How to manifest your best year yet

It's Been a Minute

NPR

News, Religion & Spirituality, Spirituality, Society & Culture, News Commentary

4.6 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 December 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you want something badly enough, should you have it?

Today, Brittany is investigating so-called "manifestation." It's this popular belief that if you want something badly enough, it'll come to you. But here's the thing: our relationship to the internet and algorithms is creating a feedback loop that actually makes our own dreams seem more...possible? But where's the line between dreams, reality, and the internet?

Brittany calls on Tara Isabella Burton, an author and journalist, and New York Magazine's Rebecca Jennings to get to the bottom of this trend: the appeal of manifestation, its symbiotic relationship with the internet, and why it might make us less aware of our humanity.

This episode originally aired on March 31, 2025.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This holiday season on the StoryCorps podcast, we're casting our eyes north.
0:05.0	We have checked and rechecked our tracking screens.
0:07.1	I hate to bring you and all your good listeners, the bad news, but it doesn't appear...
0:11.0	Just a minute.
0:12.2	We have a sighting.
0:13.7	Santa is on his way.
0:15.4	Here tales of the fears, hopes, and joys of Christmas past on a special holiday edition
0:20.4	of the StoryCorps podcast from NPR.
0:24.1	A few years ago, songs that were topping the Billboard Hot 100 might have sounded like this.
0:31.2	Or this.
0:32.4	I'm a savage.
0:34.4	But lately, the songs that are getting the most replays are sounding more like this.
0:43.7	And a little further down on the charts, like this.
0:54.4	Are you picking up when I'm proposing? like this. It is well, hallelujah.
0:58.8	Are you picking up what I'm putting down?
1:05.6	The Hot 100 has been getting a heavy dose of piety and prayer lately.
1:11.9	It's an unusual thing for multiple Christian artists to be on the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time,
1:13.4	and that's happened right now.
1:15.2	That's Kelsey Kramer McGuinness.
1:21.5	I am a reporter for Christianity today covering music and congregational worship practices,
1:24.5	and I'm an adjunct professor at Grandview University.
1:29.0	She even has a name for this unusual amount of faith-flavored music on the charts. Bar-stool conversion rock. It's sort of this, like, interesting web of things between
	...

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