Throughline

In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order invoking a centuries-old law: the Alien Enemies Act. The Act allows a president to detain or deport citizens of foreign adversaries to the Unit...

Climate disaster, political unrest, random violence: Western society can often feel like what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls "a thin layer of ice on top of an ocean of chaos and darkness." But is t...

Want to get rich quick? You're not alone. Right now, Americans spend over $100 billion, yes billion, every year on lottery tickets. Today on the show, in collaboration with Scratch and Win from WGBH, ...

The Fifth Amendment. You have the right to remain silent when you're being questioned in police custody, thanks to the Fifth's protection against self-incrimination. But most people end up talking to ...

Big Bird, politics, and the ABCs: how a television show made to represent New York City neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bronx became beloved by families around a divided country. This episode origin...

Dinosaurs, Carl Sagan, and nuclear war. There was a moment in the not-so-distant past when we learned what drove the dinosaurs extinct — and that discovery, made during the Cold War, may have helped s...

The 25th amendment. A few years before JFK was shot, an idealistic young lawyer set out on a mission to convince people something essential was missing from the Constitution: clear instructions for wh...

Millions of Americans depend on their jobs for health insurance. But that's not the case in many other wealthy countries. How did the U.S. end up with a system that's so expensive, yet leaves so many ...

What can and can't the president do — and how do we know? The framers of the U.S. Constitution left the powers of the executive branch powers deliberately vague, and in doing so opened the door for ev...

The alleged link between vaccines and autism was first published in 1998, in a since-retracted study in medical journal The Lancet. The claim has been repeatedly disproven: there is no evidence that v...