Everything has endings,” Anna Sale tells me. “Sometimes you choose them, and sometimes they choose you.”
This essay was adapted from the Alta Weekly Newsletter, delivered every Thursday. To keep reading, become an Alta Journal member for as little as $3 a month.
SIGN UP
When we spoke on Zoom earlier this month, Sale, a writer and podcast host, was in the middle of many endings and beginnings. In October, Death, Sex & Money, her popular podcast, lost its home at WNYC after a round of massive cuts that laid off 6 percent of the radio station’s staff. Sale spent a month not working, visiting libraries and museums in the Bay Area, where she lives; taking hikes; and even catching a workday performance by Bobby McFerrin at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley.
Rather than let her show go, Sale brought Death, Sex & Money to Slate, where she now finds herself working at a private media company for the first time.
Death, Sex & Money has done exactly what podcasts were designed to do: crawl into the listener’s ear canals with astounding intimacy, sharing deeply personal conversations. Sale created the show in 2014 to talk about the topics that occupy our minds but that most of us avoid in casual conversation. In one episode, she spoke to a childless couple about what would happen to their land after they died. In another, she spoke with former senator Alan Simpson and his wife, Ann, about how their political disagreements have affected their marriage. As an interviewer, Sale asks prodding but not invasive questions; she wins her subjects’ trust early, using her calm voice as a bridge throughout the interview.
As we talk, Sale takes her time with her words. She listens carefully to each of my questions, pausing to turn each in her mind. Her two large dogs wander in the background, one occasionally resting his huge head on her lap.
In 2014—before #MeToo went viral, the Trump presidency, the pandemic, the rise of Black Lives Matter protests, and the year of the Barbie—the things that we weren’t talking about (and needed to) were different from what they are now. The media landscape was different too. Podcasts were booming thanks to shows like Serial, and Sale and her team soon found themselves in a more crowded field.
“Ten years ago, I was casting about for, ‘Give me models of adulthood,’” Sale says of her early interviews. Now, deeper into her own adulthood with a cross-country move, a marriage, children, and those two dogs, Sale has bigger questions and worries: Can the United States survive polarization? Can we develop understanding for our neighbors, especially those who think differently than we do? Sales finds herself worrying about the lack of empathy and curiosity in conversation these days, our tendency toward hostility.
Starting over after WNYC was scary: Sale was publicly losing a job for the first time, possibly ending a long stretch in public radio, and deciding whether to rehouse the podcast or let it die a natural death. She was inundated by offers, but she was asking herself big questions: What did she want to do each morning when she woke up? What could her future business look like? Did she want to go independent? Does podcasting, a suddenly volatile medium, have a future? “It’s sort of like a near-death experience,” she tells me. “You see things more clearly.”
Slate, a 27-year-old online magazine known for its witty and often contrarian takes, turned out to be the right partner for her. The site already has a thriving podcast network and a history of developing hit shows like Slow Burn. With Slate, Sale says, “every single Zoom call was like a really great first date.”
That feeling is apparently mutual. “We are thrilled that Death, Sex & Money will be joining Slate’s podcast network,” Slate CEO Dan Check wrote in an email. “Not only am I personally a fan of the show and Anna’s work, but it is a perfect fit for Slate’s listeners.”
New episodes will arrive beginning in April, but before then, Sale will celebrate new beginnings for Death, Sex & Money at a KQED live event in San Francisco on February 29. Called “Four Interviews and a Revival,” it will feature Bay Area comedian W. Kamau Bell, author Vicki Larson, Oakland-based hospice-care doctor Bonnie Chen, and writer and illustrator Carissa Potter.
Sale chose the word revival for a reason: “We’re not starting a whole new show,” she explains. “We’re starting a show that has been jolted back to life.”•
Jessica Blough is a freelance writer. A former associate editor at Alta Journal, Blough is a graduate of Tufts University where she was editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
