You can now find the New York Times podcast host Michael Barbaro on a surprising platform: the Calm app.
Today, Calm launched a new “Sleep Story” featuring Barbaro’s signature halting but mysteriously effective delivery. Barbaro hosts “The Daily” for the Times. His Calm episode, which appears exclusively on the app and clocks in just shy of 30 minutes, is called “The Nightly.” Listeners must have a Calm subscription, which costs $14.99 monthly and $69.99 annually, to access Barbaro’s episode.
Calm, one of the biggest meditation and wellness apps, has a habit of snapping up celebrity talent for its sleep content. You can already find stories narrated by Harry Styles, Kevin Bacon, and Cynthia Erivo. Inexplicably, even Donna Kelce, mom to football stars Travis and Jason, has her own episode, “The Rules of Football.”
Barbaro adds something unique to this diverse roster thanks to his intimate knowledge of how stressful the news can be. Indeed, the goal of “The Nightly” is to help listeners wind down with a heaping dose of good news.
While you’ll find no sleep story spoilers here, the episode is broken into three segments and leans into nonpartisan nature and animal content, delivered in Barbaro’s traditional podcast format.
There are vivid descriptions of locations where these three real stories take place, including Icelandic glaciers and tree-filled parks in Australia. Some listeners might find themselves more curious than relaxed — and resisting the temptation to grab their phone and google the stories — thanks to the true but pleasantly strange details that unfold.
This is especially the case when it comes to the slow burn of a flight attendant tending to Chilean flamingo eggs on a plane headed for Seattle. (Yes, you read that sentence correctly.)
The final segment, about Icelandic horses specially trained to write your out-of-office reply (again, you read that correctly), might be the one misfire in the trio of stories, if you think too hard about the ethics of the whole situation.
But overall, “The Nightly” is a far superior choice to falling asleep to a random TikTok video or the sound of your own anxious inner monologue. Without being too earnest, the episode is a nice reminder that we share this planet with good humans who act with kindness more often than not. You’ll definitely need that reminder more than once between now and Election Day.
