Kawah Ijen: The Acid Lake, Blue Flames, and Sulfur Miners
In East Java, Indonesia, an explorer once paddled a rubber dinghy across a turquoise crater lake so corrosive its pH measured 0.13, stronger than battery acid. This is Kawah Ijen, home to the world's ...
30 Jun 17min
The Broad Street Pump: How One Doctor Mapped a Killer
In late August 1854, a cholera outbreak tore through Soho, London, killing 127 people in three days and driving three-quarters of the neighborhood to flee. Yet the workers at a local brewery, surround...
30 Jun 23min
Khutulun: The Mongol Princess Who Wrestled for Horses
In the late 13th century, a Mongolian princess stood in a dusty ring on the Central Asian steppe surrounded by 10,000 horses, each one won from a male warrior who had failed to defeat her in a wrestli...
30 Jun 18min
Lehman Brothers: How a 158-Year-Old Bank Collapsed
On September 15, 2008, thousands of employees streamed out of a Times Square skyscraper carrying cardboard boxes, witnessing the largest bankruptcy in United States history and the spark that set off ...
30 Jun 13min
Lady Death: The Deadliest Female Sniper in History
In 1942 Washington, D.C., American reporters asked a Soviet combat veteran whether she wore makeup on the front lines and criticized her uniform skirt for making her look fat. What they failed to gras...
30 Jun 16min
Leopold and Loeb: The 1924 Crime of the Century
Two wealthy, prodigy-level teenagers from Chicago's elite Kenwood neighborhood threw everything away to commit what they believed would be the perfect crime, simply to prove they were smarter than eve...
30 Jun 22min
Mad Jack Churchill: The Sword-Wielding WWII Commando
Picture a British officer charging into the industrialized warfare of World War II armed with a Scottish broadsword, a longbow, and a set of bagpipes. This episode profiles John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming...
30 Jun 23min
Coober Pedy: The Opal Town That Lives Underground
In the far north of South Australia sits Coober Pedy, a town with over 250,000 unmarked mine shafts, a golf course with no grass, and a population that lives underground to escape scorching heat that ...
30 Jun 20min
