I’m a photo editing resident at The New York Times, working in Culture on disciplines including fine arts, television and video games. But listening to things — music, podcasts, strangers’ conversations — is my favorite pastime.

Here are five that I’m currently enjoying →

One of the funniest, strangest and — most charmingly — shortest shows I’ve ever watched, “Smiling Friends” packs a lot of comedy into its 11-minute (sometimes shorter!) episodes. There is a hilarious, reasonably distressing Halloween episode in Season 1 that feels right to revisit this time of year.

The music site NTS features some of the world’s best D.J.s, including the tranquil-voiced, musically encyclopedic Zakia Sewell. Her explorative Sunday-morning show, “Questing w/ Zakia,” aired its final episode last month but the entire archive is available online. One of my favorite recent episodes celebrates the end of Caribbean carnival season with a thoughtful mix of reggae, dub and dancehall.

Listen here.

I look forward to the nights that Desmond Thorne, a film programmer at Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn, pilots an adventure through Black cinema for an audience. Thorne, who is also a filmmaker, is a masterful curator, and he delivers a flawless monologue before each screening that contextualizes that month’s selection (most recently Ernest Dickerson’s “Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight”).

I’m not sure how else to describe this album, which was released by the Sundays in January 1990, other than as the perfect September-to-October music. The mix of jangly, spacious guitars and self-reflective lyrics, charmingly sung by the sometimes-squeaky Harriet Wheeler, plops me, pleasantly, right back on a yellow school bus.

In the first season of this podcast, the co-hosts John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika undertook the creation story of racial whiteness. It was, and remains, a most helpful and most listenable history on the topic. This season, Biewen and his co-host, the longtime economics reporter Ellen McGirt, chronicle the history of the world’s dominant economic philosophy: Capitalism.

Here are some more favorites:

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