Thecuriousmanspodcast

My thoughts on the 25th Anniversary of September 11th, 2001.

America spends more on health care than any other wealthy nation—and yet millions of Americans struggle to afford care, medical debt remains widespread, and our health outcomes often lag behind those of countries...

Imagine parachuting into Nazi-occupied France with no guarantee that you'll survive the night. Your mission: arm the Resistance, sabotage the enemy, gather intelligence, and rescue Allied airmen. Now imagine doing it...

1985. A small Oregon town. A teenage girl named Lou Miller is preparing to graduate high school when her father makes an unexpected announcement: a coworker named Jim—and his two Pomeranians—are moving into the family...

What do you do when your father leaves behind an unfinished novel—and your father happens to be one of the most beloved and prolific storytellers in American literature? Do you finish it? And if you do, how do you make...

What does God have to do with the American story? The answer, as you'll discover in today's conversation, is complicated. For four centuries, Americans have argued, preached, written, protested, prayed, rebelled...

For decades, Africa has too often been viewed through the narrow lenses of crisis, conflict, and poverty. But today's guest has spent a lifetime making the case that the continent is far more accurately understood as a...

What does a mother do when survival means making impossible choices? And what happens when a thirteen-year-old girl is forced to grow up in a world where childhood can disappear overnight? Pauline Steinhorn's new book...

What can the collapse of an ancient republic tell us about the health of the American republic today? More than two thousand years ago, Rome was a functioning republic. It had elections, political institutions, a...

What happens when a political party loses the trust of the people it says it represents? And perhaps even more importantly: how does it earn that trust back? My guest today has some unusually direct answers. Joe...

What if science finally proved that there really is an afterlife? And what if it also proved that not everyone gets to experience it? That's the provocative premise behind Don Schechter's debut novel, Ascendants . Set...

What does a place do to you when you leave it behind—but it never really leaves you? In 1990, a young journalist named Earl Swift set out to hike the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia. More than 2,000 miles later...

What if one of the central assumptions about cancer is wrong? For more than half a century, cancer research has largely focused on the idea that cancer begins with mutations in genes that disrupt the normal controls on...

Conspiracy theories can feel like a uniquely modern phenomenon. QAnon. Pizzagate. The "Big Lie." The Epstein Files. False claims about vaccines, medicines, elections, and political opponents. But what if conspiracy...

Rock 'n' roll has always had a dark side. Behind the music, the fame, the drugs, the excess, and the mythology are stories of mysterious deaths, unexplained events, strange symbols, secretive organizations, and rumors...