542. Is a Museum Just a Trophy Case?

Podcasting started as a niche-nerd pursuit. Now it’s a $9 billion industry. Is that a lot? The strange economics of this thing we do. SOURCES:Jim Bankoff, chairman and C.E.O. of Vox Media.Ben Davis, head of digital at WME.Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify and author of ...  Show more

An economist calls America’s beef industry a “miracle.” An antitrust scholar calls it “broken.” Maybe they’re both right? SOURCES:Austin Frerick, agriculture antitrust expert, fellow at Yale University, author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry ...  Show more

Mary Beard argues that 21st Century disputes about what museums should own - or give back - are far from being a modern phenomenon. 'Almost as far back as you can go, there have been contests about what museums should display, and where objects of heritage properly belonged,' wri ...  Show more

In 2023, Anderson Cooper reported that a large number of antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection had come to the world-class museum by way of theft. Ancient art had been looted from Cambodian temples fifty years ago and the Cambodian Government wanted them back ...  Show more

African artifacts shown in museums worldwide are often not borrowed, but stolen -- and TED Fellow Jim Chuchu is on a mission to get them back. Learn the sordid history behind how many of the collections in the West came to be, Chuchu’s extensive work tracking and restoring Kenya’ ...  Show more

The world’s most illustrious museums are finally having to reckon with the stolen art in their collections. Today’s show was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at v ...  Show more