Drew Ackerman, the creator and host of the podcast “Sleep with Me,” tells labyrinthine stories that are intended to put insomniacs to sleep—and are downloaded roughly 1.3 million times each month, reports The New Yorker.
In the three one- to two-hour-long episodes he releases each week, he keeps his voice gravelly, at the bottom of his vocal range, and so slow that his upstate-New York accent takes on a tinge of Southern drawl. His sentences are mazelike constructions that turn on countless “if”s, “or”s, and “so”s; he drifts off into pointless tangents, or doubles back to ask himself if he really means exactly what he just said. His plots are equally labyrinthine: a recent few episodes centered on a magical female pirate named Lady Witchbeard; another imagined a secret war between See’s Candies and Whitman’s Samplers.
