Throughline

What's better than holiday hot chocolate? If just thinking about it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, well – that’s by design. Chocolate's big history sweeps across the globe, and today we’re going o...

On today's show, a Thanksgiving story you might never have heard -- not about Pilgrims or Native people, but instead about a woman who, as civil war loomed, pushed for a shared national holiday she th...

Rund Abdelfatah and Cristina Kim try to unravel the mystery of a Soviet scientist who was helping to spread the word about nuclear winter theory—until he disappeared.  This is a peek at the kind of e...

How quickly can a government fall? Chile was once one of Latin America's oldest democracies, but that all changed in a matter of hours after a military coup on September 11, 1973. Some supported the c...

On the surface, the story of Sudan’s war is about two generals vying for power. But it’s also about a vast web of international interests involving the U.S., China, Russia, and the UAE.  Today on the ...

Late last month, President Trump announced that the United States would be restarting nuclear weapons tests after a break of over 30 years. We’ve since learned that they won’t be the explosive kind of...

The word "genocide" can seem like it’s everywhere right now: So it can be easy to forget that, fundamentally, it's a legal term that dates to World War II — and wasn’t used in court for half a century...

Stuck in traffic? Glued to your desk chair? Folding yet another pile of your kids’ laundry? We GOT you!! Take a break, turn up the volume, and shake it out with this special episode of Throughline, a ...

What powers the global internet? The answer might surprise you: not satellites, but hundreds of thin cables that run along the ocean floor. They’re an absolutely essential technology that’s also incre...

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a plan to end fighting in Gaza, just over two years after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023 and Israel’s subsequent bombardment and invasion of Gaza. ...