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

What’s Happening in Myanmar

Understanding the military coup in Myanmar

Home Alone, with 200,000 Friends

Coming to terms with the critters we live with

All in the Family

How the mob came to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and small towns across America

Death in Papua New Guinea

Chronicling the disappearance of an entire language—and everything else that goes with it

Looking In, Looking Out

Artist Betty Yu turns the camera on her family

The Father of Art History

The man behind the great men of the Renaissance

A Solstice Send-Off

A Slavic folktale to tell around the holiday fire

Pencil-Pushing Spies

The secret history of how Imperial Russia kept an eye on its Chinese neighbor

If I Only Had a Brain!

Inside the extraordinary minds of people who feel others’ emotions, hear hallucinations, and get lost in their own homes

I Will Not Make Any More Boring Podcasts

What John Baldessari’s conceptual art can teach us about life during the pandemic

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