Unearthed audio for deep listeners.
The Selects Podcast is a curated feed of audio work pulled from web archives, radio streams, and old podcasts. It favors pieces where memory, voice, history, translation, and form matter as much as plot.
PRESS PLAY
The Selects Podcast treats audio history as something still warm to the touch. Its episodes gather works found in web archives, radio streams, old podcasts, and related documentary collections, then place them back in circulation with concise editorial framing. The format is simple. A selection is introduced, its origin is named, and the listener is invited into the grain of the piece itself. That restraint matters. The show often lets archival sound, subtitled speech, oral history, testimony, and performance hold the center without overexplaining them. Selections move from Harlan County oral history to Radio Atlas, from a Greenland diary piece to a comic experiment with a text-to-speech robot. They also revisit public-radio treatments of literature, television, war, race, and the archive itself. The tone is patient but not sleepy. It has a curator's confidence that a strange document, a half-remembered broadcast, or a recovered voice can still open a room. Some pieces are formally playful, especially when comedy, automation, and self-description start rubbing against one another. Others are grave, built around coal mining, flooding, wrongful conviction, execution, or tapes recorded near the front lines of war. The connective tissue is not topic but attention. The show keeps returning to the way sound records what official summaries flatten: breath, hesitation, accent, room tone, timing, silence, and the pressure around a remembered event. Mitra Kaboli's introductions often position a selection inside a broader question about documentary form, cultural aesthetics, or the need to protect uncomfortable archives. The featured works may come from Radio Diaries, Studio 360, Third Ear, Lost and Found Sound, Radio Atlas, or individual producers, but they are presented as part of one listening practice. The show suits people who like documentary audio with texture and provenance. It does not rush toward takeaways. It lets old work feel newly unstable. At its strongest, The Selects Podcast makes discovery feel less like browsing and more like opening a box that still has voices inside.
Made for: For listeners drawn to audio documentaries, oral history, archive work, subtitled storytelling, and formally adventurous radio. It rewards patience, curiosity, and an ear for pieces that reveal themselves slowly.
What sets it apart: The show stands apart by making curation the main act: it finds older or less-visible audio works, frames them briefly, and lets their original shape remain intact. Its range stretches from public-radio history to experimental performance without sanding off the strangeness.
Selects is a show that brings you unearthed audio works we’ve found buried in web archives, radio streams, and old podcasts. They’ve come to us through the recommendations and inspirations of some of the most talented audio creators working today. Every two weeks we release a new episode right here and it is going to be something that you definitely want to hear. The works that we are going to feature are going to be some of the most compelling and exciting and ambitious works in audio. You can find the whole library of exclusively curated works and bonus...
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Carefully framed audio documentaries make memory, displacement, creative anxiety and emotional life vivid through archival voices and distinctive storytelling forms.
The Selects Podcast gives complete audio documentaries room to establish their own language, then lets Mitra Kaboli supply just enough introduction and reflection to sharpen the encounter.
This is the show that sends your queue digging through archives while everyone else chases the new.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A reflective talk about audio as a medium still being made, remade, and heard across traditions.
The episode stays the medium here: Mitra Kaboli speaks with Eleanor McDowell about what audio can still be when listening opens onto another tradition, with Radio Atlas giving the piece its clearest center.
An AI-written stand-up routine becomes a sharp, uneasy study of voice, labor, and self-definition.
Seinfeld turns an AI-written stand-up routine into something that is really about voice, labor, and the awkwardness of explaining yourself. The machine does the literal speaking, but Ross Sutherland keeps the human pressure visible, so the joke lands as much on authorship as on…
A sober family search for truth becomes an argument for preserving compromised archives.
Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair follows Bridget McGee as she tries to understand what happened to her great-grandfather and how to carry that story forward.
A patient documentary about loss, memory, and a house in Ramla.
The Lemon Tree draws on archival audio and family recollection to revisit the expulsions from Ramla and the house later named abandoned property by the state.
Manga readalong, detours fully preserved.
An excerpt from an oral essay blending oral history, music, and sound to portray Harlan County, Kentucky, focusing on coal mining history and self-sufficient lifestyle.
A short Proxy promo opens the show.
Ross Sutherland asks what a stand-up routine written by ChatGPT would sound like.
The Big Read presents an excerpt from Ernest Gaines' novel 'A Lesson Before Dying,' about a young black man wrongly sentenced to death in 1940s Louisiana.
This episode of The Selects Podcast features a Studio 360 American Icons episode exploring the cultural significance of the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy and its star Lucille Ball.
This episode presents the Vietnam Tapes of Lance Corporal Michael A.
Bridget McGee Robinson investigates her grandfather Willie McGee’s 1945 arrest, conviction, and execution after finding newspaper articles about him as a teenager and receiving a directive from her dying mother to find the truth.
The episode opens on news voices from Jerusalem and the violence of 1948.
Mitra interviews Sonja Williams, producer of Black Radio series, about her career in audio documentary and her approach to ambitious projects.
Reporter Annie Cheney explores how the simple question 'What did you have for breakfast?' becomes a loaded family drama about her past eating disorder.
Mitra Kaboli introduces Celex, a new Radiotopia show that unearths compelling audio works from archives, and shares her personal journey in audio production.