American Hysteria

Just like every year, more and more stories are coming out about how wild, unpredictable, and dangerous fireworks can be, and yet our capacity for explosive hubris continues to prevail. For part two o...

6 Jul 1h 39min

Love them or hate them, there are few things that feel as quintessentially American as fireworks, the favorite way to celebrate during every unhinged national birthday party. For part one of this two-...

29 Jun 1h 42min

As we endure surreal celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the United States, we hear the same Disneyfied history being told over and over again. Rebecca Nagle is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and t...

22 Jun 1h 11min

Have you ever noticed that many of the most iconic evil-doers in movies seem, well, pretty gay? Think Scar from the Lion King, Jafar from Aladdin, Ursula from The Little Mermaid, Miss Trunchbull from ...

15 Jun 1h 4min

In the early 1990s, match.com debuted as the first major dating app on the world wide web, but it was far from the earliest way that people used technology to meet other hopeful singles. For this epis...

8 Jun 1h 6min

This is a rerelase with a new introduction! The purse-carrying, tutu-wearing purple Teletubby Tinky Winky was outed as a homosexual in 1999, capping off a decade of conspiratorial anti-gay writings an...

1 Jun 37min

We are celebrating our (estimated) 300th episode of American Hysteria with a little Chelsey Weber-Smith Q&A session hosted by Sarah Marshall of You’re Wrong About. It’s been a strange journey, and to ...

25 Mai 1h 28min

During the 1970s, a ragtag group led by American astronomer Carl Sagan set out to create and then launch into deep space an audio time capsule of sounds, songs, and messages that would represent the E...

18 Mai 1h 25min