Brooke Gladstone is the host of On the Media.
“I’ve learned so much about how easy it is to redefine reality in this era of billions of filter bubbles. How easy it is to cast doubt on what is undeniably true. And I think that that’s what frightens me the most. I actually think that’s what frightens most people the most. How do we make sure that we all live in the same world? Or do we?”
Thanks to MailChimp, Texture, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago for sponsoring this week's episode.
Two days with a broken-hearted Tom Hiddleston.
Around 60 people in the world share a condition called “highly superior autobiographical memory.” They remember absolutely everything.
A mysterious cache of documents could prove that a man serving a life sentence for homicide was framed by corrupt Alabama authorities—if the documents, and the man, can be believed.
A family defends the life of a man who died and became a national punchline.
On the motivations and techniques of a prolific book thief who “built a vast collection of rare works, most of which he will never read and no one will ever see.”
Somewhere in the desert, buried under a mountain of sand and rock, is an ancient shipwreck. Maybe.
On the outsized pleasures of the very small.
On the history of the essay and someone who had gotten it all wrong.
Music editor Yaroslav Pastukhov drew young journalists and artists into a transnational cocaine-smuggling ring.
Filipinos make up nearly a third of all cruise ship workers. It’s a good job. Until it isn’t.
A program in Washington state aims to teach johns about healthy relationships - and the patriarchy.
The hour-by-hour account of two Iraqis’ detainment and release.
First her best friend was murdered. Then her mother fell from a balcony. And finally a man she had just met was found dead in her house.
Shady security dealings in Iran.
A profile of the Oklahoma City point guard, who is averaging a triple-double in his first season without Kevin Durant.
Half a century ago, an American commando vanished in the jungles of Laos. In 2008, he reappeared in Vietnam, reportedly alive and well. But nothing was what it seemed.
Ezra Edelman is the director of O.J.: Made in America.
“When I say what I learned is that America is even more fucked up than I had previously thought, it’s that—the superficiality of it. How we are willingly seduced by these shiny people and these shiny things. And, again, when I looked at O.J.’s trajectory, that was an operating principle.”
Thanks to MailChimp, Squarespace, Casper, and Secrets, Crimes, & Audiotape for sponsoring this week's episode.
"And far from the ivory towers of music academia, mostly on his blog, Elgar’s Enigma Theme Unmasked, Bob Padgett has emerged as perhaps the most prolific and dogged of all Enigma seekers. His solution, which has caught the attention of classical music scholars, lies at the bottom of a rabbit hole of anagrams, cryptography, the poet Longfellow, the composer Mendelssohn, the Shroud of Turin, and Jesus, all of which he believes he found hiding in plain sight in the music".
A team of researchers has a controversial plan to root fake data out of science.
The mass deportation of the Siberian Kalmyk people by Stalin still reverberates.
Will interactive films be this century’s defining art form?
One story of coming to America from the Soviet Union.
Trump’s Commerce pick and a government by, and for, the super-rich.
