Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchHegel and the World Soul on Horseback
Episode 7331
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw Napoleon ride through Jena in 1806 and called him the world soul on horseback. That single image captures his entir…
3 days, 16 hours ago
Lucky Luciano: The Gangster Who Built the Corporate Mafia
Episode 7337
Charles Lucky Luciano dismantled the old Sicilian Mafia hierarchy and replaced it with a corporate structure. He created the Commission, organized th…
3 days, 16 hours ago
John Dillinger: The Bank Robber Who Built the Modern FBI
Episode 7336
John Dillinger robbed banks across the Midwest during the Great Depression and became America's first celebrity criminal. His exploits forced J. Edga…
3 days, 16 hours ago
Jack Kerouac: The Beat Icon Who Hated the Hippies He Inspired
Episode 7339
Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road and became the reluctant godfather of the counterculture. By the 1960s, he was a conservative Catholic who despised th…
3 days, 16 hours ago
Anna Akhmatova: The Poet Who Outlasted Stalin
Episode 7332
Anna Akhmatova watched the Soviet state execute her ex-husband, imprison her son, and ban her poetry for decades. She refused to leave Russia. She re…
3 days, 16 hours ago
Francis Bacon: Logic, Scandal, and Death by Frozen Chicken
Episode 7329
Francis Bacon laid the foundations of the scientific method, served as Lord Chancellor of England, and died from pneumonia contracted while stuffing …
3 days, 16 hours ago
Bertolt Brecht: The Playwright Who Staged His Own Survival
Episode 7334
Bertolt Brecht wrote The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage while dodging Nazis, outwitting the House Un-American Activities Committee, and navigati…
3 days, 16 hours ago
Molière: The Comedian Who Died Playing a Hypochondriac
Episode 7341
Molière collapsed on stage during a performance of The Imaginary Invalid, a play about a man who thinks he is dying. He was actually dying. The great…
3 days, 16 hours ago
Boethius: The Prisoner Who Saved Logic for the Western World
Episode 7335
Boethius translated Aristotle's logical works into Latin, preserving them for the medieval West. Then the Ostrogothic king Theodoric accused him of t…
3 days, 16 hours ago
Baruch Spinoza: The Lens Grinder Who Redefined God
Episode 7333
Baruch Spinoza argued that God and Nature were the same thing, and the Amsterdam synagogue expelled him for it. His Ethics, published after his death…
3 days, 16 hours ago