Ep. 028 · 16 JAN 2026
FEATURED
On second drafts.
Priya Anand · read by the author
14:00 · 1,408 listens
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Two-hundred-and-forty essays recorded by their authors. Long-form, slow-paced, properly produced — closer to a BBC radio feature than a podcast. Average episode runs 14 minutes; no two-host banter, no sponsor reads, no introduction telling you what you're about to hear. Just the piece, well-read.
“The voice carries what the page can't. The pause is punctuation.”
Every author records into a Røde NT1 we ship out the week before publication. They send us the raw take; our producer in London — formerly at BBC Radio 4 — handles the leveling, the de-essing, the room-tone fills, and the pacing edits that turn a first read into a clean broadcast. Average production cycle: 38 hours from receipt to publish. Average retakes per piece: 1.4.
We don't speed up authors who read slowly. We don't smooth out the breaths. We leave room for the pause that means "and I mean that."
Word-level timestamps, paragraph anchors, marked pauses, and italicized emphasis where the author's voice carries the meaning. Search the whole catalogue — 248,000 words — and tap any sentence to begin listening from that moment. The transcripts are typeset, not auto-transcribed: every one is read against the master by a human before publication.
Available on Member only. Eight bug-fixes a month, on average; one full re-transcription if you find an error and email us about it.
Priya Anand · read by the author
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Ines Calderón · read by the author
One episode a week is free, with one short read from our producer at the top. Members get the full back catalogue, the transcripts, the ad-free feed, and bonus essays we never publish in writing.
One new episode every Friday. A 28-second read from our producer at the top. That's the entire ad.
Everything in Free, no producer read, the full 240-episode catalogue, the transcripts, and the bonus.
“I listen on the walk home. By the time I'm at my door I've thought through something I'd been avoiding for a month.”
“The production is the best in the genre. No two-host banter. No mid-roll. Just the essay.”
“Hearing essays in the author's voice — pauses and all — changed how I read the written version.”
“Worth the $8 for the transcripts alone. Searchable, timestamped, actually accurate.”
Most Loom episodes are audio-only commissions written specifically for the ear. About 28 of the 240 are author-read versions of pieces we published in print or on Quill — the rest you can't read anywhere. The audio version is always the version the author preferred; we publish accordingly.
Yes — your member feed is a standard RSS URL with HMAC-signed authentication. We've tested every major podcast app; the only one that doesn't work cleanly is Spotify, which refuses third-party authenticated feeds entirely (their decision, not ours). For Spotify, we offer in-app membership at the same $8 / month.
First pass is Whisper-large with our own vocabulary file. Second pass is one of two human transcriptionists in Edinburgh and Cape Town, who run the audio at 0.9× and correct against the master. Average corrections per episode: 38. We've measured 99.6% word-accuracy across the 240-episode catalogue.
Every episode is recorded by the author in their own voice. We've refused four offers from voice-cloning vendors. If an author can't read their own piece (illness, accessibility), we use a credited human narrator paid $400 / episode. We will never synthesize a voice. The C2PA provenance manifest on every audio file declares this.
Yes. Member feeds expose direct MP3 and AAC downloads. Most podcast apps cache offline automatically. The whole 56-hour catalogue clocks in at 1.4 GB at our delivery bitrate (96 kbps mono, the broadcast standard for speech).
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