The Root Cause

Padraic X. Scanlan tells the real history of the Irish Potato Famine

Something New in the West

Kurt Beals on translating All Quiet on the Western Front

Family/History

David Levering Lewis digs into his own origin story

The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday

Eleanor Barraclough on the ordinary people of Norse history

Keepers of the Old Ways

Eliot Stein on the people keeping cultural traditions alive

The Snow Maiden

Our final episode of 2018 is a send-off to the solstice

Ho Ho Horror

Why not make this Christmas a little darker?

Kinship and Contradictions

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz on the complexities of Native American identity

Overconsumed

Adam Minter on what happens to all the stuff we downsize, declutter, and discard

Fiction, Fakery, and Factory Farming

Spanish novelist Munir Hachemi talks about Living Things

Shelling Out

What seashells reveal about the future of the ocean—and our own past

The Devils’ Books

What the publishing habits of the 20th century’s dictators reveal

Listening to the Trees

What the forest can teach us about ourselves

Has Electronic Dance Music Lost Its Soul?

From acid house to deadmau5

Eat, Pray, Love Like an Ancient

Why we should care about Epicurus

The Author’s Accomplice

Susan Bernofsky on the art of translation

Two Parts Gin, One Part Sin

Going back to the Golden Age of cocktails

Godmother to Poets

An introduction to Muriel Rukeyser

A Verray, Parfit Gentil Knyght

The first biography of Geoffrey Chaucer in a generation explores the places that inspired the English poet

Between Science and Séance

The poltergeist that cemented a ghost hunter’s theory about the psyche

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