Back in early 2021, as a podcast producer, I spent Wednesdays tracking the week’s newsiest topics for our end-of-week episode. On the first Wednesday of January, I was sitting at the kitchen table in my Brooklyn apartment, laptop plugged in in front of me, one tab open to the script in progress, and the other opened to my Twitter feed, keeping an eye out for incoming fodder. I remember the first tweets popping up, reporting live as the situation unfolded: A violent mob was pushing its way into the Capitol. While real-time tweets likened the scene to The Handmaid’s Tale, a spate of narrative podcasts in 2022 would teach us that this moment actually looked a lot more like the realities of America’s radical and extremist history than fiction facsimile.

In late April of this year, about two months before the January 6 hearings would start being televised, Pineapple Street Studios released Will Be Wild, an eight-part series that took us into the homes and families of people who stormed the Capitol. What podcasts often do best is tease out a singular event, giving us the many disparate perspectives and emotions we miss in our endless scroll. By the time White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s blockbuster testimony dominated headlines in June, the Will Be Wild audience had become personally acquainted with the enraged horde she had heard about from outside the Oval Office, and the forces that had radicalized them as individuals.

As the nation tuned in to the January 6 hearings, my favorite podcast of the year, Mother Country Radicals, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Mother Country Radicals is hosted by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, a playwright and the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers—leaders of the Weather Underground. Over the summer, Zayd told Chicago magazine that one of the reasons he decided to tell the story now “was that it was the Trump administration when [he] started, and [he] was thinking a lot about how young activists tried to resist out-of-control law-and-order authoritarian governments.” This podcast has all the ingredients: a narrator with personal stakes recounting his own childhood on the run from the FBI; unprecedented accounts inside notorious jailbreaks; youth culture against the backdrop of a country in tumult, not too dissimilar from our own.

Independent studio Dustlight Productions coproduced the series. Part of their brand strategy, in addition to producing, is offering seminars on creating podcasts. I’ve been recording, editing, and writing audio for over a decade now, from writing local Morning Edition episodes and reporting stories for NPR’s All Things Considered to codeveloping and producing Pivot, with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. Most recently, I cocreated and executive-produced Archetypes, with Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. Building my craft and career in the era of the podcast boom has been an education, but directing high-profile productions can often take you away from the fundamentals of cutting tape.

In the weeks before Mother Country Radicals premiered this past June, to keep my production skills fresh, I took a sound-design class with that team’s senior producer, Stephanie Cohn. You build a podcast soundscape by layering nuanced recorded sounds, mounting them over a linear timeline, and manipulating how we hear them. When done well, a visceral sonic scene comes together and pulls listeners into an anecdote. On this Friday afternoon, we were experimenting with explosions.

Several weeks later, I binge-listened to all 10 episodes of Mother Country Radicals on a cross-country flight. Sharing an elbow rest with a snoozing stranger, I heard Cohn’s finished explosion. It was laid under the voice of Weathermen member Cathy Wilkerson, describing the moment she realized a bomb had detonated in the basement of the Greenwich Village townhouse where the radical group worked. As the cacophony of shattered windows ricocheted in my headphones, Wilkerson transported me into the moment: her disoriented footsteps as she dodged collapsed floorboards, unsure who else was alive, out of the wreckage, onto the street, and into her realization that she was now a fugitive on the run with nothing but the tattered clothes she was wearing, a high-pitched frequency ringing in her memory and through my AirPods.

Mother Country Radicals gave me a glimpse into the personhood of young militants fueled by high-minded ideals—many of which resonated with me: fighting racial inequality, stemming violent imperialism, rectifying class disparity. But in the voices of these former radicals, I also heard the weariness of people conflicted by their own youthful mistakes in the face of a largely unchanged culture decades later. The podcast raised immutable questions: Where does performative activism end and wholehearted political uprising begin, and at what point does that tip into full-blown terrorism?

As host, Zayd Ayers Dohrn alluded to the forces that the Mother Country Radicals leftists were fighting back against have in many ways intensified over recent years. We are seeing more conservative extremists enter our political system. In September, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, “Joe Biden is Hitler”—another tweet in a long line of racist and antisemitic remarks. This sentiment actually mirrored political rhetoric around President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the lead-up to the US joining World War II, a time period Rachel Maddow has explored in her hit podcast Ultra, which premiered in October. I found myself hooked on Ultra as Kanye West was in the news for pushing conspiracy theories demonizing Jewish people. Maddow’s reporting takes us back to the late 1930s, into America’s first America First movement, which was charged by antisemitism and infiltrating Congress through a Nazi operative. Ultra was the soundtrack of my Los Angeles commute when a group of neo-Nazis hung a banner over the 405 saying, “Kanye was right about the Jews.” What I heard Maddow explaining about America’s history of extreme antisemitism, and how it spread, sounded eerily similar to what I was witnessing in my present.

While West may have been the year’s most incendiary internet zealot, he was certainly not alone. The turbulence of Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition spawned countless think pieces bemoaning the platform’s future as a hub for right-wing extremists. Our reliance on the internet has vastly sped up since Ted Kaczynski, one of America’s most notorious domestic terrorists, wrote his infamous screed. Project Unabom, like Ultra and Mother Country Radicals, brought us back in time to reexamine the Unabomber saga. Jenna Weiss-Berman, the cofounder of Pineapple Street, pointed to themes in that early internet era that are resonant today. “I do feel like the show explored topics that are especially relevant right now—I think, in a way Ted Kaczynski is what we would now call an incel, and that his form is semi-nonsensical (and yet to some, inspirational) radicalism is prominent right now,” she told me.

Episode one of Project Unabom introduced Don Graham, the then publisher of The Washington Post. Graham recounted the day a hefty package arrived at his office—it was an anonymous manifesto enumerating arguments to stop the advancement of technology and humankind’s dystopic future. If the media did not publish his manifesto, the writer threatened credible violence. Most prescient was hearing The Washington Post and The New York Times grapple with the stickiest ethical conundrum I’d never heard about in journalism school. On one hand they could publish the manifesto, potentially preventing harm and giving the public an opportunity to bolster the FBI’s ongoing manhunt. On the other hand, by giving into the demand, would the American free press and the nation’s most trusted news sources, at the height of their cultural significance, set a damaging precedent for other potential coercions?

This type of journalistic self-inquiry—how do you report on ideologically driven domestic terrorism without fanning the flames?—was explored more currently by Vice News reporter Ben Makuch in the podcast American Terror. Makuch has been reporting on the expanding white nationalist movement since 2018. In the series he expatiates on that reporting: the seminal texts, recruitment strategies, and interconnectedness of the racist mass shootings we’ve seen play out over recent years.

Part of why I think podcasts recounting historical instances of extremism have been so prolific this year is because they offer a hungry but exhausted news consumer the opportunity to examine extremism from a safe distance and in the rearview. Listening to a highly produced podcast about radicalized people in the past, removed enough from the terror of our own moment, allows us to understand our circumstances without having to stare directly at them. It is easier to consider stories from a time gone by, about people long forgotten, like those in Ultra, than it is to be confronted by ongoing investigative reporting, like that in American Terror.

But what podcast hosts get to do that traditional reporters don’t is break out of the third-person vantage and introduce themselves into the story. Makuch, for one, gives me something more human: his internal process covering the dark subject area, often spoken aloud, as he lights a cigarette and decompresses with his fellow reporter. He weighs his responsibilities as a journalist, a balance between bringing this very real movement into the light without feeding oxygen to its supporters. In sharing his vulnerability on the microphone, woven throughout American Terror, Makuch provides me a framework to process my own discomfort as I face our alarming underbelly, which, if 2022’s narrative historical podcasts are to be believed, has been part of American identity all along.