The fantasy writer Elsa Sjunneson has been haunted by Helen Keller for nearly her entire life. Elsa is Deafblind, and growing up, she couldn’t escape the constant comparisons. Then, a year ago, an online conspiracy theory claiming that Keller was a fraud exploded on TikTok, and suddenly, Sjunneson found herself drawing her sword and jumping to Keller’s defense, setting off a chain of events that would bring her closer to the disability icon than she’d ever dreamed she would be. For more than a year, Sjunneson, Lulu Miller, and the Radiolab team dug through primary sources, talked with experts, even visited Keller’s birthplace, Ivy Green, and discovered that the real story of Helen Keller is far more complicated, mysterious, and confounding than the simple myth of a young deaf-blind girl rescued by her teacher.
This story originally ran on Radiolab.
Further reading: “The Three Things Helen Keller Wished She Could See,” “Helen Keller’s Depression-Era Business Advice: ‘Put Your Husband in the Kitchen’”
A transcript of this episode is available in text and braille-ready format. An ASL translation of the episode can be viewed here.

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The Helen Keller Exorcism

Each week, we tell the story of what happens when individual people confront deeply held American ideals in their own lives. We're interested in the cultural and political contradictions that reveal who we are.

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Host Julia Longoria is back with a new season of More Perfect, from WNYC Studios.
We’re taught the Supreme Court was designed to be above the fray of politics. But at a time when partisanship seeps into every pore of American life, are the nine justices living up to that promise? More Perfect is a guide to the current moment on the Court. The show brings the highest court of the land down to earth, telling the human dramas at the Court that shape so many aspects of American life — from our religious freedom to our artistic expression, from our reproductive choices to our voice in democracy.
In the season trailer, Julia returns to the place where she first fell in love with SCOTUS: high school.
Subscribe to the podcast here.
Supreme Court archival audio comes from Oyez®, a free law project by Justia and the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School.
Support for More Perfect is provided in part by The Smart Family Fund.
Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook @moreperfectpodcast, and Twitter @moreperfect.

The Experiment Introduces More Perfect

The Experiment is coming to an end. For our final episode, we contemplate our strange, sometimes beautiful, often frustrating country. We go back to some of the people we met and fell in love with while making the show, and ask them how their version of the American experiment is going.
A transcript of this episode is available. 

Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at theexperiment@theatlantic.com.
This episode was produced by Alyssa Edes, Gabrielle Berbey, Julia Longoria, and Tracie Hunt, with editing by Michael May and Emily Botein. Fact-check by Sam Fentress. Sound design by David Herman. Transcription by Caleb Codding.
Music by Water Feature (“Richard III (Duke of Gloucester)”), Naran Ratan (“Forever time Journeys”), H Hunt (“C U Soon”), Parish Council (“Heatherside Stores” and “Durdle Door”), and Ob (“Ghyll”), provided by Tasty Morsels.

The End of This Experiment

In The Atlantic’s new series How To Start Over, Olga Khazan takes listeners on a journey of reinvention. How To Start Over is your guide to navigating life’s gray areas, whether knowing it’s time to make a career switch, repairing strained family ties, or forging new connections in a post-pandemic world.  

Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at theexperiment@theatlantic.com.

The Experiment Introduces: How To Start Over With Olga Khazan

Deep in Yellowstone National Park, there’s a glitch in the U.S. Constitution where, technically, you could get away with murder. Lawmakers didn’t seem interested in fixing the problem until Mike Belderrain stumbled into the “Zone of Death” while hunting the biggest elk of his life. In a world with so many preventable deaths, The Experiment documents one attempt to avert disaster.
This episode of The Experiment originally ran on February 4, 2021.
A transcript of this episode is available.

Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast or write to us at theexperiment@theatlantic.com. 
This episode was produced by Julia Longoria and Alvin Melathe, with editing by Katherine Wells and sound design by David Herman.
Music by Water Feature (“In a Semicircle or a Half-Moon”), R McCarthy (“Big Game,” “She’s a Gift Giver, She’s a Giver of Gifts,” and “Melodi 2”), Ob (“Ell” and “Ere”), Parish Council (“Mopping”), H Hunt (“11e”), Column (“Quiet Song”), and Bwengo (“Première Mosrel”); catalog by Tasty Morsels. Additional audio from Montana State University Library’s Acoustic Atlas, the National Park Service’s Sound Library, C. J. Box, CNBC, C-SPAN, Vox, NPR’s All Things Considered, Idaho News 6, @ItsKeyes, and C-SPAN’s Book TV.

The 50-Square-Mile Zone Where the Constitution Doesn't Apply

In June 1964, at the height of the civil-rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan burned a Black Methodist church to the ground in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, and murdered three civil-rights workers in cold blood. This crime became one of the most notorious of its era, shocking the nation on the eve of the passage of the Civil Rights Act and later inspiring a Hollywood blockbuster: Mississippi Burning.
But when the reporter Ko Bragg started questioning how this history is being preserved in Philadelphia, she was confronted with a town that would much rather forget its violent past. Bragg finds a few Black residents taking it upon themselves to keep the story of this crime alive, and she asks where the burden of safeguarding history should lie. 
A transcript of this episode is available. 
Further reading: “Who Will Remember the Mississippi Murders?”

 Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at theexperiment@theatlantic.com.
This episode of The Experiment was produced by Gabrielle Berbey, with help from Salman Ahad Khan. Editing by Michael May and Julia Longoria. Reporting by Ko Bragg. Fact-check by Naomi Sharp. Sound design by Hannis Brown with additional engineering by Jennifer Munson. Transcription by Caleb Codding.
Music by Naran Ratan (“East of Somewhere Else”) provided by Tasty Morsels. Additional music by Hannis Brown. Additional audio from Iowa PBS, HelmerReenberg, AP Archive, MGM, CBS Evening News, NBC News, C-SPAN.

The Helen Keller Exorcism

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