Quillette Podcast

Jonathan is an engaging and interesting host. Iona is quite bad. I sped up an Iona episode to 1.5x and it was still slow and boring with lots of um’s. But the Jonathan episodes are a highlight for me when they come out.

The new host is unfortunately not nice to listen to, and she hosts about 50% of the episodes now. I can’t get through her episodes — just skip them.

Since when does “free thought” mean reactionary diatribes about subjects you know nothing about?

Quillette was great at first. Coleman Hughes came from there.. so much good ("heterodox") writing came out of the early years of Quillette. Then came Covid. Quillette, "where freethought lives," was suddenly Defenders of Authority. Don't let them fool you, they are taking a revisionist tack now, claiming they were simply against the looney conspiracy types. This simply isnt true. They had ZERO interest in anyone remotely suggesting that just MAYBE we humans were overreacting a bit with this bug, and doing ourselves more harm than good. "Fearless commentary" it was not during covid. There is still sizeable redeeming value in this pod though, buuttt... that brings me to the 2nd, more recent problem.. this Iona person. I am sure she is a nice woman, so I dont want to be mean... but she should not be in podcasting. She is just too darn slow. And there is no cogent analysis of anything with her, just everything all dramatic-sounding and plodding. And did I mention slow? I guess (the sharp & excellent) Jonathan Kaye felt he needed a break from doing all the pods... but this was not the answer. (A great answer would've been Coleman Hughes! as his pod appears to be languishing.) Sadly, i have unfollowed this formerly great podcast, and now it is in my informal group of "check in on" pods, in which i check every so often if anything interesting has popped up (and only if Kaye is the host.)