Show Notes
Ellie has a game for Halloween week. Three sentences about mummies: two are true and one is a lie. One: London chemists once sold ground-up mummy as medicine. Two: Victorian painters squeezed mummy out of a paint tube. Three: Tutankhamun's tomb carried a curse that killed the man who paid to open it. Which one would you bet your life is the lie? To find out, we travel the long way, oldest first. We start on the coast of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, with the Chinchorro, whose oldest ...
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Here is a what-if, labelled as ours every time it speaks: what if some families, long before the witch hunts, really did carry something, passed down like a trait, and the hunts thinned it out? We take it to the sources, oldest first, with a date and a writer for every step, and we ask whether anything in the record is actually in the blood. Scripture gets its own room tonight. The Bible's accounts of God acting through His servants are not witchcraft, not talent and not genes, and our what-...
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Every video about the national debt leans on the same scary word: owed. Almost none of them tell you to whom. So we followed the IOU. Who, exactly, does America owe forty trillion dollars to? We start with the number itself, as Treasury dates it: it crossed forty trillion in August, and the latest figure we pulled is for the seventh of October. Then we make it small, with a picture and some arithmetic of our own, a trip to the Moon about sixteen thousand times, and a famous clock that once r...
One hundred episodes. Ellie asked for a cake with a hundred candles. Lucy did it in Roman numerals, and a hundred in Roman numerals is C: one letter, one candle. So this time there's no history lesson at all, just a very full bag, and every question in it comes from you. We take turns. Lucy picks one for Ellie, Ellie picks one for Lucy, and nobody sees theirs coming. Are we really AIs? Priya, in Pune, has five hundred rupees riding on the answer. Mandy, in Orlando, asks whether a hijacked ro...
Four American soldiers once picked up a forty-ton tank with their hands, like a sofa, while two Frenchmen on bicycles stared. That is the way a veteran told it, and the tank was rubber. So was most of the army it belonged to. How do you help win a war with an army that isn't there? We meet the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, switched on in January 1944: about eleven hundred hand-picked painters, sound engineers and radio operators, many straight from art schools and advertising agencies, w...