Top Society & Culture Podcasts

In the third season of her podcast, Dua Lipa: At Your Service, pop powerhouse Dua Lipa has candid, uplifting and insightful conversations with the people who inspire her most about topics like reinvention, sex and relationships, psychedelics, and more. Season Three will include conversations with internationally renowned artists, thought leaders and cultural icons.

Season Three of At Your Service will also invite listeners to explore the vast landscape of human experiences, and celebrates the power in sharing stories and insights into the world around us. Following Season Three's premiere with Chicken Shop Date host Amelia Dimoldenberg, Dua will welcome an extraordinary lineup of guests including BLACKPINK's Jennie Kim, renowned relationship expert Esther Perel, star of Netflix's You and podcaster Penn Badgley, drag icon Sasha Velour, and the incomparable Billie Eilish. New episodes of At Your Service will be released every Friday at 12pm UK time.

The Dua Lipa: At Your Service podcast is the sweeping companion piece to Dua's Service95 newsletter, a global style, culture, and society editorial platform created to help the reader make sense of the world.

Quitted is a podcast about quitting, hosted by Holly Whitaker and Emily McDowell.

What happens when you don't want to be who you are anymore?

For all of us, there comes a time when in order to thrive (or simply survive!), we have to walk away from something that represents a huge piece of our identity. This could be a career, a relationship, a religion, a long-held dream, a social norm, a gender–whatever it is, it’s a massive part of who we are, and letting it go comes at great personal cost. Quitting means disappointing all the people invested in our staying; it requires giving up the security of what we know, and stepping into a liminal space where we’re not sure who we are anymore.

Unlike growing and building, which our culture obsessively celebrates, endings are quiet and lonely, because we don’t talk about them. Quitting is synonymous with failure. We’re conditioned to believe perseverance is a virtue, “winners never quit,” and giving up means losing. Quitting is only acceptable when it's a waypoint to something greater, some imagined bigger and better future. But what if that’s all a lie?

We’ll talk with guests who have quit all kinds of seemingly impossible things, about the decision to quit, but even more importantly, about what happens after that. Quitting doesn't mean going directly from being one thing to being another thing; in between, there’s a middle space, a transitional space, and that space is hard, confusing, and groundless. We'll talk about navigating that space, and everything surrounding it, in order to help provide insight, permission, and illumination for others seeking the courage to risk everything to find a truer north.

We’ll also explore the concept of quitting itself, how it came to hold the meaning it does, its inextricable links to late-stage American capitalism, and how a shifting narrative around giving up could be the key to a different future.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you've ever yelled at someone on social media about, say, cancel culture or mask-wearing, then you are a soldier in the culture wars - those everyday battles for dominance between conflicting values. The acclaimed writer and podcaster Jon Ronson has seen friends swallowed up in them to the extent that it's ruined their lives. Jon was curious to learn how things fell apart, and so he went back into the history of the culture wars to find some of the origin stories: the pebbles thrown in the pond, creating the ripples that led us to where we are today. He had no idea what he'd find, but he's uncovered some extraordinary people and the strangest, yet most consequential tales.

In each episode, we bring people together to discover stories they’ve never heard about the people they thought they knew best. Hear real conversations about the stories, big and small, that shape us. Since 2013, Storyworth has been on a mission to connect people through the power of storytelling.

Imperfect Paradise is an award-winning weekly narrative podcast showcasing California stories with universal significance, hosted by Antonia Cereijido. Each deeply reported story is driven by characters who illuminate aspects of American identity and underscore California's reputation as a home for dreamers and schemers, its heartbreaking inequality, its varied and diverse communities, its unique combination of dense cities and wild places. New episodes premiere Wednesdays, with broadcasts on LAist 89.3 the following Sundays.

Support for this podcast is made possible by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe that quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live.

Virginia Tapscott is on a quest to uncover her family’s darkest truth - and shine a light on the secrets in all our families. This gripping new investigative podcast is created by Tapscott and journalist Steve Jackson, and brought to you by The Australian. Proudly supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.