pplpod

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The hippopotamus of board games and cartoons is chubby, sleepy, and funny. The real animal is a one and a half ton fighter with an evolutionary secret. Its Greek name means river horse, and until 1909 naturalists grouped it with pigs because of its molar teeth. Molecular evidence overturned both ideas: the hippo's closest living relatives are whales, dolphins, and porpoises, with a shared semi-aquatic ancestor that split off roughly 60 million years ago. Hippos are the last survivors of a once diverse family called anthracotheres.

This episode walks through the body and habits of that survivor. Dense bones let it sink and trot along the riverbed instead of swimming. Its jaws open 100 to 110 degrees, and its lower canines, which never stop growing, can reach 50 centimeters and are used only for combat. By day hippos crowd together in pods of up to a hundred. At dusk they leave the water and walk three to five kilometers alone to eat about 40 kilograms of grass. The account closes with their long, violent history with humans and their vulnerable status today.

• The so-called blood sweat is a secretion containing two acidic pigments, hipposudoric acid and norhipposudoric acid, that work as both sunscreen and antibacterial agent.
• Hippos sleep underwater and surface to breathe every few minutes by reflex, without waking.
• Males mark territory by muck spreading, spinning the tail to spray dung. In the dry season the sheer volume can strip oxygen from the water and cause fish kills.
• In Virunga National Park, poaching for meat and ivory cut the population from around 29,000 in the 1970s to just 800 or 900 by 2005.
• Hippos that Pablo Escobar imported for a private zoo in Colombia escaped after his death in 1993 and have multiplied into an invasive population of more than a hundred.

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The phrase public enemy calls up pinstripe suits, tommy guns, and Al Capone, but it began as a political weapon in ancient Rome. In AD 68 the Senate declared Emperor Nero a hostis publicus, cutting him off from the protection of the law so that anyone could kill him without penalty. The term surfaced again in the United Kingdom around 1642 and turned lethal in the French Revolution, when Maximilien Robespierre argued in 1793 that the government owed enemies of the people nothing except death.

This episode follows the label across the Atlantic to Chicago in April 1930, where Frank J. Loesch of the Chicago Crime Commission faced gangsters everyone knew were guilty but no court could convict. His answer was publicity: a short list of public enemies with Al Capone at the top, mailed to police, sheriffs, and newspaper editors. J. Edgar Hoover then took the idea national, reserving it for charged fugitives and turning Public Enemy Number One into a running drama that laid the ground for the Ten Most Wanted list in 1950.

• The law of 22 Prairial in 1794 stripped defendants of witnesses and counsel and made spreading false news to divide or trouble the people a capital offense.
• Loesch cut a list of about a hundred known hoodlums down to 28 names, a cast small enough to fit on one newspaper page, and put Capone's brother right behind him.
• Hoover reversed Loesch's approach: where Chicago named men whose crimes could not be proved, the FBI named only fugitives who had already been charged.
• From June 1934 to May 1936 the number one title passed in sequence from John Dillinger to Pretty Boy Floyd to Baby Face Nelson to Alvin Karpis.
• During the Depression many people resented the banks, so Hoover used the label to recast robbers such as Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, and Ma Barker as villains instead of folk heroes.

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Say Machine Gun Kelly and some people see a tattooed musician on a red carpet while others see a Prohibition era gangster with a fedora and a tommy gun. This episode is the biography of a name instead of a person. The original Machine Gun Kelly was an American gangster who lived from 1900 to 1954, and for his whole adult life the name meant real danger and federal manhunts. Then, only four years after his death, a 1958 Hollywood film carried his name onto theater marquees and turned a threat into entertainment.

Once the man was gone and the movie had made him a character, the name was free to travel. Radio disc jockeys who grew up on that mythology borrowed it to promise rapid fire patter. Basketball adopted it as shorthand for relentless scoring, from an American player born in 1961 to a Filipino-American player born in 1982. Musicians then pulled it in opposite directions, from folk storytelling to punk defiance to modern crossover stardom, until a single phrase had shed nearly all of its history.

• The four year gap between the gangster's death in 1954 and the 1958 film is the hinge of the story: the physical threat was gone, so the name could be sold as a thrill.
• Radio personalities M.G. Kelly, born in 1952, and Shotgun Tom Kelly, born in 1949, used weapon names as a metaphor for fast talking energy on air.
• Harry Kelly and Kelly Williams both carried the Machine Gun Kelly nickname on the basketball court, where it described a style of shooting and nothing else.
• James Taylor recorded a song called Machine Gun Kelly on Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, and the punk band Angelic Upstarts cut their own track on Last Tango in Moscow.
• The American actor and musician born in 1990 built his early career on the full name, then shortened it to MGK, reducing a century of history to three letters.

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In 2007 the FBI began flashing fugitives' faces on digital billboards across American cities, yet it did not print color photographs on its paper wanted posters until 2009. That odd timeline opens this history of the wanted poster, an object tied in the imagination to dusty frontier towns but still in use today. At its core the poster has three parts: an image, a description of the alleged crime, and a cash reward. In the 1800s it went up in post offices and public squares, where the whole town gathered and gossip did the rest.

The episode separates the working tool from the Hollywood version. The famous blocky lettering was a matter of cost, since large letters were carved from wood instead of cast in heavy metal. The phrase dead or alive rarely came from sheriffs or marshals, who needed suspects alive for trial. It was more often the work of railroads, banks, and cattle barons protecting their money. From there the story follows the poster into wartime propaganda, modern politics, fingerprint identification, and the electronic networks that made paper a relic.

• The posters issued for John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices after Lincoln's assassination show the wood type style at full force.
• Before photography, a bounty hunter often had to bring back the body to prove he had the right man, which made the corpse the receipt.
• On September 4, 1939, the Daily Mirror branded Adolf Hitler a reckless criminal under the words wanted, dead or alive.
• In 2001 President George W. Bush recalled an old poster out west that said wanted, dead or alive when speaking of Osama bin Laden, and the New York Post ran with it.
• The FBI's billboard program started in 23 cities. By 2014 it reached more than 5,200 billboards and was credited with solving at least 53 cases.

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Hoa Lo means fiery furnace, or simply stove, a name inherited from a Hanoi street where vendors once sold wood and coal stoves. Between 1896 and 1901 the French colonial government built a high security prison there, the Maison Centrale, to hold Vietnamese dissidents. Designed for about 460 inmates, it held more than 1,400 by the 1930s and over 2,000 by 1954. Set in the middle of a crowded city, it leaked letters and contraband over its walls and gathered future Viet Minh leaders in the same rooms, turning a tool of control into a school for revolution.

This episode follows the same ground through its second life as the Hanoi Hilton. The first American aviator, Everett Alvarez Jr., arrived in August 1964, and prisoners later named a new section Little Vegas after casinos near Nellis Air Force Base. American memoirs and Senate reports describe solitary confinement, beatings, ropes, and irons, while North Vietnam insisted it followed the Geneva Convention and filmed a documentary called Pilots in Pajamas. The account ends with the demolition of most of the prison in the 1990s and the museum that remains.

• Bob Shumaker put the nickname on record by carving Welcome to the Hanoi Hilton on the handle of a wooden bucket to greet a newly captured pilot.
• Isolated prisoners talked through a tap code built on a five by five alphabet grid, introduced by Air Force pilot Carlyle Harris.
• Navy seaman Doug Hegdahl played the fool for his captors and memorized the names and details of 256 fellow prisoners to the tune of Old MacDonald Had a Farm.
• The failed Son Tay rescue raid of late 1970 panicked Hanoi into moving hundreds of prisoners into Hoa Lo, creating Camp Unity and ending their isolation.
• Most of the complex was demolished between 1993 and 1994 for Hanoi Towers, a 14 story office block and 27 story apartment building, and several original cells were later rebuilt in a Massachusetts museum.

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In a Chinese farming village in 1248, the investigator Song Ci solved a sickle murder without a single interrogation. He had every villager lay a sickle in the sun and waited until flies gathered on the one blade that still carried traces of blood. That scene opens this history of forensic science, the long effort to replace forced confessions and faulty memory with a witness that cannot lie. The story moves through rice powder ordeals that exploited a dry mouth, a torn newspaper wad that convicted John Toms in 1784, and the arsenic test James Marsh published in 1836.

From there the episode tracks the race to identify people: Alphonse Bertillon's body measurements, the rise of fingerprinting through William Herschel, Henry Faulds, and Francis Galton, Edmond Locard's rule that every contact leaves a trace, and Alec Jeffreys's discovery of DNA profiling in 1984. It also faces the failures. Bullet lead analysis and bite mark comparison fell apart under scrutiny, crime labs have fabricated evidence, and genealogy databases now raise hard questions about privacy.

• Marsh built his test after a jury acquitted an accused poisoner in 1832 because the yellow precipitate proving arsenic had faded before it reached the courtroom.
• In Argentina in 1892, a bloody thumbprint on a door frame identified Francisca Rojas as the killer of her two sons after she had blamed a neighbor.
• Police surgeon Thomas Bond produced the first recorded offender profile while reviewing the Jack the Ripper autopsies.
• The first criminal use of DNA cleared Richard Buckland, who had confessed. A sweep of more than 4,000 local men then led to Colin Pitchfork.
• The FBI dropped comparative bullet lead analysis in 2005, and in 2009 the Supreme Court ruled in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts that lab analysts must testify and face cross-examination.

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Flora MacDonald is remembered in statues and song as the romantic Jacobite heroine who saved Bonnie Prince Charlie. The record tells a different story. Born in 1722 on South Uist to a Protestant family of minor gentry, she was raised in a household loyal to the government in London. Her stepfather, Hugh MacDonald, commanded a pro-government militia. When a relative asked her in 1746 to smuggle the fugitive prince off Benbecula after Culloden, she hesitated, then agreed for a practical reason: if he were caught on her clan's land, her family would pay for it.

This episode follows the whole of her life, not just the boat to Skye. Arrested for treason and taken to London, she charmed high society, collected more than 1,500 pounds, and went free under the Act of Indemnity in 1747. Rising rents and failed harvests later drove her and her husband Allan to North Carolina in 1774, where they sided with the Crown in the American Revolution and lost everything. She returned to Scotland in 1780, lived out her days on a tenant farm, and died in 1790 at 68, before Victorian writers remade her as a legend.

• The travel permits used for the escape came from her own stepfather, the militia commander hunting the prince, who appears to have known exactly what was happening.
• The prince was disguised as an Irish spinning maid named Betty Burke and managed his skirts so badly that a steward on Skye told him to take the dress off.
• Asked by Frederick, Prince of Wales, why she had helped a rebel, Flora said it was Christian charity and that she would have done the same for him.
• Allan raised a Loyalist force of about a thousand men that was crushed at Moores Creek Bridge in 1776. He was taken prisoner, and Flora was evicted from their plantation.
• Sailing home on a privateer in 1779, she broke her arm during an attack by a French ship. In 1878 her granddaughter published a fabricated autobiography that fed the myth.

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On an Indo-Pacific beach at low tide, a pitted gray rock near the water's edge can turn out to be a stonefish, the most venomous fish in the world. Members of the genus Synanceia are relatives of scorpionfish and lionfish that have traded flash for invisibility. Their cratered heads and mottled skin copy dead coral, a sticky secretion traps algae and sediment on their bodies, and they can survive out of water for up to 24 hours as long as they stay damp. That puts them on exposed sand where bare feet land.

This episode explains the machinery behind the sting and the science behind surviving it. The fish hunts by ambush and uses venom only for defense, delivered through 13 rigid dorsal spines whose glands are squeezed by the weight of whatever presses down. The toxin, verrucotoxin, jams calcium channels open, flooding nerves with pain signals and throwing the heart out of rhythm. Yet because it is a protein, heat unfolds it, which is why hot water is first aid and why the same animal is served as a prized dish in southern Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and parts of China.

• Each dorsal spine works like a pressure activated syringe: the harder a victim steps, the deeper it goes and the more venom is forced into the wound.
• Beyond its spines, the stonefish carries lachrymal sabers, bony cheek blades it can flick outward to deter anything trying to swallow it head first.
• Deaths are rare but real, including one on Thursday Island, Australia, in 1915 and one in Okinawa, Japan, in 2010. Doctors dose the antivenom by counting puncture wounds.
• Soaking the limb in water at about 45 degrees Celsius denatures the toxin, much as heat sets an egg white, though severe stings still need medical care.
• Unlike pufferfish, stonefish flesh is not toxic, so chefs who cleanly remove the dorsal apparatus can serve it in ginger soup or even raw as sashimi.

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Thomas Coleman Younger was born in 1844 in Jackson County, Missouri, the seventh of 14 children of a prosperous farmer. His father, Henry, supported the Union and was shot dead anyway by a Union soldier from Kansas. Grief turned Cole toward William Clarke Quantrill's pro-Confederate bushwhackers, and by August 1863 he was riding in the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, where guerrillas burned the town and killed roughly 200 citizens. This episode follows how a border war with no rules shaped a particular kind of violent man.

Peace offered no way back. Missouri's new constitution barred former Confederate sympathizers from voting, serving on juries, or holding office, and a core of ex-guerrillas turned to robbing banks. By 1868 Cole was named in a robbery at Russellville, Kentucky, and the James-Younger gang took shape around him, his brothers Jim, John, and Bob, and Frank and Jesse James. The story runs through train wrecking, Pinkerton blood feuds, the ruinous Northfield raid of 1876, and long quiet years in Stillwater prison before a Wild West show and a public conversion.

• In 1873 the gang derailed a Rock Island Railroad locomotive at Adair, Iowa, to loot the express car, which brought the Pinkerton National Detective Agency after them.
• A March 1874 shootout on a Missouri road killed Pinkerton agent Louis Lull and Cole's brother John.
• At Northfield, Minnesota, in September 1876, townspeople grabbed rifles from hardware stores and shot the gang to pieces. Clell Miller and William Chadwell died in the street and the robbers left with nothing.
• Sentenced to life at Stillwater, Cole became the prison librarian and worked as a printer's devil on the Prison Mirror, a newspaper the Younger brothers helped fund.
• Paroled in July 1901, he toured with Frank James in a Wild West company in 1903, was baptized in Lee's Summit, and died there in March 1916 at age 72.

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About a mile off Marseille sits a three hectare limestone rock crowned by the Château d'If. King Francis I visited around 1516 and ordered a fortress to shield the port, and between 1524 and 1531 builders raised a square, three story stronghold with three cylindrical towers. It looked fearsome enough that Charles V dropped his plans to attack Marseille, yet it never saw battle. When the military engineer Vauban inspected it in 1701, he judged it very badly built, with mortar slapped over natural rock.

A useless fort on an isolated island found other work. Napoleon parked the embalmed body of General Jean-Baptiste Kléber there so no tomb could rally Republican opposition, and the state then turned the rock into a prison ringed by deadly currents. This episode traces that grim history, including more than 3,500 Huguenots held there, and shows how Alexandre Dumas buried it all in 1844 with The Count of Monte Cristo. Roughly 100,000 visitors a year now come to see the cell of Edmond Dantès, a man who never existed.

• Kléber was assassinated in Cairo in 1800, and his coffin sat on the island for 18 years because Napoleon feared a martyr's grave on the mainland.
• Wealthy inmates such as Mirabeau could rent upper cells called pistoles, with windows and fireplaces, while the poor were chained by the dozen in windowless dungeons cut into the rock.
• No real prisoner is known to have escaped the island and survived. After it opened to the public in 1890, operators hacked a hole between two cells and labeled it the cell of Dantès.
• Mark Twain toured the still working prison in July 1867 and was shown the supposed cell of the Man in the Iron Mask, who was never held there.
• Gaston Crémieux, a leader of the Paris Commune, was shot against the walls in 1871, and the 2002 film of the novel was shot in Malta instead of on the real island.