Walt Whitman, Poet of Democracy

Cyrano de Bergerac is often called a man of letters, a philosopher, a soldier, a duelist, a playwright and many more things. But what he may have been best at was self-invention. His real story is blu...

5 Jan 202233min

When European naturalists saw a platypus for the first time, they found it so bizarre that they thought it was fake, and then argued about how to classify it for almost a century. This happened in tan...

3 Jan 202238min

This 2016 episode covers the Piltdown Man, which is one of the world's most infamous instances of scientific fraud. It derailed the study of evolution for decades. How exactly did scientists in 1912 f...

1 Jan 202233min

Holly and Tracy discuss Daguerre's life, and veer off into VR, and the nature of Daguerre's monetization of photography. Then they talk about the famously handsome Cornelius and the importance of phot...

31 Dec 202116min

Cornelius is famous for having taken what’s often called the world’s first selfie - and he's noted for how handsome he looks in it. But he was smart and inventive in a variety of ways, and he innovate...

29 Dec 202131min

Daguerre comes up almost any time we mention photography, but we’ve never covered his life story. Well before he figured out how to capture images through a camera obscura, he was an artist and innova...

27 Dec 202138min

This 2018 episode takes a look at three creative works that have become staples of the Christmas season. All three of them have played a huge part in how people observe and celebrate Christmas in part...

25 Dec 202135min

Tracy and Holly discuss Tracy being frightened by Ichabod Crane's fate in the Disney Sleepy Hollow cartoon as a kid, and the letters between Dickens and Irving. They then discuss the trickiness of res...

24 Dec 202117min