“We’ve always been inventing and reinventing new worlds for taking care of each other. We just have to notice.”We asked our subscribers to send us audio postcards to encapsulate where they live, wh...
What happens when Santa trades his sleigh for a rocket ship? Christmas correspondent Sarah Archer tells Sarah about how the Cold War era affected the image of old Kris Kringle through the rampant c...
Remember being a teen and coming up with “cool” ways of spelling common words? Well, just like the teenager it was, the United States in the 18th century was annoying their mom, England, with the h...
Listen now to the first episode of Sarah's new 8-part series with CBC Podcasts, The Devil You Know.In the 1980s and 90s, Satan and his followers were accused of brainwashing children, sacrificing b...
What do you get when you combine a horror movie audience, a spiritualist séance, and a haunted house attraction? Beginning in the 1930s and lasting into the 1960s, midnight ghost shows were ghoulis...
Are you a survival pessimist or a survival optimist? Blair Braverman surprises Sarah with a harrowing, heartening, and sometimes hilarious tale of love and endurance in the face of certain death, b...
Who really ended the Cold War, Ronald Reagan or a ten-year-old girl? Eighties correspondent Maris Kreizman joins us for a heartfelt conversation about America’s Youngest Ambassador, Samantha Smith,...
What do John Hinckley Jr. and a jazz age tuberculosis patient have in common? Legal correspondent Mackenzie Joy Brennan takes Sarah through some of the strange cases that helped make—and break—th...
Can you find your way out of the maize? The corn maze has become an enduring attraction of the American autumnal experience, seen at touristy family farms next to pumpkin patches and haunted houses...
In the second part of our series, pop culture historian Jamie Loftus takes us through the meteoric rise of Pee-wee Herman and the withering of Paul Reubens' world as dubious allegations surface tha...
What’s today’s secret word? Paul Reubens spent years bringing to life one of America’s most beloved characters, Pee-wee Herman, an icon of joy for weirdos of all ages. In the first of this two part...
What happens when you’re just a little too good at forging the diaries of Adolf Hitler? And why did so many people want to read them? In 1983, the West German news magazine Stern bought sixty volum...
Who is out there behind the howling midnight parties in the distance? For generations we have coexisted in varying degrees of rivalry, conflict, and admiration with the North American canine known ...
Where did all these teens come from? Harmony Colangelo, co-host of This Ends at Prom, is here to explain how, before Americans got to worry about what teenagers were up to, we first had to decide w...
Have you scrubbed down the top of your fridge lately? Home & garden correspondent Sarah Archer is here to tell us how and when we got so obsessed with the antiseptically clean house as a status...
This week, flim flam correspondent and certified April Fool Chelsey Weber-Smith is here to talk about a fistful of fake memoirs, featuring girls raised by wolves; the chicken pox of James Frey; wha...
At the end of our last episode, we asked you to call in and tell us what has been bringing you joy, connecting you to your community, and where you’ve been finding hope in these last few months. Th...
What do Lily Tomlin, Snow White, and Kenny Ortega have in common? They were all part of the 61st Academy Awards, a broadcast now remembered as the worst of all time, and masterminded by Allan Carr ...
What is "emotional labor," and why is it probably not what your boyfriend accuses you of making him do when you want him to go to Ikea with you? Psychotherapist Ash Compton and journalist Rachel Mo...
In County Kilkenny, Ireland, in an early year of a century not too long before our own, Alice Kyteler was accused of witchcraft. But the story doesn't end there. This week, Molly Aitken—author of B...
