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

How to Save Farming From Itself

The “quiet emergency” created by industrial agriculture

How Architecture Shapes Our Emotions

Why we shouldn’t give up on how cities make us feel

Jeremy Irons Reads T. S. Eliot

The legendary actor on why poetry matters

Studying Stones

What rocks reveal about the stories we’ve lost and the stories we tell

All the Fish in the Sea

The story of a Senegalese fishing community on the brink

This Is How an Empire Falls

The discomforting parallels between our current moment and the end of Rome

I Want to Believe

Hunting down America’s favorite fringe stories, cryptids, and alien encounters

The Oldest Living Music in the World

One man’s quest to uncover the mysteries of Europe’s most enduring folk songs

Twin Pandemics

A conversation about Covid-19 and racism with Philip Alcabes and Harriet Washington

Preaching the Floral Gospel

How the Plant Messiah saves species from the brink of extinction

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