seasick in the navy, or Andrew forgetting how to sweat in the Falklands, or William assisting the Liverpool Coast Guard on civilian rescue sorties. This was war, and Harry survived it, came home with the usual psychic wounds of combat, and carried on with his life.

Harry is a grown man, he’s had a lot of experience with women (and “bedroom promises”), and he married the one he loved. When she was miserable, the way his own mother had been miserable, he didn’t do what his grotesque father had done—cheat on her, treat her like a broodmare, ignore her suffering; he moved her and his family far away. Considering that three of his grandmother’s four children got divorced, he seems to have a better idea of what constitutes marital obligation than most of his in-house role models.  

Quit while you’re ahead! you want to yell at the television screen—but they can’t. These two burn through money at a fantastic rate, and the only thing that reliably sells is their own story, which is getting pretty threadbare. It’s so familiar to us by now that we could tell it ourselves.

But we probably could never tell it the way they do, could never cast the fairy-tale spell that they can. We could never convince a vast audience that the paper moon hanging over the cardboard sea is real—if only you can believe in it.

In the first episode, we see a video diary of Meghan standing on an endless lawn, in the blue shadows of early evening, the sky beyond turning the saturated orange and pink of a color-enhanced postcard of the original California dream. She’s wearing a striped apron and a pair of gardening gloves, and she’s holding a handful of blush-colored roses. In the weary tones of Every Mom, she tells us in a near whisper, “Both the babies are down.” It’s a “nice, calm night.”

For a moment, we take it all in: the huge lawn, the sunset, the rose garden in which not a single bloom is marred by spider mites or overwatering or bad attitude. Her voice lowers to an actual whisper and here she is, the picture of a pretty wife and mother, her children sleeping and her attention turned to simple abundance: “Just picking some roses.”

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