Last Friday, I found myself a liturgical space while listening to a news podcast.
The Daily is a daily news podcast. It’s hit-or-miss, but one segment I do appreciate consistently is the “Here’s What You Need to Know Today” bit at end of each episode. It consists of one or two three-sentence stories describing recent events that can generally be agreed upon as being “big news”. Sometimes, I just skip to that.
On Fridays, if Michael Barbaro is hosting, Here’s What You Need to Know Today is followed up by a very long staff credits read.
A lot of people work on the Daily, and it is cool that they acknowlege so many of them. But it is weird to just hear names being read for two minutes. Almost no verbs an a sea of names. Because there’s few grammatical waypoints, the segment feels like it goes on for a much longer time than it actually does. The non-verbal, liturgical quality takes the listener to the chant/prayer/incantation space.
So I could spend more time in that space, I made a player that shuffles chopped up Michael Barbaro samples so you can hear him reading names for as long as you’d like.
Hit play to start the infinite staff credits chant:
Opties
(The other main host, Sabrina Tavernise, has much sharper enunciation than Michael Barbaro. There’s also generally a lot more life in her voice, so it would be interesting see what kind of vibe an infinite read by her would produce. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, she never does the long staff credits read.)
(Also, I don’t think this works on Mobile Safari. Apple wants people to support Mobile Safari but basically requires people to buy Macs to debug Mobile Safari issues. ¯\(ツ)/¯)