The Case of the Missing Checks
"High is a different thing for different folks. I don’t smoke pot but I’m awful high tonight." Community organizer Elsie Easley said this about the state of welfare to students at University of Illino...
2 Nov 20155min
Zero Mostel and the truth of the absurd
When Zero Mostel was under trial by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1955, the committee asked what he was doing at an anti-HUAC meeting. Mostel replied: "What if I did an imitation of a b...
2 Okt 20159min
When the Negro was in vogue
At the Cotton Club, Harlem's premier nightclub of the 1920s and 30s, 16-year-old Lena Horne performed as a chorus girl alongside legends like Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. The only catch? The aud...
15 Sep 20159min
Seamus Heaney and the Long Dead
How do you write a love poem to a 2,000 year old stranger? On Popcast, hear about Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney's obsession with "bog bodies." These centuries-old human remains were found in bogla...
24 Aug 20157min
Welcome to Womanhouse
The rooms were full of menstrual blood and Kotex, rubber breasts and stumbling brides, fragmented bodies in linen closets and simulacra of babies being born. It was 1972, and this was Womanhouse: a ri...
10 Aug 20157min
The Freedom Singers, and the three simple words that gave strength to a movement
It was the early days of the civil rights movement. Across the South, black students staged sit-ins, marches, demonstrations and protests that were violently repressed. In this podcast, two voices fro...
21 Juli 20155min
Freud in the Night Kitchen
When Maurice Sendak’s now classic children’s book In the Night Kitchen was released in 1970, it caused a scandal. Its protagonist, a young boy, is bare naked throughout the book, amidst a landscape ph...
7 Maj 20154min
The Song Banned by NASA
Astronauts don’t have days and nights like we do on earth, so they need some help regulating their sleep. Turns out, it takes a whole team of engineers down on earth to rouse NASA’s elite from their s...
15 Apr 20155min
