Top 5:

5. “Backfired: Attention Deficit”

This year, the reliably topnotch podcaster Leon Neyfakh (“Slow Burn,” “Fiasco”) collaborated on the new show “Backfired” with an equally strong co-host, Arielle Pardes, releasing two first-rate series—both, essentially, about drugs. Neyfakh, whose previous work has contextualized political and cultural phenomena (Iran-Contra, Watergate, Michael Jackson), applies that approach to the history of American attention spans and the uppers that deal with them. Here and in “Backfired: The Vaping Wars,” we learn about the makers of the drugs as well as their users, and the complex interplay—of mental health, anxiety, calm, focus, and, essentially, the human condition—that can make understanding and treating our problems so difficult. Neyfakh delves into more personal territory than he has in the past—turns out he’s a big vaper, and a longtime dabbler in the stimulant arts—which enhances the series’ perspective and power.

4. “Not All Propaganda Is Art”

Benjamen Walker, whose venerable podcast “The Theory of Everything” embodies the spirit of its fiercely independent, creator-driven network, Radiotopia, released a magnum opus this year—a group biography, as he calls it, of the great mid-century writers Richard Wright, Kenneth Tynan, and Dwight Macdonald, with a generous dose of James Baldwin for good measure. All of them were supported at times by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a transatlantic postwar organization secretly funded by the C.I.A., dedicated to promoting democracy and disparaging Communism—in short, spreading propaganda—through its support of highbrow art and intellectual journals. That, in itself, is amazing. But so is getting to know these writers and their work, seeming at once lifetimes away from our world and shockingly prescient, as we contemplate big questions about art, money, racism, the postwar cultural landscape, Orwell, communism, McCarthyism, and much more, with a frisson of conspiracy theory shivering beneath it all. What did the writers know, and when did they know it? And what does it all mean? Walker delves into this whirl of ideas and intrigue with zeal; he spent four years researching, and tracking down wonderfully obscure archival audio and writing, and it sounds at every moment like he’s thrilled to blow your mind. He just might if you can keep up with his. A companion series, “Propaganda Notes & Sources,” feverishly details his research.

3. “Chameleon: The Michigan Plot”

Drawing on hundreds of hours of secretly recorded F.B.I. audio, “Chameleon: The Michigan Plot,” hosted by the investigative reporters Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison, delves into the world of right-wing anti-government anxiety, paranoia, and misinformation; it also delivers a novel’s worth of vivid characters, so tragicomic they feel like satire. It centers on the right-wing Michigan militia accused of planning to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, a ragtag collective of true believers unwittingly plotting alongside government informants who helped train and organize them. Bensinger and Garrison tell the story with patience and care, blending narration, interviews, and absolutely bonkers F.B.I. audio, which is scary and funny, with the quality of high-grade eavesdropping. The results poignantly reveal the intersection of the personal (loneliness, isolation, male bonding), the political, and the hyped-up misinformation landscape (TikTok news, Facebook militias) that we might now call the manosphere. From the opening scene, when we hear audio of an informant driving his giddy supposed friends to meet their sting-operation doom, “The Michigan Plot,” by bringing us into the group, captures the strange bittersweet irony of how the desire for community, and even for connection, can sometimes lead to the destruction of both.

2. “The Belgrano Diary”

“The Belgrano Diary,” a London Review of Books series hosted by the appealingly Scottish-accented writer Andrew O’Hagan, sustains an irresistible mood as it relays a horrific story—that of Britain’s 1982 sinking of the General Belgrano, the second-largest ship in Argentina’s Navy, in the early days of the Falklands War, and the political opportunism that surrounded the attack. (Borges described the war, O’Hagan says, as “two bald men fighting over a comb.”) The operation, which killed three hundred and twenty-three men, sparked patriotic fervor (“gotcha,” Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid The Sun declared) and made Margaret Thatcher a hero overnight. But the diary of Narendra Sethia, a British supply officer on the attacking submarine, sharply contradicted the government’s account and justifications; when its contents were made public, Parliament rang with war-crimes accusations. O’Hagan reinvestigates the story, tracking down seemingly every important surviving character in it, including Sethia, now living with rescue dogs on a secluded hilltop in the Caribbean. The series is full of riveting audio: O’Hagan’s thoughtful and intrepid interviews, maddening archival clips (“Rejoice!” Thatcher says), diary excerpts, and tasteful, evocative sound design (waves lapping, pen scratching across paper, hypnotic original music by Joel Cox). A masterly sequence of the attack, in which a traumatized Sethia compares the sound of the ship breaking up to the shattering of an eighteenth-century ballroom chandelier (“tinkling, tinkling, tinkling, tinkling”), is emblematic of the series’ unforgettable blend of elegance and savagery.

1. “Noble”

I don’t know what it says about me, or about this year, that my favorite podcast was about hundreds of dead bodies found in the woods, but “Noble,” unlike its subject matter, was a wonderful surprise. Hosted and reported by the Atlanta-based journalist Shaun Raviv, it’s a gripping, thoughtful, perfectly balanced meditation on death and our relationship to its practicalities, via the stunning story of the 2002 discovery of three hundred and thirty-nine bodies scattered across the grounds of a rural Georgia crematorium. The series begins with a description of the cremation process (“It takes twenty-eight gallons of fuel, and a spark, to burn a human body”), continues to a former gas man recalling an unsettling sight on a delivery (“Just the foot?” “Just the foot”), and proceeds to a well-written and thoroughly reported saga about a community trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. Campside Media, founded in 2019, has made some of the most sophisticated podcasts to come out in recent years, and like those—“Suspect” and “The Michigan Plot”—“Noble” tells a riveting, troubling story ethically and with respect for the people at its heart. As it contemplates the side of death we really don’t want to know about (“We treat dead bodies like they’re precious, sacred even, but we’re also revolted by them—the way they smell, the way they look,” Raviv says), “Noble” illuminates much about the essence of human connection