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

Sitting Down With Witold Rybczynski

The writer and architect talks chairs

Four-Legged Friends

How the horse has carried us through history

The Ghosts of Nazi Germany

We’ve all but forgotten the frenzy of witch trials and wonder doctors of the postwar period—but why?

Berlin Bops

How East German punks tore down the wall that divided them

Morbid and Misunderstood

The science and history of books bound in human skin

In Search of the Good Death

Examining our changing relationship with the afterlife

Do You Believe in Magic?

A global history of our oldest—and most maligned—practice

Quoth the Raven

There’s evermore to ravens than you think

Meet the Dean of American Cooking

How James Beard cultivated the authentic flavors of our cuisine

Who’s the Nerd Now?

How geek culture finally triumphed

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