Of Rats and Men

When we call something "clickbait," we don't mean it as a compliment. But let's be real: we also click. It's hard to resist a spicy story, and 19th-century newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst knew it. At a time when most papers merely reported events, his papers created them ...  Show more

In the late 1890s, the United States fought wars and backed independence movements around the world. By the time the fighting was over, the US emerged as a new global power —and with it, a new identity. This week: how the U.S. became an empire, and why it started calling itself A ...  Show more

Bringers of plague, schleppers of pizza slices, garbage gobblers. Rats have adapted over the millennia to survive and thrive in human company, much to our amazement and (often) disgust. But love them or hate them, our past and our future is bound up with these little hustlers. Fo ...  Show more

This episode may have you reconsidering what you think about rats. That’s because at this training and research center in Tanzania, African Giant Pouched Rats are being raised up to sniff out landmines and disease, proving to be the heroes we all need. 

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Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble, and I believe truer, to consider him created from animals. A military grave from the 5th century BC was found to contain something extraordinary; a macaque monkey dressed as a roma ...  Show more

In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024), Dr. Marcy Norton offers a dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world. When the m ...  Show more