Who would have thought, back in 2008, that Barack Obama would become one of podcasting’s biggest movers and shakers? The former president is front and centre of this series on the post-slavery period in the US, a collaboration with Malcolm Gladwell for Audible and the History Channel. It’s slick and excellently researched, but it’s the calibre of conversation and careful dot-joining that make it so compelling.

Meanwhile, John Prideaux, the Economist’s US editor, embarks on a road trip to assess America’s democracy on its 250th anniversary, following the 1831 tour of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville - whose book is apparently “the single most insightful thing ever written about the United States.” It’s a colourful way to wrestle with anxieties over whether the country can survive Trump.

In more unsettling podcast news, journalist Catrin Nye tells the tale of a woman who joined a swinging website to please her husband - and says she had non-consensual sex with more than 100 men. It’s graphic, troubling, and spares no detail, as Nye looks into swinging, including interviews with the men who do it. Not exactly easy listening.

On a lighter note, historian Alice Loxton and the BBC’s Ben Henderson explore the history of tea - which legend says was discovered in 2737BC when a leaf drifted into Chinese emperor Shen Nung’s boiling water. The conversation soon turns to the violence and smuggling it provoked, because of course it does.

Finally, Rolling Stone writer Paul Solotaroff hosts the fifth season of the acclaimed true-crime strand, on the murder of a 12-year-old girl in New York State in 1995. While the circumstances of Josette Wright’s death are nightmarish, this is a careful, powerful investigation that has “pierced the skin, and will not give me peace.”