Black stories from the porch to the archive.
The Stoop turns everyday Black cultural shorthand into thoughtful reported conversation. Across episodes on names, fatherhood, hair salons, polyamory, rest, trauma, and sound, it moves easily from laughter to history and back again.
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The Stoop is a reported conversation show about Black identity, culture, memory, and everyday life across the diaspora. Its strongest moments often begin with something small enough to recognize instantly: a niece leading a meditation, jollof rice in a lunchbox, the sound of snapping fingers, the quiet posture of someone sitting in a braiding chair. From there, the show asks what that detail has been carrying. A conversation about children's stories becomes a deeper look at names, belonging, apology, repair, and the need for kids to hear familiar worlds reflected back to them. An episode on Black dads moves from personal grief and TV expectations into data, stereotypes, community support, and the pressure placed on fathers who are already parenting beyond the narrow role society imagines. A salon conversation turns a stage play about African hair braiding into a meditation on labor, empathy, immigration, laughter, and aching hands. The show can be playful. It is also willing to get grave. Episodes take on polyamory without reducing it to shock, racial trauma without making it abstract, and incarceration without flattening a person into their sentence. The pacing stays conversational, with teasing, questions, reported tape, and reflective turns braided together. Guests are not treated as decoration. They are given space to carry memory, expertise, uncertainty, and feeling. The Stoop's best editorial instinct is its patience with cultural shorthand: it hears a joke, a phrase, a sound, or a family habit and asks what history sits underneath it. That makes the show useful for listeners who want Black culture discussed with warmth, specificity, and real reporting, not flattened into trend language or public-radio distance.
Made for: For listeners drawn to Black culture, diaspora stories, identity, family, and intimate reported conversation. It especially suits people who like personal banter that opens into history and social context.
What sets it apart: The Stoop turns familiar cultural moments into reported questions without sanding off humor or feeling. Its range is the point: a joke, a salon memory, a children's book, or a holiday story can all become serious cultural evidence.
The Stoop podcast digs into stories that are not always shared out in the open. Hosts Leila Day and Hana Baba start conversations and provide professionally-reported stories about what it means to be Black and how we talk about blackness. Come hang out on The Stoop as we dialog about the diaspora.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Hana Baba and Leila Day connect intimate questions about Black life to history, identity, language, faith, and relationships.
The Stoop begins with questions close enough to touch, then follows the history and social pressure inside them. Hana Baba and Leila Day move easily between personal reflection, reported scenes, guest testimony, and explanatory research.
Perfume, church, jealousy, inherited trauma: Leila Day and Hana Baba turn your curiosity into better questions.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A warm, specific conversation about representation that stays grounded in repair and small moments of recognition.
The Stoop centers a conversation with Lovie Ajayi-Jones on a plain but loaded idea: children should be able to find themselves in books, audio, and on screen, right down to their names, foods, and familiar words from home.
A humane look at polyamory that treats jealousy, communication, and exclusivity as the real story.
This episode folds polyamory into ordinary relationship talk: jealousy, honesty, exclusivity, and the effort of naming what people actually want.
A Father's Day episode that trades cliches for a fuller view of Black fatherhood.
Father's Day gives The Stoop a clear emotional frame. It begins with missing dads and the wish for a TV-style father, then broadens into the pressure Black fathers carry and the stereotypes that shape how they are seen.
A cheerleading story opens into generational trauma and health risk.
The episode opens with a 90s Las Vegas cheerleading story about a Black girl on an all-white squad, then stays with the humiliation of a coach who polices her body and voice.
A warm, sonic meditation on Black memory and everyday joy.
The Stoop treats Black history as something lived in full view all year, not something tucked away for one month. It begins with the fatigue of nonstop news, then moves toward the voices and stories that keep people going.
A holiday story about freedom, memory, and what prison takes away.
The Stoop folds a holiday conversation into a quiet look at what Christmas can mean after freedom has been withheld. Hannah and Leela center Greg Eskridge's first Christmas as a free man after more than 30 Christmases inside prison, and the episode keeps circling the small…
A salon-set conversation that turns everyday detail into a clear look at labor and care.
Jocelyn Beo's turn on The Stoop treats Zsa Zsa's African Hair Braiding as a working room, not just a setting. The talk stays close to the small things that give the place shape: the conversations, the clock, and the way a chair can hold both waiting and work while life keeps…
Country music, Black memory, and African history come together in a thoughtful, easy listen.
The episode starts with a familiar country-music question and opens it into something wider: why Black listeners and African families have long found a place in a genre many still treat as white.
Ira Glass frames weekly theme-driven segments spanning family secrets to Portland's protest conflict.
Shankar Vedantam unpacks the psychology behind relationships, careers, and money through researcher interviews.
David McRaney interviews researchers on cognitive bias, motivated reasoning, and why minds change.
Ryan Holiday pairs daily Stoic lessons with long-form guest conversations at his Texas bookstore.
NHPR's Jason Moon investigates the Bear Brook barrel murders and a New Hampshire wrongful-conviction case.
Russ Roberts interviews authors and economists on ideas from classical liberalism to AI.
Hosts Leila Day and Hana Baba reflect on their nine-year journey with The Stoop, announcing a hiatus to prioritize rest and stillness.
Leela finally made the folktales project.
The Stoop producer Natalie Parrott explores polyamory through interviews with a triad called X, Intro, and Ambie — a married couple and their third partner who is expecting a child together — and Kevin Patterson, who has been polyamorous for 19 years and wrote Love's Not Colorblind about race in alternative communities.
The Stoop co-host Hannah and Leela examine the stereotype of the absent Black father through interviews with Black dads including Chris Stewart, CEO of Bright Beam and host of Eight Black Hands, and Rob Fields, a Brooklyn father of two.
Co-host Leela Day of The Stoop tells the story of being the only Black cheerleader on a predominantly white high school squad in Las Vegas in the 1990s, where she experienced repeated racial microaggressions including a demerit for gum while white teammates hid theirs.
This episode explores the diverse sounds that embody Blackness, from celebratory noises like the Zagaruta and hype-ups to historical communication through drums and snapping.
After spending over 30 Christmases behind bars, journalist Greg Eskridge was released from San Quentin in July and is preparing for his first holiday season as a free man.
A salon chair can make you disappear.
Black country is getting loud.
After the 2024 presidential election, The Stoop revisits a powerful essay by writer Stacia Brown that examines what it means for Black women to consistently show up for a country that does not always show up for them.
Some phrases carry whole family histories.
Pride sits beside Juneteenth on the stoop.
The Stoop celebrates its 100th episode with co-hosts Leela Day and Hannah Bui revisiting defining moments across their run, including the founding principle that the show exists for conversations that stop when non-Black people enter the room.
Something is cooking, but dinner is not the point.