Stuff You Should Know

Back when cars were a brand new thing, before people even knew they'd stick around, two men and a dog drove from San Francisco to New York. This classic episode has their story.

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Eleanor Roosevelt was something else. We can't get into it here, but just wait until you listen to this episode.

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Now that it’s been 250 years since America split from England, we figure enough time has passed that we can finally learn the difference between the UK, Great Britain, and  the British Isles.

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During the Cold War all eyes were on the Space Race between the US and USSR. But there was another, overlooked race too and it went in the opposite direction. 

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In this classic episode, Chuck and Josh sit and converse on the simple, elegant chopstick.

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When a 9.2 quake shoook Alaska in 1964 it was the 2nd largest earthquake ever recorded. This is that story.

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Those are three words you probably never thought you’d see together. And the true story is just as interesting as it sounds.

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When a crush of football fans killed 97 people in England in 1989, police and officials engaged in a massive cover-up to blame it on drunken fans. Today we tell that story.

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Until 2007, the largest single corporate bankruptcy was Enron, a $67 billion energy trading company. Its decline was breathtaking, and while it’s a fascinating story of corporate malfeasance and greed, it’s also about the lives of ruined workers. Learn all about it in this classic episode.

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The sort of commune of Freetown Christiania in Denmark may not be what it used to be, but it's still true to many of its original values. Learn all about this unique neighborhood today.

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Fear is different than being scared, most notably because fear is generally a negative thing and being scared can cause an enjoyable thrill. We'll get into the difference in today's episode.

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Even though curses aren’t real – and we go to great pains to make that clear – they are pretty interesting, especially ones you haven’t heard of before. So we dug deep and found some of the curses that don’t always hog the spotlight for this fun episode.

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It’s a pretty safe assumption that people have been born with birthmarks since humanity began, and between then and now we’ve come up with some wacky, even dangerous, explanations for them – even a few that survive still today. Learn all about them in this classic episode.

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• Since the age of Descartes, science has put all of its eggs in the basket of determinism, the idea that with accurate enough measurements any aspect of the universe could be predicted. But the universe, it turns out, is not so tidy.

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It's a confusing part of climate change when it seems winter is as cold as ever, but as global temperatures creep ever so slightly higher, a cascade of catastrophic events will almost surely follow. The ball is in humanity's court.

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