Tomoe Gozen: The Female Samurai Who Defied History
On a chaotic 12th-century battlefield, a warrior beheads a rival clan leader and presents the head to her master. That warrior was Tomoe Gozen, an onna-musha, or female samurai, and one of the most fa...
30 Jun 8min
Eddie the Eagle: The Last-Place Olympian Who Won the World
What if the most famous athlete at an Olympic Games finished dead last, by a comical margin? This episode follows Michael Eddie Edwards, the working-class plasterer who became Britain's first Olympic ...
30 Jun 19min
Struck by a Meteorite: The Tragic Story of Ann Hodges
On November 30, 1954, in Sylacauga, Alabama, a four-and-a-half-billion-year-old rock crashed through Ann Hodges's roof, ricocheted off her radio, and struck her while she napped on the couch. Out of m...
30 Jun 17min
The Iron Lung: How a Metal Tube Saved Thousands From Polio
In October 1928, doctors slid a dying eight-year-old polio patient into a massive airtight cylinder powered by vacuum cleaner motors, and within a minute she was breathing again. This episode traces t...
30 Jun 23min
The Pyrenean Ibex: The Only Species to Go Extinct Twice
Extinction is supposed to be permanent, an irreversible door slamming shut. But the Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo, holds a unique and tragic record: it is the only species known to have gone extinct not o...
30 Jun 20min
Adrian Carton de Wiart: The Unkillable Soldier
Shot in the face, head, stomach, groin, ankle, leg, hip and ear, blinded in one eye, survivor of two plane crashes and an Italian POW camp tunnel escape, and the man who tore off his own injured finge...
30 Jun 20min
Eyam: The Plague Village That Sacrificed Itself
When a deadly pathogen arrives, is human nature wired to flee or to build a wall and lock yourself inside the infection zone? This episode dives into Eyam, the Derbyshire village that chose self-quara...
30 Jun 22min
Aldrich Ames: The CIA Traitor Who Spied for Shoes
We expect our spies to be masterminds, but Aldrich Ames was the unremarkable bureaucrat asleep at his desk, the man who caused the execution of at least 10 people not for ideology but to pay for a div...
30 Jun 20min
