Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchHoward Hughes: The Billionaire Aviator Who Built an Invisible Empire and Vanished Into Madness
Episode 6788
Howard Hughes was the richest man in America, a record-setting aviator, a Hollywood producer, and the owner of an airline, a hotel empire, and defens…
1 week, 1 day ago
Toni Morrison: The Editor Who Rebuilt the American Literary Canon
Episode 6787
Before Toni Morrison wrote Beloved and won the Nobel Prize, she was a senior editor at Random House, quietly reshaping American publishing by champio…
1 week, 1 day ago
Duke Ellington: The Bandleader Who Faked His Greatest Live Masterpiece
Episode 6786
Duke Ellington's legendary 1956 Newport Jazz Festival performance — the concert that revived his career and put him on the cover of Time magazine — w…
1 week, 1 day ago
James Baldwin: The Prophetic Voice Who Told America What It Refused to Hear
Episode 6789
James Baldwin left Harlem for Paris because he was convinced America would kill him — not with a bullet, but with the slow poison of racial hatred th…
1 week, 1 day ago
Georgia O'Keeffe: The Ruthless Fight to Define Herself on Her Own Terms
Episode 6782
Georgia O'Keeffe spent her entire career fighting to control how the world saw her work. Alfred Stieglitz exhibited her paintings alongside nude phot…
1 week, 1 day ago
Bette Davis: The Actress Who Broke the Hollywood Studio System
Episode 6784
Bette Davis sued Warner Brothers in 1936 — an act of defiance so unprecedented that the entire studio system tried to make an example of her. She los…
1 week, 1 day ago
Aretha Franklin: The Preacher's Daughter Who Claimed Every Song She Touched
Episode 6783
Aretha Franklin did not just sing other people's songs — she seized them. When she recorded Otis Redding's "Respect," she transformed it from a man's…
1 week, 1 day ago
Jesse Owens: Four Gold Medals, a Dictator's Humiliation, and a Freight Elevator at His Own Party
Episode 6781
Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and demolished Adolf Hitler's fantasy of Aryan racial supremacy on the world's biggest s…
1 week, 1 day ago
Bob Dylan: The Master Shapeshifter Who Reinvented Himself Every Time the World Caught Up
Episode 6785
Bob Dylan has spent six decades refusing to be who his audience wanted him to be. He was the voice of a generation who denied being the voice of anyt…
1 week, 1 day ago
Buster Keaton: The Stone-Faced Genius Who Never Flinched
Episode 6777
Buster Keaton performed stunts that would kill most people — a two-ton building facade fell on him, missing his body by inches through a precisely me…
1 week, 1 day ago