Damn Interesting

Against the odds, a tiny Icelandic town speaks of a local Black ancestor. Geneticists and historians combine forces to uncover the man’s eventful life.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/a-trail-gone-cold-fixed

The tangled history of humanity’s search for the solar system’s uncharted planets.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/journey-to-the-invisible-planet

When the U.S. Army came for their land in 1877, the Nez Perce tribe complied. But tensions boiled over, and Chief Joseph led as they ran for their lives.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/from-where-the-sun-now-stands

In 1970s Bali, a sudden rice crisis prompted an unexpectedly far-reaching scientific discovery

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-ancient-order-of-bali

In 1933, British WWI vet Maurice Wilson hatched an unorthodox plan to reach the still-untouched summit of Everest.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/lofty-ambitions

A great pitcher’s great temptation.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-rubes-dilemma

In 1924 a bankrupt businessman in Portugal launched an audacious international scheme to become one of the wealthiest men in the world.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/devouring-the-heart-of-portugal

Robert Rogers, a man obsessed with trespassing, sets his sights on Mount St. Helens in the spring of 1980

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-mount-st-helens-trespasser

The true story of a runaway Nazi, a determined sleuth, and a chase around the world.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/hunting-for-kobyla

In 1958, one heavily modified airplane flew out of Las Vegas with a single objective: Don’t land.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-unceasing-cessna-hacienda

From the depths of poverty, Du Yuesheng rose through Shanghai’s underworld to become one of the most influential, and overlooked, figures in modern China.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-kingpin-of-shanghai

In Nazi-occupied Paris, “Dr. Eugène” offered Jews an alternative to deportation, slavery, and death camps. But the escape network was not what it seemed.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-traveler-and-his-baggage

A true story of castaways on a lost and hostile scrap of land, all thanks to some meddlesome Frenchmen and terrible luck.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/fifteen-years-forsaken

Nikolai Vavilov dedicated his life to improving Soviet agriculture and eradicating famine, but his allegiance to science would ultimately lead to his downfall.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/a-blight-on-soviet-science

How a booming oil town aimed to become a western metropolis through one of the most ill-conceived boxing matches of all time.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/pugilism-on-the-plains

How a female engineer defied all norms to save England in the Second World War.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/055-how-miss-shillings-orifice-helped-win-the-war

The true story of the 18th century's greatest femme fatale, and the most unfortunate of her victims.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/dupes-and-duplicity

When an ancient, unexpected imprint is discovered in a stone quarry, scientists endeavor to explain its mysterious origin.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/chronicles-of-charnia

The Spy of Night and Fog by Damn Interesting

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-spy-of-night-and-fog

French mathematician Évariste Galois lived a full life. When he wasn't trying to overthrow the government, he was reinventing algebra.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/radical-solutions

One of Poland’s most beloved and honored World War II veterans was not Polish at all: he was a 500-pound brown bear named Wojtek.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/private-wojteks-right-to-bear-arms

The 18th century misadventures of HMS Wager and her reluctant crew

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/dead-reckoning

The little known story of an age-old scam

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-eponymous-mr-ponzi

The secret runaway success of Kenneth Gandar-Dower’s racing cheetahs.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-most-modern-of-modern-sports

The most expensive, bizarre, and obscure work ever created by Dr. Seuss.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/a-debaculous-fiasco

Working almost single-handedly, visionary Argentine filmmaker Quirino Cristiani created full-length animated films between 1917 and 1931. He has since been all but forgotten.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/drawing-the-shorter-straw

In 1981, an international group of doctors identified the devastating disease behind a perplexing outbreak of paralysis in northern Mozambique.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-curse-of-konzo

Amanda Theodosia Jones was a 19th-century poet, entrepreneur, and inventor who found inspiration in some unlikely places.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/a-jarring-revelation

The opening of a canal in 1848 led to the birth of modern financial derivatives, and the early demise of some of the men who traded them

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/death-by-derivatives

In the 1950s, an anonymous terrorist planted a pipe bomb in a New York City public space. Then another. And another.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/ghoulish-acts-dastardly-deeds

Britain’s practice of transporting convicts to American colonies was a fearsome punishment, but not for the chronic criminal James Dalton.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/no-country-for-ye-olde-men

The story of a tragic hotel fire of Rube Goldberg proportions.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/fire-and-dice

As a civilian, the beloved American Civil War general and two-term president failed at every attempt to make money. Except for one.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-reconstruction-of-ulysses-s-grant

A 300-year-old hunt for the unsung hero of Salzburg.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-greatest-baroque-composer-never-known

He made a name for himself organizing the world’s most important economic conference, only to have it tarnished by an outrageous accusation.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/foreign-exchanges

During WWII, 36 American conscientious objectors volunteered as subjects in a brutal science experiment to measure the body's response to starvation.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/starving-for-answers

A remote bay in Alaska is home to an odd and occasionally catastrophic geology. In 1958, a handful of people experienced this firsthand.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/ten-minutes-in-lituya-bay

The 15th-century scholar who upset the Korean aristocracy by creating a native script for the Korean language, and thus wean it off Chinese characters.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-kings-letters

A 1930s effort to reach the Earth's northernmost point via antiquated submarine.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/mobilis-in-mobili

Charles Waterton was a pioneer of conservation. He was also extremely nutty, in ways that suggest he may have over-identified with his animal subjects.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/into-the-bewilderness

The tumultuous true story of the life of a fast food icon.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/colonels-of-truth

The story of the Beale Ciphers; a set of three encrypted notes from the nineteenth century purportedly describing the location of hidden treasure. Only one has been deciphered.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/89-263-201-500-337-480z

On the ancient Japanese Buddhist practice of self-mummification.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/028-the-japanese-art-of-self-preservation

Faxes From The Far Side by Damn Interesting

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/faxes-from-the-far-side

When women in a poorly administered Oregon town hacked an election in order to repair the town's problems.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-petticoat-rebellion-of-1916

A happy-tenth-birthday-to-us retrospective.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-first-ten-years

As night fell over the East German town of Pössneck on the evening of 14 September 1979, most of the town's citizens were busy getting ready for bed. But not Günter Wetzel. The mason was in his...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/up-in-the-air

"I don’t think it belongs here." Such was the assessment of Bob Vinson, the graveyard shift supervisor at Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The "here" Vinson referred to was a ...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-zero-armed-bandit

(This is a podcastification of an older article to observe the 30th anniversary of the events discussed herein). In April 1985, it is rumored that a collection of executives gathered at their cor...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-american-gustation-crisis-of-1985

Under ordinary circumstances, the final evening of a cruise aboard the luxury turbo-electric ocean liner SS Morro Castle was a splendid event. Hundreds of lady and gentlemen passengers would gath...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-derelict

Low-pressure weather systems are a familiar feature of the winter climate in the northern Atlantic. While they often drive wind, rain, and other unpleasantness against Europe’s rocky western ma...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/surface-tension

In 1744, a young geographer living in Spanish-colonial Peru with his wife and children decided the time had come to move the family back to his native France. Jean Godin des Odonais had come to P...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/welcome-to-the-jungle

It was the middle of a cool September night in Munich, Germany. The year was 1939. In an otherwise unoccupied auditorium, a man knelt on hands and knees chiseling a square hole into a large stone...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-clockmaker

In April of 1938, representatives from the USSR approached the Finnish government and expressed a concern that Nazi Germany could attempt to invade Russia, and such an attack might come through p...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/white-death

Staple though it is today, the lowly potato had a hard time reaching its preeminent status in Western cuisine. Perhaps its lengthy purgatory has something to do with the tale that when Sir Walter...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/cry-havoc-and-let-slip-the-spuds-of-war

Near the heart of Scotland lies a large morass known as Dullatur Bog. Water seeps from these moistened acres and coalesces into the headwaters of a river which meanders through the countryside fo...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/absolute-zero-is-0k

Alarming events were in store for Sicily at the beginning of the summer of 1831. On 28 June, small earthquakes rocked the western end of the island, and these continued occurring day after day. O...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/it-came-from-beneath-the-sea

The men from London arrived just in time to see Mary Toft give birth to her fifteenth rabbit. It was the winter of 1726, and Nathaniel St. André and Samuel Molyneux arrived in the market town of...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-supernatural-bunnymother-of-surrey

Sometime in the 1940s an improbable encounter occurred at a mental institution in Maryland. Two women, each of whom was institutionalized for believing she was the Virgin Mary, chanced upon one a...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/three-thrown-over-the-cuckoos-nest

Under normal circumstances, one would expect a wandering throng of students to demonstrate animated displeasure upon encountering a human corpse in the woods; particularly a corpse as fragrant an...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-remains-of-doctor-bass

The story of Camp Century: A "nuclear city" under the Greenland ice sheet that was not entirely what it seemed.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-city-under-ice

While most of the major powers of western Europe spent the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries racing around the world carving out empires for themselves, Japan felt threatened by the influx of foreig...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/010-otokichis-long-trip-home

The story of Roy Sullivan. A different kind of Damn Interesting episode.

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-conductor

On the 11th of July 1897, the world breathlessly awaited word from the small Norwegian island of Danskøya in the Arctic Sea. Three gallant Swedish scientists stationed there were about to embark...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/andree-and-the-aeronauts

The naked mole rat, Heterocephalus glaber, is fleshy, furless, buck-toothed and brazenly ugly. Yet what these small East African rodents lack in terms of good looks, they make up with an impressi...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-mole-rat-prophecies

There is a small town in Pennsylvania called Ashland where Route 61's northbound traffic is temporarily branched onto a short detour. Exactly what the detour is circumventing is not immediately c...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-smoldering-ruins-of-centralia

The meeting had not gone well, the man gloomily reflected as he was driven out of East Berlin. His head was still heavy after a few too many snifters of cognac. The American's ambitious scheme to...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-spy-who-loved-nothing

It was the summer of 1936 when Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the atom-smashing cyclotron, received a visit from Emilio Segrè, a scientific colleague from Italy. Segrè explained that he had c...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-isle-of-doctor-seaborg

A simple telegram plunged America into the Great War. The Zimmermann telegram, intercepted by American intelligence in April 1917, revealed Germany’s efforts to encourage Mexico to invade the U...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-arizona-dragonslayer

It’s a testament to the strength and versatility of the human brain that anyone with at least half of one tends to assume that their senses give them direct access to objective reality. The tru...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/the-science-of-mental-fitness

On 12 November 1971, in the presidential palace in the Republic of Chile, President Salvador Allende and a British theorist named Stafford Beer engaged in a highly improbable conversation. Beer w...

https://soundcloud.com/damn-interesting/nineteen-seventy-three