DR Congo: The King Who Owned a Country
How did a shipping clerk in Antwerp discover one of the greatest crimes of the nineteenth century simply by paying attention to which ships were carrying what — and why did it take a decade of mission...
25 Jun 22min
Spain: The Red Gold of La Mancha
Why does it take between 150,000 and 200,000 flowers — and up to 470 hours of human labour — to produce a single kilogram of saffron, and why has the plateau of La Mancha been the place where that lab...
25 Jun 37min
Colombia: The Coffee Farmer Who Never Existed
Why was the most famous coffee farmer in the world a Cuban-American opera singer from Havana who had never visited Colombia — and how did a fictional man with a mule named Conchita become one of the m...
23 Jun 20min
Iran: The Garden That Became Heaven
Why does the word "paradise" — as used in every European language, in Arabic, in Urdu — simply mean "walled garden" in Old Persian, and what does that tell us about the civilisation that turned a hort...
23 Jun 22min
Austria: Styrian Identity in Pumpkin Seeds
Why does a single spontaneous genetic mutation in a Styrian pumpkin field — sometime in the nineteenth century — matter enough to trigger diplomatic rows, European Parliament debates, and a forensic i...
23 Jun 33min
South Africa: The Rooibos Dispute
Why did the Khoisan people of South Africa spend nine years in legal negotiations to receive 1.5 percent of an industry built entirely on knowledge they had held for three centuries — and what does th...
18 Jun 22min
Qatar: The Locust and the Desert
Before the gas flares and the glass towers, before the air conditioning and the sovereign wealth fund, what did Qatar actually have? Why was a single tree the difference between survival and starvatio...
18 Jun 21min
Czechia: Gregor Mendel's Peas and the Birth of Genetics
Why did a monk in a Moravian monastery spend eight years counting 30,000 pea plants — and how did the number three to one unlock the secret of heredity that Charles Darwin couldn't solve? Why did Greg...
18 Jun 22min
