There's Something About Mary

The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide the amendment's boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagine it might change? In this hour, the shifting definition of cruel and unusual punishment. This episode was originally ...  Show more

Call it standing ovation inflation: these days, it feels like it's mandatory to stand and clap for live performances. Has our please clap era gone too far? That's what one Throughline listener wanted to know. So we traced the winding road from Shakespeare’s epilogues to Broadway ...  Show more

In 1906, a New York health department investigation into an outbreak of typhoid fever led to the discovery that a cook, Mary Mallon, was an unsuspecting ""healthy carrier"" of the deadly bacteria. This discovery forever altered Mallon’s life, thrusting her into a national spotlig ...  Show more

Apprehending Mary Mallon was not a one-time affair. After she was forced to quarantine, she was allowed to reenter society under one condition: she would never cook for anyone again. But “Typhoid Mary” refused to play by anyone’s rules. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit pod ...  Show more

In 1907, George Soper located the cause of a typhoid outbreak in New York City: a cook named Mary Mallon. Mary didn’t know it, but each and every meal she cooked carried a small chance for her clients to come down with the disease. Finding out the truth could cost Mary her job…an ...  Show more

There are quite a few parallels between Mary Mallon's story (a series of typhoid outbreaks) and our present-day pandemic, and so there are things we can learn from it. But was Mary a villain? Or simply a victim of circumstances? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.f ...  Show more