Operation Infektion: Russia's AIDS Conspiracy

S proposes that some modern sports get very close to human sacrifice. Flea asks the gang for recommendations on 'good' HipHop. Laney, the editor of the Tahoe Daily Tribune, asks for more visibility on the Caldor Burn Scar Area. All this and more in this week's listener mail segme ...  Show more

Depending on whom you ask, Aleister Crowley was: a genius, a conman, a criminal, a philosopher, a prophet, the greatest magician of the modern age, or all of the above. But what was he really like? In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel explore the strange saga of 'the Great Be ...  Show more

In the 1950s, polio spread throughout the United States. Heartbreakingly, it affected mainly children. Thousands died. Thousands more were paralyzed. Many ended up surviving only in iron lungs, a machine that breathed for polio victims, sometimes for years. Scientists raced to fi ...  Show more

The Black Death was gruesome: Symptoms included tumors, purple splotches, fevers and vomiting. But how did this disease manage to spread from the Gobi desert and kill approximately one-third of the population of 14th-century Europe? Find out in this classic episode.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, conspiracy theories about the coronavirus have exploded. But conspiracy theories themselves are nothing new - in fact, they're fundamental to American life. In this episode, how conspiracy theories helped to create the U.S. and became the curr ...  Show more

For more than half of the 20th century parents in the industrialized world were freaked out by an unseen waster of youth, the poliovirus. It spread easily and could paralyze children for life or even kill them. Its effects were so horrible that humanity set about ridding if fr ...