One of my favorite podcasts, which Ken turned me on to, is NPR's Planet Money. I enjoy some long-form podcasts, with episodes approaching two hours at times, but ones like Planet Money are more listener friendly for being concise (you can listen to one in a short commute on foot) and crisply produced and edited, more like edited news segments than audio transcripts of talk radio.

One great recent episode was Why Coke Cost a Nickel for 70 Years. The story of why Coke cost a nickel for the first 70 years after it was made is more interesting than you'd suspect. I won't ruin it for you, go take a listen (or you can read the text summary, but it's only 4:34 long, and in this case, listening to the story conveyed verbally is like hearing a good story around the campfire, a tradition some of the best podcasts have helped to sustain in this high speed scanning/parsing web environment; it's the web's storytelling version of the slow food movement).