Future History: The Story Behind '2001: A Space Odyssey'
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2 Feb 202222min
The Last King of America: George III, His Battles With Madness, and Being a Thoroughly Underrated Monarch
Most Americans dismiss George III as a buffoon: a heartless and terrible monarch with few, if any, redeeming qualities (picture the preening, spitting, and pompous version in Hamilton). But in 2017, t...
1 Feb 202242min
Dragons Exist In Nearly Every Culture’s Mythology As a Mirror of Their Fears. What Are Ours?
We live in the golden age of dragons – they appear in Game of Thrones, most film adaptations of the works of J.R.R. Tolkein, and nearly everything tangentially related to fantasy. They date back mille...
27 Jan 202250min
Harry Guggenheim: The Elon Musk of the Gilded Age
Harry Guggenheim was a man of impressive achievements and staggering wealth. While most commonly known for the creation of the famed Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Harry was also the co-founder of Newsday...
25 Jan 202238min
Are Cities Humanity’s Greatest Invention or an Incubator of Disease, Crime, and Horrific Exploitation?
During the two hundred millennia of humanity’s existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. From their very beginnings, cities created such a flourishing of human endeavor—new profe...
20 Jan 202256min
Revolutionary Monsters: Why Lenin, Mao, Castro, and Others Turned Liberation into Tyranny
All sparked movements in the name of liberating their people from their oppressors—capitalists, foreign imperialists, or dictators in their own country. These revolutionaries rallied the masses in the...
18 Jan 202225min
Robert E. Lee Was America’s Most Gallant, Decorated Traitor
Robert E. Lee was one of the most confounding figures in American history. From Lee’s betrayal of his nation to defend his home state and uphold the slave system he claimed to oppose, to his traitorou...
13 Jan 202254min
Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Contentious Path to Emancipation
In a little-noted eulogy delivered shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Frederick Douglass called the martyred president “emphatically the Black man’s president,” and the “first to show any ...
11 Jan 202254min
