Changing Stripes Revisited

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

This episode is sponsored by Acura.From the outside, the building is a light gray spiral, and from the inside, the art is displayed on one long ramp that curves up towards a glass skylight in the ceiling. We’re going to take the greatness of this building as a given. What we’re g ... Show More

<p>How do you actually make change in the world? For 126 years, Mississippi has had the Confederate battle flag on their state flag, and they were the last state in the nation where that emblem remained “officially” flying.  A few days ago, that flag came down. A few days before  ... Show More

<p>The discovery that an upside-down American flag — a symbol adopted by the campaign to overturn the 2020 election result — had flown at the home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. elicited concerns from politicians, legal scholars and others. And then came news of a second flag.</p ... Show More

On January 6, 2021, insurrectionists storm the U.S. Capitol. 

<p>In June 2015 an American anti-racist activist climbed a flagpole on the South Carolina state house grounds to take down the Confederate flag. The protest followed the killing of 9 black people at a historic Charleston church by a white supremacist who was pictured holding the ... Show More

New Zealand is thinking about changing their flag - so why is that? 

What we equate with acid, hippies, and garish polyester prints actually began as a theatrical way of protesting bans on free speech and the Vietnam War. When the hippies got hold of it, it definitely transformed.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.