Today we're talking about old age — seen by some as the first time in their lives they can unapologetically enjoy themselves, and by others as a living hell, especially those in bad health and with few resources. To put it bluntly, we're not good at old age in America, a country whose core values are built around youth, productivity, and extreme independence. The very notion of aging triggers anxiety in people who fear isolation and physical decline, and resentment in those who feel old people have ruined their future. The animus is so intense that most Americans fail to prepare for it, leading to crises in care, finances, and housing. In Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old, Lucy Schiller, a young writer investigates the frightening world inhabited by our elders, and one that inevitably awaits all of us.

For over 250 years, the American military has tried to define what a man is supposed to be: tough, aggressive, and dominant. Those ideals have traveled beyond the battlefield, shaping schools, politics, pop culture, and expectations of boys and men. In journalist Jasper Craven's new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don't, he examines how military academies, ROTC programs, and other institutions have popularized that narrow model of masculinity, revealing a culture built around hierarchy, discipline, and service, but also marked by hazing, misogyny, racism, violence, and the suppression of vulnerability.

The N-word is the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language. But how can a word used to dehumanize Black people be a used by the Black community to express affection, humor, and defiance? That's one complicated word. But it all gets explained by Richard Pryor's daughter, now a history professor at Smith College, who unpacks the N-word's long ugly story and talks about growing up with the man who pioneered its use on stage.

Overwhelmed by 20 years of back-to-back unsatisfying sexual relationships, queer, award-winning memoirist Melissa Febos decides to go cold turkey to see what she can find out about life, sex, and love.

Justin Kaplan was an award winning biographer, a literary icon, and one of the most famous writers of his time. To his daughter, however, he was a complete mystery. In her new memoir biography, Hester Kaplan attempts to find the father who would never even let her call him 'dad.' Where to begin? In his Pulitzer prize winning biography of Mark Twain...an iconic writer whose history of loss and emotional pain mirrors Kaplan's own.

Writer/researcher Jennie Durant spent 10 years following beekeepers as they trucked their hives across country to keep industrial farms pollinated...hives that face parasites, pesticides, punishing travel, and climate extremes. It's a tough life for these high demand service providers who pollinate one third of all the food we eat.

Drawing on 50 hours of previously sealed interviews, correspondence from 18 archives and fresh conversations with friends and collaborators freely talking after Sondheim's death, biographer Dan Okrent reveals the emotionally turbulent life of the man who reinvented the Broadway musical and what drove him: a monstrous mother, decades of alcoholism, a war against critics, and an inability to fall in love until he was 60 years old.

Josh Owens spent 4 years as video editor and field producer at Infowars, a media universe where unproven conspiracy theories were delivered with absolute certainty, having sprung from the manic mind and unhinged fantasies of the infamous Alex Jones. Owens talks about the lies he perpetrated, the communities he put in danger, the useless 'supplements' Jones sold to make himself rich, and with unflinching honesty, the damage he did while enthralled with the internet's most notorious conspiracy theorist.

Award-winning science journalist Carlos Orsi talks about the history of the world's most popular and enduring pseudo-science, Astrology: how it morphed from a 5,000 year old vehicle for telling fortunes into a multi-billion-dollar business popularly used for personality analysis; why generic and banal descriptions of peoples' character are so easily believed; how newspaper astrologers get away with 'predicting' the future; the reasons its beloved by society's under-represented people and the ways a daily game-like pastime can cause harm.

Historians rank eyeglasses as one of the most important inventions in human history, but why did the Catholic church throw the inventor in a dungeon for 13 years? What did people do before glasses? Why was wearing glasses equated with devil worship? Why are they so expensive? Historian David King Dunaway answers all these questions and more as we talk about his book The Four Eyed World.