When Things Fall Apart

Brownie Wise revolutionized how we store our food. She was one of the first female corporate executives in U.S. history. But she’s not a household name. This week on our series Hidden Histories, the rise and fall of the queen of plastics—and one of corporate America's most dramat ...  Show more

Monopoly is one of the best-selling board games of all time. It heralds free market economics and celebrates the American dream. That's a far cry from the original intent. This week on our series Hidden Histories, we go back in time to reveal the swindling and cover ups that robb ...  Show more

In this THINGS HIDDEN episode, David Gornoski explains the meaning of the term "structural violence" and why we cannot deny its existence any longer. Why do we see such societal chaos around us today? Why aren't coercive laws working the way they had in the past? What can we do t ...  Show more

One of the difficulties in thinking about extinction, as Lorraine Daston argued in her recent review of Vanished by Sadiah Qureshi, is ‘the challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and centuries and the Earth’s epochs and aeons’. Lorraine joins Tom to explore the ways ...  Show more

How is it that two neighbors can look out their window at the exact same thing, and see something completely different? This is a question many people in America are asking now. We explore it by visiting a small community in Minnesota, called Eagle's Nest Township, that has a uni ...  Show more

Do you want to see the world as it is, or as it ought to be? This difficult question is at the heart of the millennia-old debate over morality and art. Pulling back the camera to ask how we got to our current dysfunction, Spencer moves from Homer and Isaiah to Nabokov and Matthew ...  Show more