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

The Lingo of LOLcats

How language is humanity’s most spectacular open-source project

Caracara, Caw Caw

Meet the smartest bird you’ve never heard of

Hope Against the Storm

How American communities contend with rising sea levels

Oh, Cruel Stagolee

Why you should never mess with a bad man’s hat

The Cherry Blossom Evangelist

How an English eccentric saved Japan’s beloved sakura—and spread them around the world

Our One-Click World

Online convenience has blinded us to the growth of a tech underclass

Women at War

The fight for a spot on the frontlines (and in the history books)

How to Be a Grown-Up

Redefining the traditional markers of adulthood

The Many Faces of Aeneas

How Virgil plays with our collective memory

Red Star Avant Garde

How contemporary artists made China modern

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