Long Shadow

The internet as we know it today is a harrowing landscape. But in its quirky infancy, the web changed everything about how we lived, shared, shopped, and communicated. Then a computer bug threatened to shut it all down forever.

When was the last time you felt good about the internet? Today’s online landscape is a harrowing one. People screaming at each other on social media. Violent videos going viral. Cyberbullying, racism, misogyny. Back in the day, the web gave power to the people, and going online could actually be fun.

In LONG SHADOW: BREAKING THE INTERNET, Pulitzer-finalist historian, author, and journalist Garrett Graff retraces 30 years of web history — a tangle of GIFs, blogs, apps, and hashtags — to answer the bewildering question many ask when they go online today: “How did we get here?”

It’s the story of mankind’s greatest invention, but it's also about the biggest crisis facing society today: how the web's unlimited feed of data morphed into a firehose of hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and lies that divided Americans over things we once agreed on, like science, diversity, and even democracy itself. 

LONG SHADOW: BREAKING THE INTERNET is produced by Long Lead and is distributed by PRX.

Raised on active shooter and lockdown drills, Gen Z has endured an onslaught of violence — and emerged inspiring a wave of activism, a powerful gun safety movement, and hope.

Easy to handle and easy to conceal, handguns went boom in the 2000s, the same moment when many Americans — falsely and tragically — began to equate guns with safety.

After a devastating, now largely forgotten, mass-shooting prompted lawmakers to take aim at assault weapons in the 1990s, their ban backfired — and caused gun sales to explode.

In the 1980s, a pair of intimidating NRA leaders recast the organization in their own imposing images as the group went on an all-out offensive against gun regulations.

The Second Amendment may have begun as a Constitutional afterthought, but a late 20th-century ideological shift caused some to view it as a sacred right in the name of self defense.

Mass shootings have plagued the U.S. for generations. But in 1999, when shots rang out in a suburban Denver school, it was different. What changed? Everything.

This season host Garrett Graff, in collaboration with The Trace, recounts how a very specific, carefully manufactured fear has driven explosive demand for guns across the U.S. It’s the history of how firearms went from being an ordinary part of rural American life to a menacing element in modern society — and the epidemic of gun violence that’s come with it. How did we get here — how did America get so divided over guns — and can we we find a way forward? Find out, this season on LONG SHADOW.

LONG SHADOW: IN GUNS WE TRUST is produced by Long Lead and Campside Media in collaboration with The Trace, and is distributed by PRX.

Emboldened by COVID lockdown protests and fighting Black Lives Matter demonstrators, far-right extremists and white power groups prepare to overthrow the government on Jan. 6… or a later date.