Mass for Shut-ins: The Gin and Tacos Podcast

At the peak of the Great Depression, one nation sent its athletes to the 1932 Olympics on a coffee freighter with instructions to barter and beg their way to Los Angeles. Even though coffee was a wor…

In 1973 a low-ranking US Air Force officer training to work in a Minuteman missile silo asks, "How do I know that the launch order I receive comes from a president who is sane?"

Good question, Harold…

As the GOP is set to lock in a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, court-packing is re-entering the political conversation. This is the story of the original "court packing scheme" attem…

Guest: Thomas Gokey of The Debt Collective (@StrikeDebt) joins me to talk about their new book Can't Pay Won't Pay, coming out in September from Haymarket Books. We talk about the ways that people c…

Albania emerged from one-party rule under Enver Hoxha as the poorest and most backward Eastern European state. Hoxha bequeathed Albanians 700,000 concrete pillbox forts and a complete lack of familia…

Guest: Tom Sexton (@TomSexton) of The Trillbilly Workers Party (@thetrillbillies) joins me to talk about the Amy McGrath - Charles Booker primary race in Kentucky, the uncharismatic void that is Chuc…

In 1918 Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius and his wife Marcet, editors of a moribund socialist newspaper, pursued their populist vision to bring education to the working classes in the form of cheap, widely a…

Guest: Financial policy guru Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) explains what should be happening in response to the economic crisis, what is happening, and why those two are different. We cover unemployment,…

Between 1850 and 1900 it was all the rage for rich, roguish Americans to form private armies to invade and conquer countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. These men were called "Filibusteros" a…

A pair of artists use a large market research survey to find out what people say they like least in music and, with their neuroscientist friend, set out to create the worst possible song. Featuring a…

In 1982 an eccentric, paranoid coal baron from Frog Level, VA wanted to buy a remote island to get away from Communists, taxes, and Freudian psychoanalysts. He chooses one of the Pitcairn Islands (of…

Story: Three Men in a Can - Voskhod 1. The USSR beats the USA to the feat of sending a three-person crew into space by pointing at its one-man spacecraft and telling three guys "Get in there." A stor…

The origin story of those flaming bottles we all know and love. Nothing says "Take that, The Man!" like the imagery of someone in a mask lobbing a Molotov. Today it's an anti-authoritarian gesture, b…

Story: One of my favorite phenomena in demographic data...the harvesting effect. What I learned from a heat wave in Chicago in 1995, and how it applies to the current coronavirus outbreak. Mortality …

Guest: Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) is the cohost of Citations Needed, an outstanding podcast on the media and political communication. He joins me to talk about the unfolding situation in Iran and…

The 2nd annual All-Mailbag Episode. Question Cathy and I tackle ranked-choice voting & instant runoff voting, whether the primaries are too nasty, how to put your time to the best use in the election…

If you need more encouragement to listen to a story about the Lewis & Clark expedition shitting poisonous heavy metals all over the continent and how science has exploited that to generate useful his…

An underemployed draftsman named Harry Beck looked at the original London Underground map, realized it was crap, and set himself the task of creating a better one. By ignoring one of the cardinal rul…

In 1946, post-war Britain tries to solve four very different problems at once: a labor surplus of returning military, a shortage of key foods, the need to make colonies economically independent, and …

Walking around the countryside ("rambling") is very important to the British, and they don't take kindly to the idea that unoccupied land is off-limits to walkers.

The so-called Right to Roam, even o…