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Sidequests
Sidequests episodes
- The Boston Molasses FloodOn January 15, 1919, a storage tank in Boston's North End burst open and sent more than 2 million gallons of molasses roaring through the streets at 35 miles per hour. Buildings collapsed. People were buried alive. 21 died. It sounds absurd — and it was also completely preventable. The tank had been leaking for years, the warnings were ignored, and the company painted it brown to hide the evidence. This is the Boston Molasses Disaster: one of the strangest and most consequential industrial accidents in American history.
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10 min - The Dancing Plague of 1518In July 1518, a woman walked into the streets of Strasbourg and started dancing. She didn't stop for days. Within a month, hundreds had joined her — collapsing from exhaustion, some reportedly dying — in one of history's most baffling and unsettling outbreaks. The city's response made it worse. The medical theories still don't fully explain it. And the way it ended is somehow the strangest part of all. This is the Dancing Plague of 1518 — and no one has ever completely solved it.
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7 min - The Dancing Plague of 1518In July 1518, a woman walked into the streets of Strasbourg and started dancing. She didn't stop for days. Within a month, hundreds had joined her — collapsing from exhaustion, some reportedly dying — in one of history's most baffling and unsettling outbreaks. The city's response made it worse. The medical theories still don't fully explain it. And the way it ended is somehow the strangest part of all. This is the Dancing Plague of 1518 — and no one has ever completely solved it.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
7 min - The Sinking of the RMS Titanic: Part Two - Building the Titanic
January 1909: RMS Republic collided with another ship in dense fog. A forty-foot gash tore open her hull. Fifteen hundred people were aboard. But the ship stayed afloat for thirty-nine hours. Wireless brought rescue. Passengers were transferred safely. Only six people died.
The newspapers called it the "Miracle of Wireless."
White Star Line learned a lesson: modern ships don't just sink. Watertight compartments keep them afloat. Wireless brings help. You don't need lifeboats for everyone—just enough to ferry passengers to rescue ships.
It made perfect sense. It was based on real experience.
And it would kill fifteen hundred people.
This is Episode 2 of a ten-part series exploring the Titanic disaster from conception to legacy—not just what happened, but why it happened, and what it reveals about hubris, inequality, and how disasters are built one reasonable decision at a time.
Paid subscribers get the full 70-minute episode featuring:
Thomas Andrews and his obsessive notebook—the designer who knew every rivet
The engineering revolution: 46,000 horsepower, 600 tons of coal per day, 176 firemen in 100-degree heat
Life in first, second, and third class—luxury, comfort, and adequate
The three sister ships and their vastly different fates
What really could have been done differently, and why it wasn't
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16 min - The Most Heavily Armed Tree Trimming in HistoryIn August 1976, two American officers were killed in the Korean DMZ — beaten to death with axes during a routine tree-trimming operation. Three days later, the U.S. military came back to finish the job. This time, they brought B-52 bombers, fighter jets, helicopter gunships, an aircraft carrier group, and a special forces unit trained in hand-to-hand combat. The mission: cut down one poplar tree. The result: one of the most perfectly calibrated shows of force in Cold War history. This is Operation Paul Bunyan — and the chainsaw was the least dangerous weapon on site.
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9 min - The Time Australia Declared War on Birds (And Lost)In 1932, the Australian military went to war. Not against a rival nation. Not against armed insurgents. Against emus — 20,000 of them — cutting through struggling farmland on their seasonal migration. The government's solution: two soldiers, two Lewis machine guns, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. The result: one of the most embarrassing military defeats in recorded history. This is the Great Emu War — and the birds won.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
7 min - The Time Australia Declared War on Birds (And Lost)In 1932, the Australian military went to war. Not against a rival nation. Not against armed insurgents. Against emus — 20,000 of them — cutting through struggling farmland on their seasonal migration. The government's solution: two soldiers, two Lewis machine guns, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. The result: one of the most embarrassing military defeats in recorded history. This is the Great Emu War — and the birds won.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
7 min - The Sinking of the RMS Titanic: Part One - The Gilded Age
In 1898, author Morgan Robertson published a novel about an "unsinkable" ocean liner that struck an iceberg and sank with massive loss of life. He called it the Titan. Fourteen years later, the Titanic—nearly identical in size and fate—met the same end. The parallels are eerie, but they reveal something deeper: this disaster wasn't just possible, it was practically inevitable.
This is the first episode of a ten-part series exploring the Titanic disaster from conception to legacy—not just what happened, but why it happened, and what it tells us about hubris, inequality, and the illusions we tell ourselves about progress and safety.
In this episode:
The dinner party that changed history - Summer 1907: Two men sketch three ships on a napkin that would become the largest moving objects ever created by humans
The age of miracles (1880-1910) - How electric light, telephones, wireless, automobiles, and flight transformed the world in a single generation and created absolute faith in unlimited progress
The "unsinkable" ship - Why everyone believed it, even though White Star never advertised it that way
The world that believed - How Social Darwinism, technological optimism, and Edwardian confidence created a civilization convinced it had conquered nature
The warning nobody heeded - Jack Thayer's haunting observation: "The world of today awoke April 15th, 1912"
UPGRADE TO PREMIUM for the full 30-minute episode featuring:
The complicated story of J. Bruce Ismay and the sale of White Star Line to J.P. Morgan
The real economics of ocean liners: why the profit came from immigrants, not millionaires
The coal strikes, suffragettes, and Irish crisis of spring 1912
Why THIS disaster mattered more than any other maritime tragedy
Extended analysis of the worldview that made catastrophe inevitable
Premium episodes available exclusively at newssidequest.com
Next episode: Building the Titanic - The workers who died constructing her, the rivets that failed, and the design flaw no one saw until it was too late.
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12 min - Steel from the Deep
In June 1919, a German rear admiral gave a secret order and within hours, 52 warships slipped beneath the surface of a Scottish harbor. The British were furious. Nine German sailors were shot. And nobody realized, yet, that those sunken ships would eventually become one of the most valuable scientific resources of the 20th century.
This episode is about low-background steel: why it matters, where it comes from, and how a fleet deliberately scuttled in an act of protest ended up helping us build spacecraft, study dark matter, and treat cancer. It’s also, if you have submechanophobia... the fear of man-made objects underwater… well, that’s why I do audio content. You won’t have to see it.
This Friday: Episode 1 of Sidequests: Titanic.
Yes, ships at the bottom of the ocean two episodes in a row. I’m not apologizing.
The Titanic series isn’t just about the sinking — it’s about the age that made the Titanic possible, and what the world looked like when an entire civilization believed technology had finally outrun tragedy. Ten episodes. One of the most famous disasters in history, told from angles you probably haven’t heard before.
Free subscribers get a nice 15 minute story. Paid subscribers get the complete 60-minute experience — the deeper dives, the additional threads, the full story.
Upgrade to a paid subscription and get 20% off!
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8 min - Everything You Need To Know About the Avignon Papacy
Sidequests is a podcast about the history you didn’t know you needed... and sometimes, the history that explains the week you just had.
We go down a rabbit hole. Sometimes it’s obscure. Sometimes it’s weird. Sometimes it’s both, and somewhere in the middle of it you realize the fourteenth century is suddenly more relevant than it has any right to be.
In 1309, the entire papal court packed up and moved to France. Not because the pope wanted to. Not exactly. It’s a story about a king who wasn’t afraid of excommunication, a conclave that lasted eleven months, a wall that collapsed at the worst possible moment, and a mystic from Siena who eventually got tired of writing polite letters.
The Avignon Papacy lasted sixty-seven years, produced seven popes, all French, and ended with a schism that cracked open questions the Church wouldn’t fully answer for another century. You may have seen a reference to it floating around in the news last week.
Coming this Friday: The first episode of Sidequests: Titanic — a ten-part extended series on the sinking of the RMS Titanic and the age of technological optimism it brought crashing down with it.
Free subscribers get the first episode in full. Paid subscribers get the complete 60-minute experience, with deeper dives into the people, the engineering, and the decisions that made April 14, 1912 inevitable long before the iceberg showed up.
Upgrade to a paid subscription and get 20% off!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
10 min
About Sidequests
From the publisher's feed
History, headlines, and the experts who help make sense of both