Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchNoah Webster: The Failed Lawyer Who Rewrote American English
Episode 11776
Every time autocorrect drops the U from colour, you are interacting with the legacy of a depressed, unemployed 18th-century lawyer. This episode trac…
13 hours ago
Clifford Irving and the Fake Howard Hughes Autobiography Hoax
Episode 11775
In 1970 novelist Clifford Irving decided to write the autobiography of Howard Hughes, the most reclusive billionaire on Earth, without ever speaking …
13 hours ago
Charles M. Schulz: The Melancholy Behind the World's Biggest Comic Strip
Episode 11774
His high school yearbook rejected his drawings, and his first published sketch was a Ripley's Believe It or Not entry about his dog Spike, who ate pi…
13 hours ago
Ernest Hemingway: The Iceberg Theory and the Man Beneath the Myth
Episode 11773
A mortar blast at 18, a rogue militia in France, a fishing boat armed to hunt U-boats, two plane crashes in two days, and the experience of reading h…
13 hours ago
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: How Gabo Invented Magical Realism
Episode 11772
On the road to Acapulco with his family, Gabriel Garcia Marquez had an idea so complete that he turned the car around, canceled the vacation, sold th…
13 hours ago
Ghostwriting Exposed: Memoirs, Pop Hits, Essay Mills, and Medical Fraud
Episode 11771
The celebrity memoir that moved you, the hip hop verse that felt deeply personal, the business book with a consultant's name on the cover: many were …
13 hours ago
Jack Kirby: The King of Comics Who Refused to Be a Cog
Episode 11770
Jacob Kurtzberg was rejected from an art program for drawing too fast with charcoal and quit the Pratt Institute after one week. He went on to draw m…
13 hours ago
John Keats: Surgeon's Apprentice, Cockney Poet, Name Written in Water
Episode 11769
John Keats died at 25 convinced his work was a failure, asking that his gravestone carry no name, only a line about a name written in water. This epi…
13 hours ago
The Biography of Haiku: Why 5-7-5 Is a Myth and Who Really Shaped It
Episode 11768
In 1959 Richard Wright, exiled in Paris and bedridden with amoebic dysentery, stopped writing political novels and composed thousands of haiku instea…
13 hours ago
Ray Bradbury: The Futurist Who Predicted Earbuds but Hated the Internet
Episode 11767
Ray Bradbury imagined seashell earpieces piping constant audio into people's ears, walls made of flat-screen televisions, and automated banking machi…
13 hours ago