England
country in north-west Europe, part of the United Kingdom
Episodes
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#5636: Before the 9-to-5: Working Hours in 1700s EnglandSaint Monday, seasonal building sites, and a scholarly brawl over whether anyone worked 270 days a year before factories existed.Main topic -
#5588: Anchorites: Dead to the World, at the Center of ItSealed into a church wall, declared dead to the world — and then consulted by kings. The strange, true story of the anchorite. -
#5509: The Long Tail of Spy StationsHow far does the CIA's station map actually reach? A 1961 memo to JFK and the agency's own map archive tell two very different stories. -
#5374: Why Trades Still Say Apprentice, Journeyman, MasterA papyrus contract from 18 BC, a five-euro coin, and the German Walz — how one medieval ladder survived only in the licensed trades. -
#5145: What Life Expectancy Really Meant in the 1600sThat "people died at 35" statistic? It's mostly measuring dead children, not short adult lives. -
#5144: What Medieval Peasants Actually Ate From the PotA cauldron on a chain, a fire that never quite goes out, and the real Tuesday of perpetual pottage — minus the four-hundred-year broth myth. -
#5809: What If Israel Had Never Fallen? A 2,000-Year Thought ExperimentHannah's question: what would Israel look like if it had stayed under Jewish rule for 2,000 years — and was antisemitism structural or circumstantial? -
#5663: Did the Puritans Really Hate Fun?The Puritans banned alcohol? Invented happy hour rules? A look at what they actually did — and the 1781 hoax we still quote. -
#5601: How Image Forensics Catches Fake Ghosts and DeepfakesFrom darkroom magnifying glasses to AI provenance fingerprints — how we've verified photographs for a century. -
#5582: Who Invented the Internet? Actually, Seven PeopleThe first message ever sent was "LO" — then the system crashed. The real story of the internet is a stack of seven layers, not one genius. -
#5562: What "Heavy Industry" Actually MeansIt's not about weight — it's about capital intensity and cycles. Why the heavy/light split is younger than the factories it describes. -
#5502: Clifford Hutsell and the Storybook Houses of DallasA listener's childhood mystery: who designed those fantastical Lakewood houses? The answer leads to Storybook architecture. -
#5439: Life at 76 Degrees North: Inside Pituffik Space BaseA few hundred people, four months of darkness, and a $100M-a-year mission on thawing permafrost. -
#5331: Steeplejacks, Linemen, and Tower ClimbersThree jobs that look like pure nerve — steeplejacks, helicopter linemen, tower climbers — and what they're actually doing up there. -
#5307: Selling Holy Air and Moon DeedsMoon deeds, bottled Banff air, and a proposal to sell Holy Air from Jerusalem — what makes novelty gifts actually work? -
#5214: Meningitis: Why It Kills So FastMeningitis is an anatomical description, not a prognosis. Same word, wildly different odds — from a bad week to five days from flu symptoms to a fu... -
#5161: How Statistics Get Misread: A Field GuideAverages, rates, correlations — the ten categories of statistics most likely to fool a general audience, and why the number is usually right.