New & Notable Podcasts: Week of September 14

Podcasts worth your time right now, new or old — picked by Rex editors. Monday is Emmys; these are for the rest of the week.

6 titles

  1. Search Engine (2025), PJ Vogt
    PJ Vogt (Reply All) takes one question per episode and follows it until it turns into a story: a missing person, a company, a thing the internet thinks it already knows. Any episode works as a first one, and the show is still going now. For anyone who misses the era when a podcast could surprise…
  2. The Last 12 Weeks (2026), Serial Productions & The New York Times
    Lawyers race a Texas execution date, and the case is still moving through court rather than wrapped up in a neat ending. Serial Productions and The Marshall Project made it together, and it is out now. Not a true-crime snack: the Serial method on a story that has not finished happening, best…
  3. It Was a Book First (2026), It Was A Book First
    Two culture reporters take a movie or show that came from a book and work out what the adaptation kept and what it cut. New this year and out now. Useful this week for anyone walking into Practical Magic 2 (opened September 11) or saving Resident Evil (Friday, September 18): a brain in the room…
  4. Heavyweight (2025), Pushkin Industries
    Jonathan Goldstein helps a stranger reopen an old wound, a friendship that ended or a thing never said, and then he calls the other person. Funny, then suddenly not. Any season-one episode is a fair place to begin, and the whole run is available now. Still the podcast that behaves most like a…
  5. The Rest Is History (2026), The Rest Is History
    Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, two British historians who talk like people who like each other, go through Rome, the world wars, and whatever struck them as interesting that week. No homework. Out now with a deep back catalog; their postwar episodes pair with Kate Atkinson’s Our Noble Selves…
  6. Decoder Ring (2025), Slate Podcasts
    Willa Paskin takes one cultural object (a jingle, a font, a canceled sitcom) and finds the story underneath it, in twenty-something minutes per rabbit hole. It comes from Slate and is out now. The palate cleanser after Emmys night, for anyone who wants to care about something small and specific…