This, Again

For more than six hundred years, societies have created institutions designed to rescue, protect, discipline, and reform children. Foundling hospitals took in abandoned infants. Houses of refuge promised to save children from crime and poverty. Reform schools claimed they could turn troubled boys and girls into productive adults. And eventually, residential treatment centers and therapeuti...

Today, Elvis Presley is the King of Rock and Roll. Jackie Robinson has an entire day dedicated to him across Major League Baseball. Mary Tyler Moore is remembered as one of the most influential women in television history.

But before they became icons, they became arguments.

In this episode, we explore what these three remarkably different people shared and ...

In this episode of This, Again, we pull back the curtain on the hidden infrastructure that made American independence possible. From communication networks and local committees to supply chains, intelligence operations, diplomacy, and the ordinary people whose names rarely appear in history books, we explore how a revolution was held together long before it was won. Because history remembers the cannon fire...

Who gets to be believed?

A fake doctor performs surgery without a medical degree. A fossil hunter makes discoveries that reshape science but struggles to be taken seriously. A physician uncovers a lifesaving medical practice, only to be ignored by much of the medical establishment.

This week, we explore the strange and often uncomfortable gap between expertise and credibility. Why do some people earn trust they haven't earned, whil...

After every assassination, the same questions seem to follow. How did this happen? Why wasn't it prevented? What warning signs did people miss?

From William McKinley in 1901 to John F. Kennedy in 1963, Ronald Reagan in 1981, and Shinzo Abe in 2022, each attack exposed vulnerabilities that suddenly seemed obvious in hindsight. Security systems changed. Procedures evolved. New lessons were learned.

But what if the deeper story isn't ...

This week on This, Again, we look at three figures from the 1600s whose stories became cleaner, simpler, and easier to pass down over time:

• Galileo Galilei
• Pocahontas
• Isaac Newton

Galileo becomes the ultimate symbol of science versus religion, even though the reality was tangled up in politics, ego, public pressure, and institutional instability.

Pocahontas becomes a romantic bridge between worlds, despite the fact that ...

What would it take to be labeled insane?

In 1887, Nellie Bly checked herself into a New York asylum to find out. She got in with surprising ease. Getting out was something else entirely.

Nearly a century later, David Rosenhan ran an experiment to see if anything had changed. Healthy people walked into psychiatric hospitals, claimed to hear a single voice, and were admitted. Once inside, they acted completely normal. It didn’t...

In 1962, a group of schoolgirls in Tanganyika began laughing and could not stop. The episode spread to multiple schools, eventually forcing closures and affecting hundreds of students.

More than four centuries earlier, in 1518, residents of Strasbourg took to the streets and danced for days at a time. Contemporary accounts describe exhaustion, collapse, and a response from local authorities shaped by the medical beliefs of the time...

In May 1536, Anne Boleyn was still Queen of England.

Seventeen days later, she was executed.

This episode looks at how that kind of collapse is even possible.

Anne’s rise wasn’t just personal. Her marriage to Henry VIII forced England to break with the Catholic Church, reshaped the law, and required oaths of loyalty across the country. By the mid-1530s, she had become tied to the most disruptive political and religious ...

In the second episode of this two-part series on cults, we look at what happens when cult psychology collides with the digital world.

The online relationship movement known as Twin Flames Universe promised followers that a single destined partner existed for each person and that spiritual coaching could reunite them with that soulmate. Behind the scenes, former members describe a system that pressured followers to pursue relationsh...

In this episode of This, Again, we trace the evolution of cults from the obvious monsters of the 1960s and 70s, the Manson Family, Jonestown, and Heaven’s Gate, to the respectable reinventions of the 1980s and 90s like NXIVM, Scientology, and multi-level marketing empires.

What do these groups share beneath the costumes, the jargon, and the business cards? The same psychological mechanics: obedience, conformity, charisma, sun...

In the early 20th century, hundreds of women were employed to paint luminous watch dials using radium-based paint. Despite early warnings from medical experts, companies continued to insist the work was safe. This episode examines the history of the Radium Girls, focusing on what corporate leaders knew, how they delayed accountability, and the lasting legal and public health consequences. It also draws a direct line to modern chemi...

How do you justify rebellion when you are fighting for freedom, and then justify suppressing it once freedom is yours?

In this episode of This, Again, we rewind to the years immediately after American independence, when the Founding Fathers were forced to confront a problem they had not fully planned for. Americans were rebelling again, this time against them.

We begin with the Boston Tea Party before it became a founding myth, whe...

In this episode of This, Again, we look at three familiar figures from late medieval and early modern Europe and ask a different kind of historical question.

Not whether they were heroes or villains. But how their stories came to be told the way they were.

We start with Christopher Columbus, whose brutality was documented while he was alive and whose authority collapsed long before he became a national symbol. His later transformat...

Coups are often remembered as sudden explosions of force. Tanks in the streets. Jets overhead. Governments collapsing overnight. But history tells a quieter, more unsettling story.

In this episode of This, Again, we trace the hidden psychological pattern that links coups across centuries and continents, from Napoleon’s rise in revolutionary France to Cold War interventions in Latin America and beyond. Using the 1973 Chilean c...

The lights got brighter. The cameras got closer. But the system never changed.

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off and trace the next wave of child stardom, from the 1980s to today. We revisit the sitcom era that gave us tragic headlines, the pop machine that chewed up teen girls for profit, and the digital boom that turned toddlers into monetized brands.

Behind the fame was something more dangerous: a psychological cost that b...

Hollywood has been cashing in on cute kids for over a century, and the kids usually pay the price. In Part 1 of The Child Star Problem, we trace the origins of child exploitation in the entertainment industry, starting even before Hollywood with vaudeville stages, traveling acts, and silent films. This episode unpacks the system that raised children for applause and profit, from Jackie Coogan, whose stolen fortune led to the first ...

What do 19th century weavers and 21st century tech workers have in common? More than you might think. In this episode, we unpack the real story behind the Luddites, skilled artisans who weren’t afraid of machines but deeply aware of how those machines were being used to undercut their labor and erase their way of life. Their protests were met not just with force, but with a powerful narrative campaign that branded them as bac...

In 1949, the royal vaults of Baroda were supposed to be sealed, transferred to the new Indian state as part of a complex and delicate independence process. But when an audit revealed that hundreds of crown jewels had vanished, suspicion fell on one woman: the Maharani of Baroda, Sita Devi.

A woman as notorious as she was glamorous, Sita Devi didn’t just smuggle the jewels out of India. She wore them on magazine covers, flaunt...