Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 220, dated July 30, 2019.
Apple categories, temporarily relieved. I was fairly delirious this weekend — between the relentless summer heat and all the heavy lifting involved in packing up an apartment — when I pulled up the Apple Podcasts app only to find that, bizarrely, the entire podcast categories menu had vanished. For a moment, I briefly contemplated that it was time to get a new phone, or that my brain was finally giving out. And then, after prodding Twitter to figure out if I really was losing it, I realized that I was just being a complete dolt.
As it turned out, I had forgotten about an email that Apple had sent out the week before, which informed podcasters that they can start updating their shows using the new categories and subcategories the company announced early last month. So begins a momentary if slightly awkward period of transition: “Changes to the enhanced Apple Podcasts categories are…
