Throughline

Edward Said brought the question of Palestine into the American mainstream. He taught at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, and today, more than two decades after his death, pro-Palestine studen...

What's the role of government in society? What do we mean when we talk about individual responsibility? What makes us free? 'Neoliberalism' might feel like a squishy term that's hard to define and und...

Captain America: an all-American superhero. Clad in red, white, and blue, he carries only a shield. And he fights only when he must. When it's right. But what happens when what's right isn't so clear...

The Iran-Iraq war, 9/11, and the story of Iranian Revolutionary Guard general Qassem Soleimani, from his rise to power, to his assassination, by the U.S., to the power his legacy wields now. This epi...

Military confrontations, early-morning attacks, and digital warfare: the story of Iran and the U.S. from the 1979 Iranian revolution to the fraught moment we're in today. This episode originally ran...

The Supreme Court is issuing its final decisions of the term this month. But it's been extraordinarily active since January, in part because the Trump administration has submitted over a dozen emergen...

The U.S. and Iran have had a tense relationship for decades — but when did that begin? This week, we feature our very first episode about an event from August 1953 — when the CIA helped to overthrow I...

Abortion wasn't always controversial. In fact, in colonial America it would have been considered a fairly common practice: a private decision made by women, and aided mostly by midwives. But in the mi...

Whose job is it to educate Americans? Congress created the first Department of Education just after the Civil War as a way to help reunify a broken country. A year later, it was basically shut down. B...

From Social Security and the minimum wage to exit signs and fire escapes, Frances Perkins transformed how people in the U.S. lived and worked. Today on the show: how a middle class do-gooder became on...