Not Built For This #5: The Little Levee ...

In 1998, the recording industry was thriving. But the company pressing more compact discs than anyone else in America wasn't a record label…it was an internet company: America Online. The AOL Disc was a marketing coup—hugely successful. It’s not an overstatement to say that it’s ... Show More

Esperanto is what linguists call a “constructed language.” It isn’t attached to a nation or a region, and it didn’t evolve from another language over time. Instead, nearly 150 years ago, someone decided to sit down and design the whole thing from scratch. That someone was L. L. Z ... Show More

In 1932, the Women's House of Detention—New York City's first women's prison—opened in the heart of Greenwich Village. It was opened to make "wayward" women quiet, private, and properly feminine. And the building had one unique feature originally meant to be a sort of kindness—a ... Show More

Sea Change is a podcast from WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana that dives deep into the environmental issues facing coastal communities on the Gulf Coast and beyond. When we talk about climate change, we hear one word all the time: resilient. We use it to talk about everything from our ... Show More

People in Lake Charles expected the federal government to help them rebuild their battered city. That’s what they had been promised. That’s what had happened after previous storms. But this time was different. In this episode, we report on why the federal government kept thousand ... Show More

Engineer John Parke and a team of workers furiously shovel dirt, trying to shore up the South Fork Dam as it threatens to overflow, amid torrential rains. Parke knows these efforts are their only chance of preventing a terrible flood. He decides he has to warn the towns in the ri ... Show More

Rain is good for California, but the state was not prepared for what might be a megastorm. KQED’s Dan Brekke assesses the damage from the San Francisco Bay Area and the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick explains how we can be better prepared for future storms. This episode was pro ... Show More

Despite the efforts of engineer John Parke, the South Fork Dam does break. The ensuing flash flood sweeps up a vast, moving wall of debris: mud, rocks, trees, fragments of bridges and smashed-up houses. Residents in Johnstown, including Reverend H.L. Chapman and his family, have ... Show More

In the wake of three historic storms, many residents of Lake Charles, Louisiana, were struggling. Roishetta Sibley Ozane felt she had to do something to keep her community together. She started feeding people, clothing people, even paying to house them in hotels. All while she st ... Show More

After severe storms struck Lake Charles, many homeowners expected to rebuild quickly. They had been paying home insurance premiums for years for just this moment. But instead of receiving prompt payouts, their claims were delayed and denied. In this episode, we learn how the insu ... Show More

If you’ve been listening to LeVar's new podcast Sound Detectives, you know there's something irresistible about a missing sound. That’s why we teamed up with our friends at 99% Invisible to tell the story of the first music streaming service, a 200-ton instrument called the Telha ... Show More