Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchFyodor Dostoevsky: Mock Execution, Siberia, and the Modern Mind
Episode 11766
In December 1849 a 28-year-old writer stood tied to a post in a St. Petersburg square, facing a firing squad, only for a letter from the Tsar to arri…
1 day, 2 hours ago
Action Comics No. 1: From 10-Cent Pulp to a $15 Million Artifact
Episode 11765
In 1938 a publisher scrambling to meet a deadline pulled a rejected newspaper strip from the slush pile, had two young creators from Cleveland cut an…
1 day, 2 hours ago
William Faulkner: Dropout, Fake War Hero, Nobel Laureate
Episode 11764
William Faulkner did not look like a future Nobel Prize winner. He was a high school dropout who forged documents to join the Canadian Royal Air Forc…
1 day, 2 hours ago
Aesop: The Enslaved Storyteller Who Talked His Way to Freedom
Episode 11763
You have known the name since you were a toddler, but the man behind the fables may never have written a word down, and his real life was more scanda…
1 day, 2 hours ago
Langston Hughes: Jazz Poetry, Patrons and a Guarded Private Life
Episode 11762
He wrote a manifesto urging his generation to be radically true to themselves while hiding his own core identity to keep his paycheck. This episode e…
1 day, 2 hours ago
The Macbeth Curse: Why Actors Never Say the Scottish Play's Name
Episode 11761
When Chris Rock said The Tragedy of Macbeth aloud on stage at the 2022 Academy Awards moments before Will Smith slapped him, the theater community ha…
1 day, 2 hours ago
A Confederacy of Dunces: Ignatius Reilly, Toole and the Cursed Film
Episode 11760
A sprawling comic manuscript written in the early 1960s was rejected, sat in a box after its author's death, and then won the Pulitzer Prize for fict…
1 day, 2 hours ago
The Index of Forbidden Books: 400 Years of Catholic Censorship
Episode 11759
Charles Darwin was never placed on the Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum, but a 16th-century woman who turned Sunday epistles into hymns …
1 day, 2 hours ago
Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven: Engineering a Viral Poem for $9
Episode 11758
A professional football team is named after it, yet Edgar Allan Poe sold the publication rights to The Raven for nine dollars while his wife Virginia…
1 day, 2 hours ago
Shakespeare the Businessman: Glove Maker's Son to Global Empire
Episode 11757
The man who mapped modern psychology with his pen had to carve a curse on his own grave to stop the sexton from tossing his bones into a charnel hous…
1 day, 2 hours ago