Hyperallergic is one of the art websites that I regularly enjoy; therefore, it’s exciting to hear they are now doing a weekly podcast!
To give you a taste of Hyperallergic’s fun stories, here’s some of the most recent articles from the 77 articles that I’ve saved to Evernote over time.
- A City Where Trees Tweet
- How Zarafa, France’s First Giraffe, Became a Cultural Sensation
- The Artist Who Preserved the Vanishing Technology of Knots
- An Artist’s Meditative Project to Retype 100 Novels
- Canada Releases World’s First Glow-in-the-Dark Coin in Circulation
Sounds like a totally cool website right? The podcast is going to be incredible, right?! It’s even hosted by one of the Hyperallergic people, Hrag Vartanian, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic.
How does episode 1 of the Hyperallergic podcast fare?
Parts of the podcast fall rather flat. The first six minutes of the podcast is the host Hrag reading news. In general when podcasts read from scripts, some can make the script sound engaging. Others sound forced. This podcast… well… unfortunately, this host sounds like he’s literally. reading. word. for. word. from. a. script.
Thankfully, the podcast becomes much more lively when the Hrag interviews someone on the Unicode emoji subcommittee. The interview lasts 10 minutes.
And then the host come back reading news stories and the introductory to the next guest—about New York City events. Ok, so NYC is the center of the art world, so maybe I should care. But I really don’t want to listen to podcasts about events in New York. If you live in New York, you’d probably like these local segments.
Summary:
- 6 minutes: reading news scripts (bleh)
- 10 minutes: interview about emojii story (entertaining)
- 1 minute: scripted intro (bleh)
- 5 minutes: interview about NYC events (bleh)
I’ll continue subscribing to Hyperallergic hoping Hrag continues to develop his reading voice better. I’ll be skipping over the NYC-focused segments, and enjoying the more quirky stories that Hyperallergic is known for.