This Week In Podcasts: Chelsea Peretti, Online Advertisements and X-Men Edition

This week at Inverse we’re listening to podcasts about X-Men, sports fandom, Chelsea Peretti and online advertisements.

I work on a website that engages deeply with what would have been called “Nerd Culture” a few years ago, but is probably just culture now. That puts the onus on me to know something about many fictional and one actual universe. It’s hard going and so I’ve been really enjoying X-Plain the X-Men, a podcast that does just that. It’s baffling, but my mother always wanted me to play outside as a kid so I’m playing catchup. The (relatively) recent episode on “E for Extinction” was compelling to me. I’m still not sure I get the X-Men, but I am approaching fluency and it helps. Knowing stuff about stuff is cool. Yellow spandex still isn’t, but that’s a different complaint for a different time. - Andrew Burmon

68- Into The Ether

Peretti’s back. Chelsea’s podcast is my favorite thing she does because even though she’s an ascendant star reaching a bigger audience on a weekly basis, this thing is still weird as hell. The people that call into this show are my children, I love them all. - Corban Goble

What It Means To Be A Sports Fan - The New Yorker

My dad sent me the link to this ‘cast, because I’m a huge sports fan and he is not. The subject had us all, “Now we can finally discover why we are or are not sports fans!” It wasn’t exactly a psychological plumbing, though, and was more of a guest-driven focus on why they were supporters of one team or another. Most were from the Northeast — the Jets, Red Sox, and Canadiens, for example — underscoring a very New Yorker bias. (I happened to be in Chicago listening, as Nicholas Dawidoff and Adam Gopnik adequately generalized the fan makeups of the Cubs and White Sox.) There weren’t any “a-ha moments,” really — besides a reminder to read more Roger Angell — but the cerebral discussion was a refreshing break from the kind of barroom banter that covers much of the nation’s turf during sports-heavy fall. - Colin St. John

There is nothing quite like the awkward interactions between a worker and their boss. This week on the Verge’s What’s Tech, Chris Plante speaks with Vox CEO Jim Bankoff about how online advertisements work in 2015. Though there are plenty of jokes about Plante not knowing how this stuff works, the show is a great catch-up on just how websites function and sustain themselves and the future of advertisements on the world wide web - David Turner