The Containment Plan (rebroadcast)
It’s hard to overstate the vastness of the Skid Row neighborhood in Los Angeles. It spans roughly 50 blocks, which is about a fifth of the entire downtown area of Los Angeles. It’s very clear when you...
2 Juli 202426min
Backfired: The Vaping Wars
When two Stanford graduate students set out to create a new kind of cigarette that wouldn’t kill them, they didn’t foresee all the obstacles that lay ahead—or the powerful forces their invention would...
25 Juni 202452min
The Power Broker #6: Mike Schur
This is the sixth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Mike Schur, who ...
21 Juni 20242h 58min
Category 6
After Hurricane Camille caused widespread death and destruction along the US Gulf Coast in 1969, two scientists created the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale as a way to quickly warn the public when...
18 Juni 202439min
The Los Angeles Leaf Blower Wars
The leaf blower is one of the most hated objects in the modern world. They’re loud, they pollute, and… how important is a leafless lawn anyway? In a lot of towns and cities, the gas-powered leaf blowe...
11 Juni 202435min
Fact Checking the Supreme Court
For a long time, the Court operated under what was called Legal Formalism. Legal formalism said that the job of any judge or justice was incredibly narrow. It was to basically look at the question of ...
4 Juni 202444min
Uptown Squirrel [update]
In late 2018, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists and explorers. Now it’s an archive of ephemera and rarities f...
28 Maj 202430min
The Lost Subways of North America
Los Angeles actually used to have a massive electric railway system in the early 1900s, called the Red Car. Jake Berman, the author of The Lost Subways of North America, tells us about how, time after...
22 Maj 202426min
