Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchPeter Mark Roget: The Troubled Polymath Who Built the Thesaurus
Episode 11846
Picture the man who wrote the thesaurus and you probably imagine a sheltered Victorian gentleman sorting synonyms in a parlor. The real Peter Mark Ro…
8 hours ago
Anton Chekhov: The Doctor Who Reinvented the Short Story and Stage
Episode 11845
In the summer of 1904, a dying Anton Chekhov sat up in a German spa town, announced he was dying, drained a glass of champagne, and quietly passed aw…
8 hours ago
Victor Hugo: The Turbulent Life of the Ocean Man of French Letters
Episode 11844
Victor Hugo drew more than two million mourners to the streets of Paris for his funeral, is worshipped as a saint in a Vietnamese religion, and wrote…
8 hours ago
Saint-Exupery: Desert Crashes, Exile, and the Making of The Little Prince
Episode 11843
The author of one of the world's most delicate fables was a crash-prone, chain-smoking military aviator who wrote his masterpiece in miserable politi…
8 hours ago
Ian Fleming: The Serial Dropout Who Created James Bond
Episode 11842
The creator of the world's most competent fictional spy failed out of a military academy, was rejected by the Foreign Office, and flopped as a stockb…
8 hours ago
One Hundred Years of Solitude: Magical Realism and Colombia's History
Episode 11841
In 1965, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was driving his family from Mexico City to Acapulco when an epiphany hit, so he turned the car around, handed the fin…
8 hours ago
Solzhenitsyn: Memorizing the Gulag Archipelago With Matchsticks
Episode 11840
A decorated Red Army artillery captain wrote a private letter criticizing the boss, and within hours he was stripped of his rank and sent into the fo…
8 hours ago
Cervantes and Don Quixote: The Prison Cell That Birthed the Modern Novel
Episode 11839
The greatest work of fiction ever written was conceived not in a sunlit study but in the pitch-black cave of Medrano, a subterranean prison cell in t…
8 hours ago
The Sokal Hoax: A Physicist's Gibberish Paper and the Science Wars
Episode 11838
A physicist once invited anyone who believed the laws of physics were merely social conventions to test that theory by stepping out of his apartment …
8 hours ago
J.R.R. Tolkien: Orphan, Somme Survivor, and Inventor of Languages
Episode 11837
A toddler in a South African garden was bitten by a baboon spider, a perfect origin story for the author of giant fantasy spiders, except that Tolkie…
8 hours ago