Yale grad, Michael Christopher Barbaro is a national political reporter for The NY Times and the host of the terrific and wonderfully succinct podcast The Daily. He is one of the best and most astute reporters about politics. After the Democratic and Republican conventions last year, Barbaro decided that he would step back from daily writing to try something new: hosting the podcast.

Until last week, I had never listened to a podcast before. My life is rather full writing #BornThisDay and #OnThisGayDay pieces for The Wow Report, working in my garden, walking my terriers and making my way through my DVR queue, but after seeing Barbaro on an episode of Late Night With Seth Meyers, I was captivated by his charm, intelligence and exotic, swarthy good-looks.

The Daily is now number two in the iTunes podcast rankings. A survey showed 97% of respondents as enthusiastic fans of the podcast. Nearly all of them felt more connected to the work of Barbaro and the other NY Times journalists who appeared regularly as guests on the show than from just reading the traditional paper or looking at it online. For The NY Times, it was a powerful demonstration of how a podcast can deliver journalism to a new, possibly younger, audience.

Bararo’s style is warm, inclusive and conversational. He still brings his deep reporting and sharp editorial thinking that always characterized his pieces in the NY Times paper. Lucky for me, each episode of The Daily is only about 15-minutes long and takes on just one or two stories from the news cycle. Slowly, episode by episode, Barbaro has been revealing the man behind the microphone too. His banter is the best part of the broadcast. He has even developed a catchphrase “As we say on this show: “sometimes life gets in the way”.

In fall 2014, Barbaro married his boyfriend Timothy Levin at their apartment in NYC. It’s okay; I’m married too. I can still have a man crush on him.