By Lex Friedman

Building a new treadmill desk setup for 2025

I’m writing this article at 2.6 miles per hour.

Fifteen years ago(!), I wrote an article for Macworld about upgrading to a standing desk. Many studies warn of the negative health impacts of sitting all day long.

After about a year of standing, I upgraded to a treadmill desk (and of course, I wrote about that for Macworld, too.) I used that setup for years. I reviewed expensive, Bluetooth-enabled treadmill desks. And then eventually, I found I was on phone and video calls all day long, and it was increasingly difficult to tread for any significant amount of time. I switched back to merely standing. And then, eventually, the pull of gravity reduced me back to sitting.

But now I’m back, baby. I took 23,000 steps yesterday, and I’ll likely exceed that number today.

One step at a time

A year or so ago, a local friend of mine named Anthony posted on Instagram about having lost 20 or so pounds while working with a (remote) trainer. I commented to congratulate him. Minutes later, at most, that trainer slid into my direct messages: Did I have belly fat I wanted to shed, too? Let’s set up a call.

Whoa there, trainer man. You don’t know me. I ignored the message and kept living my life. But this past November, when Anthony shared that he was down 90 pounds, I felt inspired. I wrote to that same trainer, and started working with him. I’ve been making steady progress.

I’d been averaging roughly 5000 steps per day. I work from home. When my trainer mentioned that I could accelerate my weight loss if I got more steps, I knew I didn’t have more time to dedicate to workouts than I was already doing. I don’t feel like I have time to inject outdoor walks into my day right now. But I remembered my treadmill desks. In fact, I still had my treadmill desk in storage.

So I dug it out and turned it on. Like me, it hadn’t aged too gracefully. So I freecycled the old treadmill and bought a walking pad from Amazon.

Walking the walk

Wow, have the prices on treadmills for treadmill desk usage come down. I owned a $700 one; I reviewed $1000+ ones for Macworld back in the day. Today, you can find treadmills for under-desk usage for less than $250, with some costing barely more than $100.

What makes a treadmill good for desk use? Typically, it won’t have the standard hand railings (since those wouldn’t fit under your desk). It will prioritize a quiet motor. And the maximum speed will top out far slower than a traditional treadmill. Wirecutter has recommendations that didn’t speak to me. I ended up going with a highly-rated Sperax Treadmill. It includes a remote that I never use, and I actually keep its foldable handrails up; my height and desk are each tall enough that the rails fit, and I like the controls there.

I set up the new treadmill and started walking while working. It was like riding a bicycle. Just, you know, without wheels.

One foot in front of the other

When you’re first starting out on a treadmill desk, walking 1.5 miles per hour or slower is the way to go. It takes some time to get used to seeing your screen while you’re moving, and typing while walking adds some complexity. But if you start slow and work your way up, you can get to comfortable casual paces — again, mine is currently between 2.4 and 2.6 miles per hour — without impacting your work at all.

I still shut off the treadmill while on Zooms. But on audio calls, no one hears a thing. I’ve even recorded multiple podcast episodes while treading and no one knew. I use the NS1 Noise Supressor plugin from Waves on my recordings, but Zoom’s built-in noise cancellation and even GarageBand and Logic’s freely included noise gates do a great job of stripping out the treadmill’s sound.

I did encounter a few technical hurdles with my latest treadmill desk setup. Some were related to my displays, and some were related to getting my ego-boosting step count credit. Let’s start with the latter.

I wear an Apple Watch and an Oura Ring. Neither is particularly good at tracking steps on a treadmill desk. If you tell the Apple Watch you’re doing an indoor walk, it’ll fare slightly better, but only barely: In my testing over a few days, it would record 20 to 30 percent of the distance I actually covered.

The problem is that unlike normal walking — or even traditional treadmill walking — treadmill desk walking doesn’t involve my arm movement. I’m typing and walking literally right now as I write these words; there’s not much for smart devices to glom onto to figure out how many steps I’m taking. But I wanted credit for my steps, dammit!

You can buy (much) pricier treadmills that offer different levels of Apple Health integration through their own third-party apps. You can buy third-party adapters to strap your Apple Watch to your ankle, where it can log your steps better. (But unless you’re very limber, said placement makes it rather difficult to check your notifications.)

Even your iPhone itself can count your steps — and I considered just dropping mine in my pocket to measure my treadmill walking. But I, you know, use my phone a lot, so that solution didn’t seem like the right one.

I went even lower tech: I bought a cheap, rechargeable pedometer that I stick in my pocket when I’m on the treadmill. When I stop the treadmill, I look at the pedometer and manually log those steps in the Health app. Or I used to, until I asked myself WWJD: What would Jason do?

I built a dead-simple Shortcut with three steps: Ask for numerical input, log those steps in Health, and then confirm with an on-screen message. I saved that Shortcut as an app on my iPhone, and now it takes mere seconds to look at the pedometer, log those steps, and move on with my day.

Except… when I first started this approach, I noticed that Health (and my third-party apps that connected to it) didn’t always reflect my increased step count. I’d manually logged 10,000 incremental steps, but the app was stuck on 2500.

The trick is understanding how Health prioritizes disparate data sources. Apple knows you have multiple devices that theoretically can measure your physical activity (your phone, watch, third-party fitness apps), and does some behind-the-scenes work to avoid double counting. And by default, Health trusts the Apple Watch to be the best source of intel for your movement. I get that instinct, but it’s wrong for treadmill deskers.

To tweak this, head over to the Health app, tap the Browse tab, and find Steps. Scroll down to the bottom and choose “Data Sources & Access.” The next screen may take a long moment to load. Once it does, scroll to Data Sources. If your phone is anything like mine — and you’ve owned or reset a few Apple Watches and iPhones in your day — you will likely see a lengthy list. Mine lists multiple entries for “Lex’s Apple Watch” and “Alexander’s Apple Watch” and numerous old iPhones. And in my case, Shortcuts was listed at the very bottom.

Tap Edit at the top right, and drag Shortcuts way up to the top of the list. Now steps entered via your new Shortcut will take priority.

Monitoring your health

There was one final tech aspect I had to handle for my personal setup. I use an M2 MacBook Air, which supports one external display. But I still wanted my seated setup to work for when I need a walking break. And my giant, 3-foot wide curved Dell monitor wouldn’t fit in my standing desk space. So I ordered a new monitor for my treadmill desk setup, and needed to figure out how to connect both to my MacBook Air at the same time.

It was time for me to learn about DisplayLink. In truth, I learned as little as possible. I installed DisplayLink on my Mac and ordered a DisplayLink adapter, the subtly named WAvLINK USB 3.0 to HDMI Adapter for Multiple DIsplays, 2k. You may need a different one if your monitor has a higher resolution, but this worked great for me. I now have the treadmill monitor connected via that adapter and an HDMI cable, and — as with my giant Dell monitor — it mirrors my laptop’s screen.

Once that was all set up, I encountered one final hiccup: Notification Center stopped working.

I’d get texts and reminders and other alerts, and they’d be in Notification Center on my Mac itself, but they’d never appear as banners on screen.

That’s because mirrored Macs with multiple displays default to expecting you’re presenting something — so they hide your alerts. Head to System Settings -> Notification Center and turn on “Allow notifications when mirroring or sharing the display.”

Do tread on me

I’m down 19.1 pounds since November. I’ve walked more than two miles while writing this piece for Six Colors.

I take seated breaks when I need to, but honestly they’re fewer and further between than you might guess.

The last time I used a treadmill desk, I took to eating more desserts and such because I could do so without gaining weight, thanks to the extra calories I was burning walking 10 to 20 extra miles per day. This time, at least so far, I’m not eating so much extra; I’m just burning more.

Now that I’ve figured out all the nuances covered here, everything’s pretty seamless; I walk up to my desk, and then I start walking. As bad for you as lots of sitting can be, lots of walking is pretty darn healthy. And the journey of a thousand healthier work days begins with a single step.

[Lex Friedman is the co-host of The Rebound, an independent consultant, the proprietor of Lex.Games, and so much more--but he's not that other Lex.]

By Jason Snell

LLMs aren’t always bad at writing news headlines

On Monday I complained about Apple’s response to Apple Intelligence making mistaken summaries of news headlines. But here’s the funny thing: large-language models are actually pretty good at writing news headlines.

The problem with Apple’s approach is that it’s summarizing a headline, which is itself a summary of an article written by a human being. As someone who has written and rewritten thousands of headlines, I can reveal that human headline writers are flawed, some headlines are just not very good, and that external forces can lead to very bad headlines becoming the standard.

Specifically, clickbait headlines are very bad, and an entire generation of headline writers has been trained to generate teaser headlines that purposefully withhold information in order to get that click. (Writing a push notification is not the same as writing a headline, but it’s at least similar.)

Not to get all Fred Jones on you, but: I was trained to write headlines that made you want to read more, but didn’t withhold information. The idea was to compete for your attention, not pose riddles that could only be decoded by reading the story in question.

The now-dead news app Artifact built a killer feature that rewrote clickbait headlines on demand. It used the complete content of the news story to write a new headline that was always better than the ones being served up by various news organizations. Yes, when given enough information and asked to generate a headline, it turns out that AI is pretty good at the job!

Still, as Mike Krieger of Artifact wrote about in a Medium post, the company also built in some layers of human validation:

When we rewrite a title given a user request, that new title is initially only visible to the user. If enough people request a rewrite of a given title, the rewritten title will be escalated for human review and if it looks good, we’ll promote it the new default title for all users.

One of the principles we use when applying AI to features inside Artifact is to be as transparent as possible. For both Summarize and the clickbait title rewriter, we’ve used consistent iconography (the star-like shape) to denote that there’s AI involvement.

It didn’t work out for Artifact, but there’s something here. Summarizing summaries isn’t working out for Apple, but more broadly I think there’s something to the idea of presenting AI-written headlines and summaries in order to provide utility to the user. As having an LLM running all the time on our devices becomes commonplace, I would love to see RSS readers (for example) that are capable of rewriting bad headlines and creating solid summaries. The key—as Artifact learned—is to build guardrails and always make it clear that the content is being generated by an LLM, not a human.

By Jason Snell

Apple Intelligence summaries might get warning labels. That’s not enough.

The BBC, following up on two reports of Apple Intelligence summaries that transformed its own headlines into factually inaccurate text, got a public response from Apple:

Apple has said it will update, rather than pause, a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that has generated inaccurate news alerts on its latest iPhones.

The company, in its first acknowledgement of the concerns, on Monday said it was working on a software change to “further clarify” when the notifications are summaries that have been generated by the Apple Intelligence system.

Here’s what the BBC reports Apple’s statement is:

Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback. A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary.

The statement uses the beta tag it has placed on Apple Intelligence features as a shield, while promising to add a warning label to AI-generated summaries in the future. It’s hard to accept “it’s in beta” as an excuse when the features have shipped in non-beta software releases that are heavily marketed to the public as selling points of Apple’s latest hardware. Adding a warning label also does not change the fact that Apple has released a feature that at its core consumes information and replaces it with misinformation at a troubling rate.

Apple is shipping these AI-based features rapidly, and marketing them heavily, because it fears that its competitors so far out in front that it’s a potentially existential issue. But several of these features simply aren’t up to Apple’s quality standards, and I worry that we’ve all become so inured to AI hallucinations and screw-ups that we’re willing to accept them.

We shouldn’t be. Apple’s shipping a feature that frequently rewrites headlines to be wrong. That’s a failure, and it shouldn’t be shrugged off as being the nature of OS features in the 2020s.

So what can Apple do now? A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give all apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out to the developers of specific classes of apps (like news apps). Next, it should probably build separate pathways for notifications of related content (a bunch of emails or chat messages in a thread) versus unrelated content (BBC headlines, podcast episode descriptions) and change how the unrelated content is summarized. Perhaps a little further down the road, news notifications should be summarized based on the full text of the news article, rather than generating a secondhand machine summary of a story already summarized by a human headline writer.

Beta software contains an implicit promise that the developer will actively work to squash bugs and make the product better before it goes final. Adding a warning label in the interim is an easy band-aid, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem. Apple needs to do much more work here, and if it can’t, it needs to turn this feature off until it can release a version it can stand behind.

By Jason Snell

Quick Tip: Which USB devices are currently attached?

I’ve recently switched from using two computers in two different offices (the hard-to-heat garage and my well-heated back bedroom) to using one computer (a MacBook Pro) docked in either location. There’s a lot that has gone into this decision, which I will detail in a future post, but this post is about one of the most frustrating aspects of this switch: the inability of my computer and automations and settings to understand when the context has changed.

Fortunately, my Mac reacts to switches to my network configuration with aplomb, so I don’t have to dive deeep into Network Locations, though if I did, there are several alternatives to old classic utilities like ControlPlane.

But I record a lot of podcasts, and I have two entirely different USB devices that I use for audio. How can I make it so that when I press the “record” button, the right USB device is recording and receiving audio?

My overall solution ended up being pretty complex, but the key insight was to use a Terminal command to list all the connected USB devices. You don’t need to know a lick of Terminal to use it, because you can stick it in a “Run Shell Script” block in Shortcuts. Here’s the command:

ioreg -p IOUSB -w0 | sed 's/[^o]*o //; s/@.*$//' | grep -v '^Root.*'

This command will output a list of all your currently attached USB devices in plain text.

(Optional explanation: ioreg will display an enormous list of devices and ports on your system. -p IOUSB restricts it to USB devices and -w0 makes it display complete devices one per line, without truncation. That result is sent to sed, which uses a regular expression to match just the names of the attached USB devices. The final step is to use grep to remove the initial line, which summarizes the list rather than listing an actual USB device. You don’t need to know this.)

At that point, you can build a Shortcut that alters its behavior based on the contents of the output. For example, my Shortcut’s next step is an If/then block that checks to see if the result contains the text “MV7” for my Shure MV7 microphone or “USBPre” for my USBPre2 audio interface. But it’ll work with any USB device that happens to be attached at a given time.

By Six Colors Staff

Our 2024 favorites: TV, books, movies, and podcasts

TV

Bad Monkey

A surprise hit, this Vince Vaughn vehicle on Apple TV+ is based on a Carl Hiaasen novel of the same name, following Florida cop Andrew Yancey—suspended from duty for…reasons—as he gets embroiled in a fishy case after a fisherman finds a severed arm. This is one of my favorite sub-genres of crime stories: darkly funny, wildly eccentric, and full of colorful characters. There is a monkey, but it’s not about the monkey…or is it?

Standout performances go to Jodie Turner-Smith (also electric this year in the much more uneven Star Wars show The Acolyte) as the Dragon Queen and Meredith Hagner as the “bereaved” widow Eve. There’s also a great sub-plot involving Saturday Night Live veteran Alex Moffat as a floundering real-estate agent.

While this season tells a perfectly concluded story, I’m glad to hear that the show will be returning for season two…my only question is whether or not the monkey will return too.—Dan Moren

Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5

I do feel bad for Star Trek: Prodigy which had its second, and potentially final season this year, and Star Trek: Discovery which also came to a kind of sputtering finish, but Lower Decks is the one I love the most. Yep, a 2D animated cartoon by one of the Rick and Morty guys. Little did I know how much I would miss it. If you didn’t get the chance to check it out there’s five great seasons, with only a handful of episodes that could have been better. That’s an outstanding run for a Star Trek show, or any show for that matter. The fact that it’s an animated show means they can also do things that the live action Treks can’t. Something they’ve taken full advantage of over the years, and especially this season.—Joe Rosensteel

Silo

The first season of Apple TV+’s adaptation of Hugh Howey’s viral self-published “Wool” series was unexpectedly great. Season two is a change of pace, quite literally, as the outcome of the first season leads to a split storyline for season two. While some might resist the natural slowdown in pacing—parceling out two stories necessarily means slowing things down—the intrigue continued, new characters came to the fore, and the mystery of the Silo deepened. Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Robbins, Common, and Steve Zahn (!) all gave great performances this season.—Jason Snell

Superman & Lois

The fourth and final season of the CW’s take on the man of steel also marks the end of the Arrowverse, the twelve years of DC comics shows on the network. (Even though Superman & Lois itself is technically only Arrowverse-adjacent—don’t at me.) It seems appropriate that a venture that started depicting a B-level, powerless vigilante should culminate with the most iconic and powerful of superheroes.

The last season is heavy on the pathos and family drama, while also doing its own spin on one of the most infamous Superman storylines. But one of the show’s strengths is its humanistic portrayal of Clark, a refreshing antidote to the distant and seemingly unfeeling god of the recent DC movies. There’s also an excellent menacing performance by Michael Cudlitz as a decidedly different kind of Lex Luthor, and the show is, as always, anchored by fantastic performances from Tyler Hoechlin and Bitsie Tulloch as the titular couple. If you don’t find yourself getting weepy in the show’s closing minutes, then you may be carved of stone.—DM

Shōgun

The show of the year might be FX and Disney+’s Shōgun, a sprawling epic of feudal Japan. That it was this good is something of a miracle, given that it’s an American adaptation of a James Clavell novel previously adapted into a popular (but questionable) 80s ministeries starring Richard Chamberlain. But by leaning heavily into Japanese creators and collaborators, the show really blossomed. Hiroyuki Sanada’s character of Toranaga becomes the true central character, with the Anjin (Cosmo Jarvis in the Chamberlain part) and Mariko (the unforgettable Anna Sawai) not having to carry the weight that the characters did in the original adaptation. I read the book, watched the original miniseries, and wondered why they bothered trying to make this. But the creative team, led by Rachael Kondo and Justin Marks (the creator of all-time classic Counterpart) nailed it. What a wonderful ride.—JS

Monsieur Spade

A one-off miniseries following Dashiell Hammett’s iconic sleuth, Sam Spade, who has retired to France in the 1960s. Having taken up the pastoral life, he’s dragged back into his old profession after a brutal murder at a convent leaves him watching over one of the only witnesses, a teenage girl with whom he has a past. The story unfolds in traditional convoluted film noir fashion, interspersed with Spade’s own personal demons and—surprisingly enough—French politics of the era.

If all of that isn’t enough to get you in the door, the show’s anchored by a great performance from Clive Owen as the retired sleuth and the behind the scenes creators include Scott Frank (Oscar nominated for his screenplays for Out of Sight and Logan) and Tom Fontana (Homicide: Life on the Street, Oz). It’s an absolutely fabulous looking show too; shot with a cinematic look and feel to it. And with just six episodes, it’s tightly constructed—taut with not too many frills, appropriate for Spade himself.—DM

The Traitors U.S.

The Traitors is a reality competition show that’s shot in a Scottish castle, with a host who comes dressed in kilts, tartans and tweeds. How is that reality? Well, what we call reality TV is anything but, and I mostly give the genre a pass. But this show, whose second US season aired this year, is fun, suspenseful and delightfully campy. The Traitors divides contestants into “faithfuls” and “traitors.” No one knows who is who, and it’s the faithfuls job to find and evict the traitors, one by one, all while the traitors gather as a group to “murder” one faithful each night. It’s hosted by the spectacular Alan Cumming, playing his part as lord of the manor to the hilt. This year’s installment brought together reality contestants from Big Brother, Survivor, the Bachelor, the Real Housewives franchises, and more, to murder and be murdered, scheme and play silly games. The first season featured a mix of normies and reality stars, but leaving out the civilians this year turned the drama and charisma on display up several notches. I know it’s true because I was only familiar with two of the contestants, as they’re past players on the only other reality show I watch, Big Brother (which also had a great 2024 season). I had no idea I would be rooting for a Real Housewife to win the game. The Traitors is an international phenomenon, with franchises in the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, all reputed to be great fun. The new US season, with more reality stars already announced, debuts next month on Peacock.—Shelly Brisbin

Movies

Man’s Castle

The May release of Man’s Castle (1933) on Blu-ray says everything about why I collect physical media. I’m a classic film obsessive, and streamers can’t be trusted to show some movies I want to see. And when a rare gem like Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle gets restored because an intrepid film historian found nine previously deleted minutes of the film, physical media is where I’ll be able to see those new scenes. It’s a 4K restoration from the original 35 mm nitrate negative, and it looks and sounds great. Man’s Castle is a precode film, so when it was rereleased in the post-code late 1930s, these minutes were very sloppily edited out, because of racy dialog and even some suggestive images of the leads skinny-dipping. The film is a Depression-era saga of a couple, living hand-to mouth, under a bridge. He is the youngest Spencer Tracy you’ve probably ever seen, and she is the winsome Loretta Young, who you will root for throughout. Beautifully and sensitively directed by Borzage, it’s a true discovery that you can’t see on your favorite streaming service.—SB

Books

Karla’s Choice

It’s one thing to fill the shoes of a literary giant—it’s another when it’s also your dad. Noted sci-fi author Nick Harkaway switches genres to pick up the mantle of his father, legendary spy scribe John Le Carré, who passed away in 2020. The result is Karla’s Choice, which brings back Le Carré’s most indelible protagonist, spymaster George Smiley (most memorably portrayed on TV and in film respectively by dual icons Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman).

Set in the previously unexamined period between Le Carré’s breakout hit The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and his equally acclaimed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the book finds Smiley, haunted by the fallout of the former story, having left the employ of British intelligence agency the Circus and attempting to patch up his tempestuous marriage. When a would-be assassin shows up to kill a seemingly random literary agent, Smiley is pulled back into the shadows. The result is a labyrinthine tale of loss and secrets, conjured in an impeccable Le Carré style—with just enough of Harkaway’s own tone injected to play to his strengths. —DM

Service Model

I’m picking Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model. It can be picked up as an ebook, which makes it technology, but I really wanted to highlight it for the subject matter, which is also technology. More importantly, the use (or misuse) of technology in a former, stratified society. The book is from the perspective of a robot valet that needs to go on a quest through the decaying, dystopian remains of human civilization. You wouldn’t believe it from that bleak description, but it’s also very funny.—JR

[This was also my favorite book of the year. —JS]

Penric & Desdemona series

This year I ripped through the 12 novellas and one novel of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric and Desdemona series. These are high fantasy stories, which aren’t usually my favorite, but Bujold is such a great writer—her Vorkosigan Saga series is must-read sci-fi—that I had been meaning to jump into this series, and I’m so glad I did.

The simple version: Penric is a young man who, largely by accident, ends up being inhabited by a demon, which he eventually names Desdemona. Demons aren’t fundamentally evil in this world, and Penric and Desdemona end up as both sides of an buddy action/comedy duo in a single body as they navigate a world of violence, magic, and tragedy. Just as Bujold sketched the lives of her Vorkosigan series characters from youth through old age, she also lets us watch Penric grow from callow youth to well-seasoned veteran. And since most of these stories are novellas, they’re bite sized, so you can read as many as you want. Me, I couldn’t stop. I read them all.—JS

Grave Expectations

I like a good mystery with some supernatural elements, and Alice Bell’s debut novel Grave Expectations manages to hit both of those genres with a solid dose of hilarity. Claire is ekeing out a paltry living as a medium, “haunted” by the ghost of her friend, Sophie, who disappeared when the two were in high school. She’s hired to do a seance at an English country house for a particularly eccentric family, and is surprised to discover the grounds are haunted by the ghost of someone murdered there the previous year.

Naturally, they investigate. If you were to wonder if hijinks would ensue, yes, yes they do. I honestly found this one of the funniest books I’ve read in years—it’s pretty rare that I laugh out loud while reading, but I did during this book. Several times. It’s the perfect cross of ghost story and murder mystery, not too dark despite its subject matter, and Claire is an appealing if flawed protagonist.—DM

Podcasts

A Very Good Year

How do you talk about movies from every era of cinema? If you’re the hosts of A Very Good Year, you organize each podcast episode around a guest and a specific year of moviemaking, from the ancient classic era, to modern times. Jason Bailey and Mike Hull are enthusiastic movie fans, but they rely on guests, who range from filmmakers and actors to critics and film bloggers, to choose five films from the year they’ve picked, and explain why they’re great, or just favorites. The top fives are surrounded by a short news segment for the chosen year, and a lightning round where the group chews over award-winners and other significant films of the year. The format is lively and engaging, and the hosts have lots of opinions, both good and bad, about the movies they cover. And they can be kind of foul-mouthed, too, if you care about that. The guys at A Very Good Year retired the show this year, promising a new show in 2025.—SB

The Rest Is History

Late last year I discovered Goalhanger’s The Rest is History podcast and the rest—well, you know. It became my most listened-to podcast of 2024. Hosted by two British historians, it’s podcasting exactly the way I like it: two personalities who feed off one another as they tell gripping stories from the past. Both Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook have good senses of humor (“That definitely happened, didn’t it?”) and pick a refreshingly broad range of topics, including wonderful series about Montezuma and the Aztecs, the roots of the French Revolution, Custer and the battle of Little Big Horn, and the conquest of Britain by the Romans. I can’t recommend it highly enough.—JS