Esther Perel’s love letter to romance

The audio superstar is back with a ‘beach read’ of a podcast, The Arc of Love. Plus: five of the best podcasts about death

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Retire the cream polo shirt, put away the Bruce Springsteen football chants whose lyrics bear no relation to reality: Euro 2024 is over. Leaving aside the actual football (probably best), this has been a total first for the competition – the levels of interest in what actually happened on the pitch has easily been matched by discussions about the expert commentary provided by podcasts.

Alright, perhaps “expert commentary” might not exactly be the mots justes, given how many headlines Gary Lineker generated saying that England v Denmark was “shit” on The Rest is Football. But it’s remarkable that a podcast caused a row (albeit one that relied on taking a quote out of context) that ended up seeing England’s captain put on the spot in a press conference. There were articles trying to create the Battle of the Garys: pitting Lineker’s pod against Gary Neville’s. There were financial analyses of how much money had been made out of being unkind about England into people’s earphones (imagine! Being paid to be a pundit who is honest about bad football!).