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Mini-Stories: Volume 17
Episode 564
It's the most wonderful time of the year. It's mini-stories season! Gather the kids around the fire because We have a year-end mix of short stories a…
2 years, 2 months ago
Empire of the Sum
Episode 563
Keeping track of numbers has always been part of what makes us human. So at some point along the way, we created a tool to help us keep count, and th…
2 years, 2 months ago
Breaking Down The Power Broker (with Conan O'Brien)
Episode 562
Today's episode features #1 Robert Caro superfan, Conan O'Brien.
The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a biography of Robert Moses, who is said to have b…
2 years, 3 months ago
The Known Unknown [rebroadcast]
Episode 344
Roman note: This is one of my favorite episodes of all time. Should be a movie. Enjoy!
The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknowns goes back only about …
2 years, 3 months ago
Long Strange Tape
Episode 561
The Cassette tape was great in so many ways, but let’s be honest, they never really sounded great. But because the cassette was so much cheaper and …
2 years, 3 months ago
Home on the Range
Episode 560
In a lot of ways, Lincoln Heights, Ohio, sounds just like any other suburb. If you walk around town, you’ll hear kids playing outside the local eleme…
2 years, 3 months ago
The Six-Week Cure
Episode 559
In the mid-1900s, people flocked to Reno, Nevada -- not for frontier gold or loose slots, but to get out of bad marriages. The city became known as …
2 years, 3 months ago
The Fever Tree Hunt
Episode 558
Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the subcontinent a…
2 years, 4 months ago
Model Village
Episode 557
For decades, society has dealt with people with dementia and other forms of cognitive decline by storing them away in unstimulating, medicalized envi…
2 years, 4 months ago
Devolutionary Redesign
Episode 328
It’s hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music in the days before people downloaded everything. Visuals were a key part of o…
2 years, 4 months ago