The Old Rituals of New Years, Part 2: Neuroscience, Resolutions and the Rick Steves Fan Club
What a year, right? If you're listening to today's episode, you have (almost) officially survived. I'm ringing in 2021 with Noel, Casey and the rest of our Ridiculous Historians in this, the second pa...
31 Dec 202030min
Holiday Classic: When the Puritans Canceled Christmas
Nowadays Christmas is a globally-recognized holiday celebrated by millions of people, but in the past this wasn't the case. In fact, some groups of Christians detested the holiday, going so far as to ...
24 Dec 202028min
Holiday Classic: The Strange History of Antarctic Fruitcake
Nowadays fruitcake is considered a stereotypical, often comical holiday punchline, but even in the modern day people across the planet can agree on at least one fruitcake fact: Those things are pretty...
22 Dec 202029min
Goodyear and the Mystery of the Ghost Blimp
In 1942, a U.S. Navy airship flew out over the Pacific to search for Japanese submarines. It lost radio contact and, hours later, slowly crashed in the San Franciscan suburbs. Inside the gondola, ever...
18 Dec 202039min
Benito Mussolini was Super into Wearable Milk
Today Benito Mussolini is probably best known as the founder of Italy's National Fascist Party, but he was also very, very into milk. So much so, in fact, that he funneled tons of funding into a stran...
15 Dec 202041min
Snowmen as Protest: The Miracle of 1511
During the brutal winter of 1511, residents of Brussels built more than one hundred snowmen... and these sculptures weren't the type of snow sculpture you see in the modern day. Instead, the city was ...
11 Dec 202029min
Why are Chimney Sweeps good luck at weddings?
It seems odd, at first - the idea that a random chimney cleaner might pass by a wedding, then be brought into the party, shake sooty hands with the couple, and bless random people on the street. Yet t...
9 Dec 202039min
People Have Been Convinced Robots Will Take Their Jobs For Centuries
Nowadays automation is affecting almost every industry on the planet, and numerous experts are raising alarms: AI, robotics and automation, they say, may well spell doom for millions of jobs held by h...
4 Dec 202043min
