Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t is an irreverent podcast for plant nerds who don’t mind swearing.  Billed as ‘a show about plants and plant habitat through the lens of natural selection and ecology, with a side of neurotic ranting, light humor, occasional profanity, & the perpetual search for the filthiest taqueria bathroom.’

Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t is hosted by Joey Santore, a self-taught botanist with a fantastic Chicago accent. Santore once co-hosted a television series called Kill Your Lawn where he and Al Scorch, a punk rock banjo player, replaced suburban lawns with native plants. ‘The grassy industrial complex is killing the planet’. A new book by Santore is due out shortly: Concrete Botany: The Ecology of Plants in the Age of Human Disturbance. Minneapolis: Cool Springs Press, 2026.

Founded by Joe Richman, Radio Diaries tells stories through first-person audio diaries. Radio Diaries was launched in 1996, long before the current podcast age where every shithead with a Rode mike and an A1 greens endorsement thinks they have something compelling to add. I can remember listening to Radio Diaries in the car driving home from Melbourne to Phillip Island ten years ago. It was raining, the car was steaming up the windscreen wipers were squeaking, and the episode was The Working Tapes – A Preview, which was recordings of the interviews Studs Terkel did for his 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.

The latest Radio Diaries episode, Detained: A Homecoming, includes a recording of Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian student recently detained by ICE for over a year, talking to her cousin Hamzah during a phone call when she was being held in Texas, and an audio diary she recorded after being released.

My Favorite Things is a podcast where comic artist/runner Brendan Leonard interviews people about the creative works that have helped shape their lives. Episode 9 is an interview with Mike Sowden, a writer who lists his favourite things as halloumi, the soundtrack to Raise the Titanic, micro adventures, electric blankets and distant lights seen at night.

My Favorite Things prompted me to think about my five favourite things which at the time of writing would be Marlon Williams Kāhore He Manu E (2025), Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991), the Rare Fruit Society of South Australia Inc, Sidetracked magazine, and mapping the location of fruit in alleyways using QGIS and MapTiler.