Sound and Vision

Log on to social media these days, and it’s likely that you’ll come across a video of two people in a studio, talking. Usually the host is famous — Joe Rogan, or Amy Poehler or the Kelce brothers. Often the guest is, too. And while the clip on social media is probably brief, the video it’s been cut from may well be three, four, even five hours long.

This is podcasting in 2025: Many of the most popular shows are now video conversations that seem to stretch on forever. They often feature major political figures and may even have played a role in electing Donald Trump to his second term. The sheer profusion of these talk shows poses a very basic question: Who, exactly, is watching all this?

I put that question to podcast creators and viewers, industry analysts and executives. And the answer, it turns out, is complicated. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what I learned.

Who’s watching

One thing we do know: A lot of people are hitting play on podcast videos. YouTube announced recently that more than a billion people a month watch podcasts on its platform. And according to the most recent survey research, around three-quarters of podcast consumers play podcast videos.

What makes it complicated, though, is that we don’t know whether everyone playing these videos is actually watching them. The same survey showed that more than 40 percent of people who play podcast videos on YouTube listen to them only in the background — say, while folding laundry or doing other work.

Podcasting began as an audio-only format, which led to an extraordinary degree of intimacy between listeners and hosts. Hearing the same people in your ears week after week tends to do that. Video podcasts strive for the same, or an even greater, sense of intimacy with their audience. One superfan of “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von” told me that she liked to watch the entire podcast because it made her feel less alone and as if she had company over. (Von’s show, which regularly draws hundreds of thousands of viewers on YouTube, typically runs for about two hours.)

Indeed, if cable news is the background noise of choice for many boomers, video podcasts have the potential to become the same for younger audiences, who often consume media with a smartphone in hand. Alyssa Keller, a stay-at-home mom from Michigan, told me she often watched “The Shawn Ryan Show” while cleaning during her children’s nap time.

The old guard

The rising popularity of video podcasts challenges how people conceive of the medium. Many were introduced to podcasts through deeply reported, painstakingly produced narrative shows like “Serial” and “This American Life.” The popular video shows today are less ambitious, and they’re much easier to share on social media, which increases the potential for bigger audiences and more money.

But at least one podcast pioneer doesn’t see much to be alarmed about. Ira Glass, the creator of “This American Life,” believes the expansion of the podcast tent is good for business, he told me. And, he added, traditional, radio-style programming — listening to people, not watching them — has a unique power that video lacks.

“If people want to watch people on a talk show, that seems fine to me,” he said. “I don’t feel protective of podcasting in that way. I don’t have snowflakey feelings about podcasts.”

Read more about video podcasts here.

THE LATEST NEWS

Trump Administration

• For nearly 15 years, Trump and Jeffrey Epstein socialized together in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Fla. They fell out around 2004, before Epstein’s first arrest. Read more about the friendship and how it ended.

• Republican efforts to force Trump’s agenda through Congress have caused tempers to flare and relationships to fray. That could mean trouble ahead, Carl Hulse writes.

• A kite surfer, a Navy SEAL and a makeup artist were among the more than 260 people freed in the U.S.-Venezuela prisoner swap.

• Trump came into office determined to bully China into changing its trade behavior with tariffs. Now, he’s trying to woo Beijing instead.

Democratic Party

• Zohran Mamdani is on a charm offensive with national Democratic leaders, many of whom are still grappling with how much to get behind his run for New York mayor.

• The Democrats’ 2024 election autopsy is expected to avoid discussion of some key decisions, including whether Joe Biden should have run in the first place.

Weather

• The number of missing in Kerr County, where the Texas floods hit hardest, is down to three. It was 97 just days ago. Many were confirmed as safe, officials said.

• The Cram fire in central Oregon has grown to more than 95,000 acres, making it the largest U.S. wildfire of the year so far.

Other Big Stories

• The man accused of killing a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband had undergone periods of religious zealotry and an unsettled career. Read about Vance Boelter’s life — and his messages to The Times.

• Torrential rain caused flash floods in the Washington, D.C., area. The authorities in Maryland rescued dozens of people, including from cars.

• A man who had been thrown out of a Los Angeles nightclub intentionally plowed his car into a crowd, officials said, injuring at least 30 people.

• It’s the parliamentary elections in Japan today. A Trump-inspired candidate with a “Japanese First” agenda has grabbed the spotlight.

• The C.E.O. of a tech company resigned after a big screen at a Coldplay concert showed him embracing another executive who isn’t his wife.

PATIENTS AT RISK

In Alabama, surgeons cut open a woman’s body to retrieve her organs only to discover she was alive. In New Mexico, coordinators subjected another woman to days of preparation for donation even as she seemed to be regaining consciousness, which she eventually did.

Those are just two examples from a growing number of bungled attempts to retrieve patients’ organs. These lapses have occurred as the U.S. health care system comes under growing federal pressure to increase transplants. Here’s what else our reporting found:

• Most donated organs come from patients who are brain-dead, but another type of donation has tripled in recent years: donation after circulatory death. In these cases, the patients are on life support and a doctor has concluded that they won’t recover. Their organs are removed after life support is withdrawn and their hearts stop. This process involves more medical judgment calls and can be subject to hasty decisions.

• Some organ procurement organizations are aggressively pursuing circulatory death donors and pushing families and doctors toward surgery. Hospitals are responsible for patients up to the moment of death, but some are allowing the organizations to influence treatment decisions.

• Fifty-five medical workers in 19 states told us they had witnessed at least one disturbing case of donation after circulatory death. And several said they had seen coordinators persuading clinicians to administer drugs to hasten death in potential donors.

Read our full investigation here.

THE SUNDAY DEBATE

Does the backlash over Trump’s refusal to release information on Epstein represent a real schism in the MAGA coalition?

Yes. While Trump will eventually quiet his base, this fracture will never fully heal. “Mr. Trump’s not exposing the story is Mr. Trump’s not draining the swamp. That is a big moment in the history of MAGA,” Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal.

No. Though his influential supporters are standing firm for now, they know Trump has a history of abandoning conspiracies he no longer needs. “They can’t let go of Trump, adored by their audiences as he fuels content, which they convert into profits,” Chris Brennan writes in USA Today.

Vows: Their shared love of theater was just the opening act.

Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about a couple’s hunt for a home in the woods of Central Connecticut.

Trending: Charli XCX and George Daniel, a member of the band The 1975, got married in a town hall in East London, Vulture reports.

Lives Lived: Felix Baumgartner, nicknamed “Fearless Felix,” was an Austrian extreme adventurer who hurtled to earth from more than 24 miles high in 2012 and became the first human to break the sound barrier while free-falling. Baumgartner died, paragliding, at 56.

SPORTS

W.N.B.A.: Team Collier cruised to a 151-131 victory over Team Clark in the All-Star Game. The captain Napheesa Collier scored a record 36 points, capturing M.V.P. honors.

“These Summer Storms,” by Sarah MacLean: If Steve Jobs’s will had stipulated that his four children spend five days together before collecting their inheritance, one might say that MacLean’s delicious romp of a novel was based on his life (or death, really). Instead we land in the long shadow of a fictional tech billionaire, Franklin Storm, whose grown offspring have gathered at the family compound in Rhode Island to complete a series of tasks tailored according to their specific issues with one another. We arrive on the island with Alice, the problem child, who only cements her reputation by getting entangled with one of her father’s henchmen before crossing Narragansett Bay. MacLean’s previous 15 novels have been historical romances; here, she proves she can more than hold her own in the modern world, spinning love, grief and sibling rivalry into a mesmerizing cyclone of family dysfunction.

More on books

• Jane Austen was a peerless chronicler of class and romance. She died without seeing her own extraordinary success, but her novels remain relevant more than two centuries after her death. Here’s why — and where to start.

• Looking for your next great romantasy? Start here.

THE INTERVIEW

This week’s subject for The Interview is the actor Sandra Oh, whom I spoke to live onstage at the Tribeca Festival last month. Oh — who played Dr. Cristina Yang on “Grey’s Anatomy” for 10 years, and is soon to play Olivia in Shakespeare in the Park’s upcoming production of “Twelfth Night” — brought along some of her diaries, which she has been keeping since she was 11 years old.

You’ve described yourself as a very emotional child, and you brought a diary entry that speaks to that.

Yes, this is my very first entry, and I just want to actually prompt it with: Don’t worry.

“Sunday, the 3rd of October, 1982. Dear Ary” — like diary — “I hate myself. That’s all. Oh yeah, I also think I’ll commit suicide.” Spelled S-U-C-I-C-I-D-E. “Nothing is worth living for. I’m no good at anything. I’m never happy anymore. I try so hard but I never succeed.” Spelled S-U-C-C-I-D-E. “Mom and Dad always laugh at me when I try, I do stupid mistakes, Mom always yells at me. I have no self confidence. I don’t believe in myself. I can’t do anything. Someday I’ll run real far, so far that no one will ever find me. I have a lot of thoughts but I can’t write them all down. I hate myself.”

Then:

“Monday, the 4th of October. A great day!”

I turned out OK. [Laughs.]

When you were revisiting this, were you surprised?

I just have so much compassion for that young person. I’m so pleased with myself that at 11, with so much feeling, I unconsciously found some place to regulate myself, which was writing. I remember my mom didn’t like it, because I would always be writing, and she knew it was about her. It was like, “What are you always writing?” That has just been a receptacle that started out as an unconscious place to feel safe but eventually helped me figure out who I am.

Read more of the interview here.

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

It’s the time of year when a lot of us arrive home from our evening commutes sticky and warm. So, in this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Margaux Laskey offers up meals that don’t require a stove. She suggests making slow-cooker chipotle-honey chicken tacos, air-fryer salmon and slow-cooker corn chowder.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were diabolic and diabolical.

Can you put eight historical events — including the first urban public transit, the first trans-Atlantic radio signals, and the creation of Winnie-the-Pooh — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.