Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás
Today’s subject had a multi-hyphenate name and a multi-hyphenate resume––, in his 55 years of life, he was an adventurer, a geologist, a spy, a dinosaur scientist, one of the founders of paleobiology,...
18 Apr 202441min
Qutbuddin Mubarak Shah
"If you have to take an beautiful enslaved convert boy from another province to become your lover, and then you fall hopelessly in love with him, and then promote him and he attains great power, do be...
9 Apr 202448min
Marthe Hanau
Marthe Hanau built a several-hundred-million-franc financial powerhouse: which turned out to be a fraud. Her investors had been promised returns of 8% interest on savings and in investments forty perc...
2 Apr 202444min
John Whitgift
Today's episode is about England and its capacity to be deeply weird. Weget into one of England's weirdest, bloodiest, and maybe horniest moments, the English Reformation: a time of enormous tumult an...
19 Mar 20241h 5min
James Levine
Warning: this episode contains discussions of child sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and workplace sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. Many people may have seen Maestro, a biopic about th...
12 Mar 202459min
Elagabalus
This episode has everything: a tyrannical little boy king, a dictator who wanted to overthrow the Roman pantheon and install a meteorite as the object of a new monotheism, prostitution and vestal virg...
5 Mar 20241h 2min
Ahebi Ugbabe
Today’s subject was an uneducated woman who was born in approximately 1880 and rose in her nearly 70 years of life from enslavement to sex work to female king. She was a leader of her community of En...
27 Feb 202450min
Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell
Warning: this episode contains discussions of domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised. A rare twofer this week on our show: we discuss the lives and car...
20 Feb 20241h 5min
