The Extreme Path
For a country with one of the lowest crime rates in the world, Japan has an unusual cultural export: the yakuza, members of transnational cr...
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Smarty Pants
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narrat...
Episodes
20 of 351 episodes
Call It Macaroni
Susan Stryker’s new book, Changing Gender , is as chameleonic as the scholar herself, combining as it does trans history, cultural theory, m...
Blades of Grass
Summon an image of an American home: Odds are there’s a green grass lawn in front of it. Was this what Walt Whitman sang of in Leaves of Gra...
The Translator Stuck
Amanda L. Andrei’s parents—he Romanian, she Filipina—met in Bucharest as two free spirits in the 1970s and then moved to the United States....
Riot Girls
In her 25 years as a music journalist, Jessica Hopper has profiled the doyennes of modern rock and pop music: Björk, Kacey Musgraves, St. Vi...
To the Manor Born
The English country house has been on the brink of ruination since at least the start of World War I—or perhaps the first chug of the Indust...
The Industrial Revolution of Bees
It’s Pollinator Week, and the bugs need us more than ever. Not just bees: butterflies, moths, wasps, flies, beetles, midges, hummingbirds …...
The Geek Squad
Were you a geek? A nerd? Did you play Magic: The Gathering, paint Warhammer miniatures, learn to speak Klingon or Elvish, or memorize whole...
Weather Kids and Panther Cubs
Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground, the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two cofounders of the Weather Underground, a militant, ra...
For Better or for Wurst
Summer cometh: the grills get scraped clean, the buns are split, and hungry Americans get set to boil or broil their wursts, wieners, and sa...
Learn the Ropes of Estate Sailing
No place is better suited to those with a taste for champagne but a beer budget than the humble estate sale. Its various guises—be they chur...
Safe From Sin
“Medieval psychology” might sound nearly a millennium out of date, irrelevant to modern science, with its reassurances of cognitive data and...
Hue and Cry
Defining words is hard, no matter what they are, but the difficulty only doubles when the word in question is a purely visual referent like...
Shotgun Ornithology
Songbirds are disappearing at an alarming rate, with some species teetering on the verge of extinction, barely clinging to their endangered...
Eulogy for a Yenta
In a cramped rent-controlled apartment on the lousy end of the Upper East Side, a dying woman in a diaper writes the story of her life. She...
The Carnifex of Čachtice
Elizabeth Bathory is alleged to have been the most prolific serial killer of all time, responsible for butchering as many as 650 virgins and...
What We Talk About When We Talk About Prehistory
Since 2011, the at-home DNA testing company 23andMe has invited its users to “celebrate your ancient DNA” with its Neanderthal report, which...
The Midwife of Black Nationalism
Audley Moore mentored Malcolm X, popularized reparations for African Americans in a 1963 essay, and advanced the cause of Black women in bot...
Ground Truths
In ancient Greece, the view from on high was known as catascopos , or “the looker-down.” It's a privileged perspective, and in the modern wo...
The Dangerous Dead
Stories of the undead tormenting the living supposedly entered the English-speaking world in 1732, with a report from the Hapsburg military...