Podcast Episodes

Winter Book Club: Why You'll Love 'Dune'

As a kid, Ramtin fell in love with Frank Herbert's 1965 epic sci-fi novel, Dune. Today, he joins NPR's Books We’ve Loved crew, Andrew Limbong and B.A. Parker, to make the case for why he thinks you'l…

Published on 9 hours ago

Winter Book Club: A Christmas Carol

Christmas wasn't always a national shopping spree — or even a day off work. But when Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 19th-century London, the holiday went viral.


Guests:

Leon Litvack, pr…

Published on 5 days, 9 hours ago

Winter Book Club: The Story of Us?

What if the real story of human history is a story itself? To kick off our winter book club, we talk with bestselling author Tamim Ansary about his book, "The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year Hi…

Published on 1 week, 5 days ago

Pride, Prejudice, and Peer Pressure

Rund takes Ramtin on a tour of the enduring world of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice... and our two hosts make a bet.

Guests:

John Mullan, professor of English Literature at University College London…

Published on 2 weeks, 5 days ago

The Bitter History of Chocolate

What's better than holiday hot chocolate? If just thinking about it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, well – that’s by design. Chocolate's big history sweeps across the globe, and today we’re going …

Published on 3 weeks, 5 days ago

The Mother of Thanksgiving

On today's show, a Thanksgiving story you might never have heard -- not about Pilgrims or Native people, but instead about a woman who, as civil war loomed, pushed for a shared national holiday she t…

Published on 1 month ago

What Happened to Vladimir Alexandrov?

Rund Abdelfatah and Cristina Kim try to unravel the mystery of a Soviet scientist who was helping to spread the word about nuclear winter theory—until he disappeared. 

This is a peek at the kind of ex…

Published on 1 month ago

Democracy Dies in a Day

How quickly can a government fall? Chile was once one of Latin America's oldest democracies, but that all changed in a matter of hours after a military coup on September 11, 1973. Some supported the …

Published on 1 month, 1 week ago

The Creeping Coup

On the surface, the story of Sudan’s war is about two generals vying for power. But it’s also about a vast web of international interests involving the U.S., China, Russia, and the UAE.  Today on the…

Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago

Winter is Coming

Late last month, President Trump announced that the United States would be restarting nuclear weapons tests after a break of over 30 years. We’ve since learned that they won’t be the explosive kind o…

Published on 1 month, 3 weeks ago