Colin Marshall

I haven’t posted much here about Podthoughts, the podcast-review column I’ve written for the past three years at MaximumFun.org. (You’ll know them for their own podcasts like Bullseye, a.k.a. the former Sound of Young America, and Jordan, Jesse, Go!) Perhaps I should. This week’s column examines (two-time Marketplace of Ideas) guest Merlin Mann’s latest podcasting project, Roderick on the Line:

Vital stats:
Format: Skype conversations between Merlin Mann and John Roderick
Episode duration: 50m-1h30m
Frequency: weekly

Time was, Merlin Mann’s followers — a square-framed group in which I count myself — suffered a perpetual drought. You’d get your luminary’s guest appearances on podcasts now and again or, on extra-special days, recordings of his speeches at tech industry conferences and company retreats. Though half of these would slice off into the rough of open-source application minutia or techniques for executing semi-documented five-keystroke Mac OS commands, Mann would still work in incisive and eerily useful observations about life, work, and the overlap between them. These came propelled by his rocket-fueled Gen-X wit, guided by cultural landmarks on maps printed by independent record labels of the early nineties. Out its back blew a noxious vapor trail meant to cloud and choke the forces of internet-enabled hucksterism and complacency. To what scraps we received, we paid the attention of Talmudic scholars.

Now, even the most compulsive admirers surely struggle to keep up with more Merlin Mann media than they can handle. Those who always approached his output buffet-style, paying attention to his indictments of certain things and ignoring his indictments of others, must see this as a boon. Those who desire only his thoughts about using your mind to create things that actually matter in a less twitchy, fearful manner can stick to Back to Work with Dan Benjamin. Those who prefer Mann’s rapid-fire cracks — not fully orchestrated jokes, exactly, but something subtler, more tonal, and further askew — about German sex tourism, fruit cocktails, John Wayne Gacy, and insistently ragtag but highly educated guitar bands hailing from the first Bush administration — now have something to download as well.

Read the whole thing here.