John Frum: Inside the Cargo Cult That Defied Colonial Power
On the Pacific island of Tanna in what is now Vanuatu, the John Frum movement emerged in the 1930s around a prophesied figure who promised wealth and prosperity, but only if islanders rejected Europea...
30 Jun 24min
WeWork: The $47 Billion Startup That Dressed Real Estate as Tech
WeWork was founded in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey and grew into the fastest-growing lessee of office space in New York, ultimately raising $12.8 billion led by SoftBank's Vision Fund. The...
30 Jun 19min
The Antonine Plague: The Pandemic That Shook Rome at Its Peak
At the height of the Pax Romana, the Roman Empire of 75 million people seemed invincible, with gleaming cities, aqueducts, and an unmatched military. Yet beneath that infrastructure lay a biologically...
30 Jun 21min
404 Not Found: What an Empty Wikipedia Page Reveals About Knowledge
What happens when you search the world's largest encyclopedia for a topic and find nothing but a blank page? This episode turns a single Wikipedia error message into a deep dive on the architecture of...
30 Jun 21min
The Svalbard Seed Vault: Inside the Arctic Fortress Guarding Our Crops
Buried deep inside a sandstone mountain on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault safeguards more than 1.37 million seed samples representing over 13,000 years of agri...
30 Jun 23min
The Acid Bath Murderer: How John George Haigh's Legal Loophole Failed
In 1940s England, charming fraudster John George Haigh convinced himself he had found the ultimate cheat code for the justice system: a literal misreading of corpus delicti that, in his mind, meant no...
30 Jun 19min
Steller's Sea Cow: The 10-Ton Giant Wiped Out in 27 Years
Discovered by a shipwrecked, scurvy-ridden crew in the Bering Sea in 1741, Steller's sea cow was a 30-foot, 8-to-10-ton sirenian covered in bark-like skin and so buoyant it could never fully submerge....
30 Jun 21min
Alexei Leonov: The Artist Cosmonaut Who Survived the First Spacewalk
In March 1965, Alexei Leonov became the first human to walk in space, floating 16 feet outside Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes. Then his spacesuit ballooned rigid in the vacuum, trapping him outside the airl...
30 Jun 18min
