Stuff You Should Know

Think tanks? More like stink tanks! We're kidding. Think tanks do valuable work, when they operate in a non-partisan way of course. Learn all about the history of these heady institutions in this classic episode.

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If you grew up in the 70s and 80s in America, you probably have the image of your tattered Guinness Book of Records. The book was ubiquitous then, but is still thriving today in despite the internet. 

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Mudlarking is a uniquely British hobby, though you can dig through river mud anywhere there's a river. But the Thames has the good stuff. 

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Unit 731 was a secret group within the Japanese Army in WWII that committed unspeakable atrocities against humans in the name of scientific research. Listen with caution. 

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No one - no one - likes to vomit, but there are some people who would prefer to die rather than vomit, people who spend their days worrying they will vomit at any moment and become so obsessed they curtail their lives to prevent it from happening. Learn all about it with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode.

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In the exciting conclusion of our two-part episode on Hoover, we come in at the Cold War and end on a strange note.

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By definition hobos are people who travel from town to town taking odd jobs as they go. But some towns are friendlier than others, and hobos developed a system of symbols they left one another to know what to expect from a town.

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It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that J. Edgar Hoover was perhaps the most powerful American of the 20th century. By the time he established the FBI as America’s police force, presidents were afraid of him. Just exactly how did he get to be so puissant?

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On Halloween 1938 young radio star Orson Welles scared the pants off of America with a fictional news bulletin claiming Martians had landed and were destroying the country. People across the nation ran wild with panic in the streets – or did they? Listen to this classic episode to find out.

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The idea that we aren’t the first advanced civilization to live on Earth sounds like a fringe theory, but it raises a good question: How can we be so sure that a civilization didn’t arise and die on Earth so long ago that any trace of it has been erased?

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