It’s hard to imagine what the world will look like when COVID-19 has passed. So in this episode, we look back to the years after 1918, at the political, artistic, and viral aftermath of the flu pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people and left our world permanently transformed.
This episode was reported and produced by Rachael Cusick, Tad Davis ... Show More
Mar 13
Return of the Flesh-Eaters
If a species is horrible enough, do we have the right to kill it forever? Seventy years ago, a nightmare parasite feasted on the live flesh of warm-blooded creatures in North America: the screwworm. That is, until a young scientist named Edward F. Knipling discovered a crucial sc ... Show More
42m 29s
Oct 2023
The Hiroshima Maidens (1955) w/ Josh Levin
<p>It’s October 3rd. This day in 1956, a group of 25 Japanese women are heading back to Japan after spending a year in the United States receiving medical and cosmetic surgery.</p>
<p>Jody, Niki, and Kellie are joined by Slate’s Josh Levin to talk about the “Hiroshima Maidens,” ... Show More
26m 47s
May 2018
Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” (PublicAffairs, 2017)
The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson. But despite a death toll of between 50 a ... Show More
43m 48s
Apr 2022
E64: Mildred Fish-Harnack, part 2
Concluding part of our double podcast episode about Mildred Fish-Harnack, the US-born woman at the centre of the underground resistance to Nazism in Berlin during World War II. In conversation with Rebecca Donner, Mildred’s great great niece and author of All the Frequent Trouble ... Show More
47m 42s
Nov 2022
Untold: Stories Of A World War II Liberator (Catalyst)
Deborah Levine, daughter of a World War II military intelligence officer/ Ritchie Boy, shares first-hand stories of WW II and the Holocaust with wartime letters of her father, Aaron Levine. He was assigned to interrogate Nazi prisoners of war. Also, hear the wartime love letters ... Show More
1 h