AIDS

The time has finally come... we’ve made it to the end of the song. This episode description is being written on a tearstained laptop as we speak. But we PROMISE we’re going out with a very fizzy bang. The cola wars was a tense battle between soda giants Coca Cola and Pepsi, as th ...  Show more

It’s the penultimate episode, and Billy’s taken us back to China to talk about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and the massacre that followed. In classic To this day, discussion of the events are strictly censored in China but in this episode we’ll explore it all. What happen ...  Show more

How do we understand something as huge as a global epidemic?

Similarly to Covid, the AIDS epidemic, which was most destructive in the 1980s and 90s, had such universal reach. Yet within that, there were millions of personal experiences.

What was it like to ...

When HIV was first identified in the early 1980s, it was a public health crisis mired in urgent scientific questions: How was it transmitted? What were the symptoms? Could it be treated? But alongside that, and equally challenging to public health, was the stigma attached to t ...

In 1992 HIV/AIDS hit a grim milestone in the United States when it became the number one cause of death among men ages 25 to 44. Since there was still so much stigma attached to the illness, people were often dying without even telling their closest friends and family that they w ...  Show more

In the early 1980s, a mysterious new disease spread like wildfire through the gay communities of major U.S. cities. Before it even had a name, AIDS had already killed over half its victims. Public response was hampered by ignorance, fear, and homophobia. This is the story of t ...