Épisodes

  • The Bitter History of Chocolate

    The Bitter History of Chocolate
    Dec 4 2025
    What's better than holiday hot chocolate? If just thinking about it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, well – that’s by design. Chocolate's big history sweeps across the globe, and today we’re going on that journey: from the pre–Columbus Americas, to an early 20th century reporter’s hunch about what cocoa production really takes, to a 21st century medical student’s story about his childhood on a farm that produces those holiday treats.

    Guests:

    Carla Martin,     lecturer in African and African American Studies at Harvard University and President of the Board of the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research

    Catherine Higgs, professor of history at the University of British Columbia in Canada

    Shadrack Frimpong, founder of Cocoa360

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    52 min
  • The Mother of Thanksgiving

    The Mother of Thanksgiving
    Nov 27 2025

    On today's show, a Thanksgiving story you might never have heard -- not about Pilgrims or Native people, but instead about a woman who, as civil war loomed, pushed for a shared national holiday she thought would keep the United States together. This episode originally ran in 2024.

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    50 min
  • What Happened to Vladimir Alexandrov?

    What Happened to Vladimir Alexandrov?
    Nov 25 2025
    Rund Abdelfatah and Cristina Kim try to unravel the mystery of a Soviet scientist who was helping to spread the word about nuclear winter theory—until he disappeared.

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    15 min
  • Democracy Dies in a Day

    Democracy Dies in a Day
    Nov 20 2025
    How quickly can a government fall? Chile was once one of Latin America's oldest democracies, but that all changed in a matter of hours after a military coup on September 11, 1973. Some supported the coup; many did not. But for the next 17 years, all Chileans lived in the grip of brutal authoritarian rule. Today on the show, the story of a democracy’s collapse and rebirth, told through the eyes of four people who lived through it.

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    52 min
  • The Creeping Coup

    The Creeping Coup
    Nov 13 2025
    On the surface, the story of Sudan’s war is about two generals vying for power. But it’s also about a vast web of international interests involving the U.S., China, Russia, and the UAE. Today on the show, the story of how things in Sudan got to this point, and the effects of the conflict around the world. This episode originally ran in 2024 and has been updated.

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    51 min
  • Winter is Coming

    Winter is Coming
    Nov 6 2025
    Late last month, President Trump announced that the United States would be restarting nuclear weapons tests after a break of over 30 years. We’ve since learned that they won’t be the explosive kind of tests, but this sent us down a rabbit hole — where we found a story about dinosaurs, Carl Sagan, and nuclear war. Because there was a moment in the not-so-distant past when we learned what drove the dinosaurs extinct... and that discovery, made during the Cold War, may have helped save humans from the same fate. This episode originally published in March 2025.

    Guests:

    David Sepkoski, Thomas M. Siebel Chair in History of Science at the University of Illinois and author of Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity.

    Owen Brian Toon, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

    Alec Nevala-Lee, novelist, critic, and biographer and author of the forthcoming book Collisions: A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs.

    Ann Druyan, co-writer and co-creator of the television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

    Andrew Revkin, science and environmental journalist.

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    52 min
  • Prosecuting Genocide

    Prosecuting Genocide
    Oct 30 2025

    The word "genocide" can seem like it’s everywhere right now: So it can be easy to forget that, fundamentally, it's a legal term that dates to World War II — and wasn’t used in court for half a century afterwards. Today on the show, the story of what happened during the Bosnian War in the 1990s and the work that went into building the legal case to prove genocide.
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    51 min
  • Throughline Dances

    Throughline Dances
    Oct 29 2025
    Stuck in traffic? Glued to your desk chair? Folding yet another pile of your kids’ laundry? We GOT you!! Take a break, turn up the volume, and shake it out with this special episode of Throughline, a tribute to dance music, all songs composed by our very own Ramtin Arablouei.

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    30 min