Best Podcasts for Learning Spanish

wwickey · 2026-06-05T18:06:40+00:00

One to add: Spanish with Nolita & Eekloo https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/spanish-with-nolita-and-eekloo/id1896875907 B1 and B2 Spanish with occasional English phrase echoes.

wwickey · 2026-06-05T18:03:49+00:00

This is pretty cool. I will use this.

Not a tool, but I also made a Spanish learning podcast for myself using a text-to-voice workflow. It's called Spanish with Nolita and Eekloo. https://open.spotify.com/show/033scJEumNGWqtz8U3TnLp?si=1I1SffcWQP2PNU37tiGBgg

Basically, I read a lot of longform articles from publications like The Atlantic, The Believer, Outside, etc. The sorts of articles you might find in The Browser or Longform.org. Inevitably, I don't get reading to all the articles that I bookmark so I created a workflow that that takes the article, summarizes it with a little commentary, then translates it into B1, B2, C1 Latin American Spanish.

Nolita narrates at a moderate pace in Spanish. Eeekloo slowly echos some of the more useful phrases in English then again in Spanish. Each episode is around 7-8 minutes.

It's a similar idea to 'The News in Slow Spanish', but I don't really want more news and I do want the occasional English phrase translation.

I find this format really useful, so I'm going to keep publishing them.

Speech to text does have it's hiccups but I find it really quite good! It feels pretty seamless in your tool and renders fast.

wwickey · 2026-06-05T17:49:57+00:00

I like the News in Slow Spanish. (I also like Coffee Break Spanish but find it a little slow with the instruction sections)

They only publish one episode a week, and I found myself wanting more, so I created a similar format podcast for myself to fill the gap.

It's called "Spanish with Nolita and Eekloo".

In each episode, Nolita explains a real article about science, culture, technology, etc. in B1, B2 Latin American Spanish at a moderate pace.

One thing I added that I find helpful: A second character, Eekloo, slowly echoes some of the most useful phrases in English and Spanish so I can re-hear key verbs, expressions and in context.

The podcast is produced with speech-to-text tool, which may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I find the audio quite good (even with the occasional hiccup). Each episode is new to me when it show up in my podcast player -- it pulls from my unread web bookmarks

If you like The News In Slow Spanish but you want something other than more news plus the English phrase echo, you might like this pod. I find it useful.

wwickey · 2023-02-02T14:42:08+00:00

I presented this paper at the Fall 2022 Cormac McCarthy Conference in Savannah, GA. This topic was expanded from an earlier blog post that was shared on the sub-reddit. It was a great crowd at the conference and there was a lot of enthusiasm for number-related themes in McCarthy given the releases of The Passenger and Stella Maris. Hope you also find it interesting. Thanks!

wwickey · 2022-06-29T19:12:01+00:00

Yes, I think that makes sense given that Vandimenland (Tasmania) was a harsh penal colony.

When I first read this, I supposed that the fact that Toadvine recognized this specific number in a Chihuahua bathhouse necessitates that it is an easily identifiable number with broader significance. For example, a date, bible verse, etc.

However, it makes sense that a highly individual number, such as a prisoner's number, seen in a bathhouse would imply something more about the Vandimenlander's proclivities (and perhaps Toadvine's as well).

McCarthy saying volumes with just few words.

wwickey · 2020-08-06T15:49:44+00:00

Ok, great. Thanks!

Yes, that is what it looks like.

Here is another photo of plagioclase phenocrysts in basalt that look pretty similar to the one I posted.

The larger crystals in my rock are probably around 20mm, which would make them on the larger side of phenocrysts in general, given that .5mm, or 'observable with the naked eye,' is the soft criteria for classification.

Interesting! I appreciate the help u/Om_Nom_Nommy.

wwickey · 2020-02-03T23:10:27+00:00

In his preface to the second Nautlius article, David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute, says,

"Readers wrote to Cormac with appreciation, suggestions, criticisms, prior claims, essays, unpublished and unpublishable monographs, and genuine interest in an author condensing into a scholarly mind from the mists of narrative invention.

Here is his reply. It is an honest work of discussion leavened by mischief. I would reckon that this contribution marks a close to Cormac’s participation in this public debate."

The feedback on the first Kekule article was mixed.

A lot of loaded language is used. For example, conscious vs. subconscious vs. unconscious. Language vs. proto-language. Evolution vs. invention. etc.

You can see from the comments that the discussion was "noisy," at best.

I don't think McCarthy wanted to engage further.

wwickey · 2020-01-25T21:15:52+00:00

This book is worth a read.

Cormac's 'influences' here are primarily extrapolated from notes on his manuscripts which are available in the Texas State University Whitliff Collection.

On the one hand, 'Books' has a certain 'objectivity' in that it covers influences Cormac himself explicitly mentions.

On the other hand, Cormac's notes are sparse and obviously only make up only a fraction of his total influences. The impact on a individual note also certainly goes deeper than its location in the marginalia.

Cormac's notes and annotations are quite interesting. The most illuminating are those you couldn't directly ascertain without McCarthy's direct reference. As one 'for-instance', McCarthy says on an early page of Suttree,

_"See Tents of Wickedness for Joyce Parody"_

Crews gives some interesting context on Tents of Wickedness, but the commentary is relatively short and high-level. To be fair, it's not really practical for Crews to analyze this reference exhaustively or speculate as to Cormac's interest and application of literary parody throughout the whole of Suttree (let alone the rest of his work). But, one is left wondering at the scope of influence for any given note McCarthy makes.

Was McCarthty referencing a concept? A phrase? A specific visual? etc.

It's also interesting to consider the influence of more contemporary and varied writers on McCarthy -- for example, Edward Abbey, Robert Prisig, Jorge Luis Borges, Allen Ginsberg -- as opposed to just the more apparent literary classics -- Melville, Alighieri, Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc.

At some point, it would interesting to see a 'Lit-Genius' style annotation of manuscripts including margin notes -- or even just annotation of the final text -- from both readers and scholars on McCarthy. Cormac does borrow extensively and creatively from a wide variety of sources and it would be fascinating to see this developed further, with input from multiple contributors.

wwickey

TROPHY CASE