“We are blackness’s biggest fans,” Brittany Luse says in the trailer for
the Gimlet podcast “The Nod,” co-hosted by Eric Eddings, which débuted
in June. “And on this show we’re going to explore the stories about
blackness that you don’t often hear.” This is followed by clips of such
stories: Eddings asking a bodega clerk for grape drink in gentrified
Brooklyn (“No—we carry only grape juice”), from an episode about the
cultural history of artificial grape flavor; a woman joyfully
reminiscing about starring in her school’s production of “The Wiz” as a
kid (“I’m going to ease on down this road, and you’re going to follow
me!”), from an episode about Afrocentric education; a man (the writer
Vann R. Newkirk II, who founded
#duraghistoryweek)
describing having color-coördinated his do-rag, headband, wristbands,
and shoelaces as a teen, from an episode called “All Heroes Wear Capes.”
Each week, Luse and Eddings present stories on topics…
