The Cut Podcast Returns For Season Two

Avery Trufelman joins the podcast as the new host

Podcasts succeed in large part because they can cover a niche that is simply too restrictive for larger media formats, such as TV, radio and film. Podcasts about grammar, deconstructing music, home and auto repair and even a show about esoteric design (99% Invisible) enable podcasting to stake out previously undiscovered topics of interest.

That’s what makes the success of The Cut podcast all the more remarkable. First, it’s a podcast that essentially follows the format of the general interest magazine – Esquire, Vanity Fair, Time, and, of course, New York Magazine.

It’s no coincidence that The Cut is produced by Vox, which owns New York Magazine because the podcast plows fertile and virgin land in the podcast garden exploring culture, style, sex, politics, and more, featuring an ensemble of voices engaged in the conversations that galvanize our hive mind.

In season one, The Cut was produced by Gimlet Media and capably hosted by Molly Fischer who left the show to focus on writing. The Cut on Tuesdays was named one of the best podcasts of 2018 by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and others. 

Season one released episodes on Tuesday and those episodes sliced through a wide swath of topics from the care and maintenance of female pubic hair to a Honduran woman living in a refugee camp in Tijuana waiting to find out if she will be allowed into the United States. What made The Cut so intriguing is that the podcast’s writers tackled critical issues in our society but avoided the melodramatic one-cycle news stories in favor of more thoughtful pieces like an episode about one woman’s journey through a late-term abortion, how to deal with internet trolls and online abusers and one author’s fascination with divorce.

Season two is teed up

In early August, the Vox Media Podcast Network released the second-season trailer for The Cut. New host Avery Trufelman will lead an ensemble of voices engaged in the conversations that matter most to women. New episodes of The Cut will be released every Wednesday, beginning August 19th.

According to The Cut’s lead producer B.A Parker and executive producers Nishat Kurwa and Stella Bugbee, season two will explore topics ranging from how to find optimism in 2020, to male sensuality, to the intensity and beauty of protests. The show will feature a rotating cast of The Cut's writers and editors, joined by an extended community of voices on the leading edge of culture.

“I’m thrilled for the Cut to return to audio with Avery Trufleman at the helm, and I’m excited to continue the same kinds of intimate, unexpected, provocative conversations that we have on thecut.com,” says Stella Bugbee, SVP & editor-in-chief of The Cut.

Host Avery Trufelman is an alumna of the award-winning design podcast 99% Invisible. In September of 2018, she launched a limited-run series about clothing and fashion called Articles of Interest, which was declared one of the best podcasts of 2018 by The New Yorker, and the finale was called the “best podcast episode of the year” by Vulture. She is also the host of Nice Try!, a podcast from Curbed and the Vox Media Podcast Network about utopian experiments, which ran its 8-episode first season in 2019.

“I want this show to feel like a box of chocolates: a real treat and a real surprise every week. I have been a massive fan of The Cut for years, so it’s been a thrill to embed with the team and develop something inventive and experimental. I can’t wait for it to be out in the world,” says host Avery Trufelman.

In an interview with Inside Podcasting, Trufelamn related how she came to work on The Cut.

“Nishat Kurwa, the head of audio at Vox Media, reached out to me in 2018, to invite me to host Nice Try!, this podcast about utopian experiments. I liked Nishat right away, and working with the crackerjack team at Vox was quite the experience.

Trufelman continued: “After that project ended, there was this moment where the stars seemed to align kind of magically: I heard The Cut On Tuesdays [New York Magazine's previous podcast with Gimlet Media] was going to end. And I had been a massive, massive fan, I was really sad to hear it go. I had always been like "this is the kind of show I wish I could make," because you never knew what you were going to get every week. It always felt like a little gift. My friend (and podcast hero) Lynn Levy had been the editor on that show, and when I saw her last fall, she joking-not-jokingly asked me if I would want to host it. Which hadn't crossed my mind at all as a possibility. But then when the news came out that Vox and New York Magazine were merging, I straight up asked Nishat if Vox would bring back a podcast for The Cut and if I could host it. For some reason, I just knew it would be a fit, and it seemed like a logical extension of my work.

There was a lot of discussion and many calls and meetings, and honestly, it was hard to tell who was wooing who. I couldn't tell if I was courting The Cut or they were courting me. But I did kind of feel like a lovesick teenager waiting by the telephone with that giddy feeling in my gut. I had a crush on The Cut. I'm over the moon it worked out. It really feels like when I started at 99pi — I have that "I can't believe I'm here" fangirl feeling coupled with that anxious need to try to do something really good. “

Where magazine meets podcast

“The legacy of New York Magazine is just extraordinary,” says Avery Trufelman. “I’m from New York, and my dad believed in subscribing to every single newspaper and magazine that covered the city. New York was always the one that I looked forward to the most. It’s the only physical magazine I subscribe to because, stylistically, New York is always having the most fun experimenting with style and layout. It is a print magazine that really relishes being in print, and yet in its own right,”

Like its glossy, high-quality print cousin, The Cut’s writers seem to be asking the questions people have in their own heads but are afraid to say out loud. The Cut offers listeners timely and clever material matched with a willingness to experiment and play, mixing the text painting of print with the sonic shading of audio.

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