Breaking Down The Power Broker (with Conan O'Brien)
Today's episode features #1 Robert Caro superfan, Conan O'Brien.The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a biography of Robert Moses, who is said...
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Episodes
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The Known Unknown [rebroadcast]
Roman note: This is one of my favorite episodes of all time. Should be a movie. Enjoy!The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknowns goes back...
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Long Strange Tape
The Cassette tape was great in so many ways, but let’s be honest, they never really sounded great. But because the cassette was so much...
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Home on the Range
In a lot of ways, Lincoln Heights, Ohio, sounds just like any other suburb. If you walk around town, you’ll hear kids playing outside the...
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The Six-Week Cure
In the mid-1900s, people flocked to Reno, Nevada -- not for frontier gold or loose slots, but to get out of bad marriages. The city became...
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The Fever Tree Hunt
Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the...
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Model Village
For decades, society has dealt with people with dementia and other forms of cognitive decline by storing them away in unstimulating,...
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Devolutionary Redesign
It’s hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music in the days before people downloaded everything. Visuals were a key...
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You Ain’t Nothin But a Postmark
Over a decade after Elvis Presley’s death, the king of rock & roll took over headlines once again as Americans weighed in on which portrait...
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The Big Dig
Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig massive infrastructure project, which rerouted the...
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Devil in the Details
This week we have two stories featuring the devil.An infamous "training video" teaching cops how to spot and stop "satanic crimes." And a...
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Cautionary Tales of the Sydney Opera House
The Sydney Opera House is one of the most iconic and distinctive buildings in the world. It took a relative newcomer and architectural...
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Blood in the Machine
Brian Merchant is a tech reporter, and he'd been covering the industry for years when he started to notice a term that kept coming up. When...
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Whomst Among Us Let the Dogs Out AGAIN
All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you've listened to over and over again....
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Office Space
In most big cities, there’s a housing crisis. And empty office buildings are creating a different crisis known to urbanists as a ‘doom...
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Melanie Speaks
The story of a voice training VHS tape that helped trans women at a time when other resources were hard to access.The way a person's voice...
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Trail Mix: Track Two
Welcome to our second episode of short stories all about what may be the original designed object: the trail. If you haven’t heard the...
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Cooking with Gas
Back in January, Bloomberg News published a story quoting an obscure government official named Richard Trumka Jr. He works with the...
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The Country of the Blind
Andrew Leland grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began to degrade from the outside in, such that he now...
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