When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., it covered the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum under tons of ash. Millennia later, in the mid-18th century, archeologists began to unearth the city, including its famed libraries, but the scrolls they found were too fragile to be unrolled and read; their contents were thought to be lost forever.

Only now, thanks to the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, scholars of the ancient world have partnered with computer programmers to unlock the contents of these priceless documents. In this episode of “There’s More to That,” science journalist and Smithsonian contributor Jo Marchant tells us about the yearslong campaign to read these scrolls. And Youssef Nader—one of the three winners of last year’s “Vesuvius Challenge” to make these clumps of vulcanized ash readable—tells us how he and his teammates achieved their historic breakthrough.

Read Smithsonian’s coverage of the Vesuvius Challenge and the Herculaneum scrolls here, here, and here.

Find prior episodes of our show here.

There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.

From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.

From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Rye Dorsey, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson.

Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz.

Music by APM Music.

As highways encroach ever further into animal habitats, drivers and wildlife are in greater danger than ever. And off the beaten path, decaying old forest roads are inflicting damage as well. “Roads are this incredibly disruptive force all over the planet that are truly changing wild animals’ lives and our own lives in almost unfathomable, unaccountable ways,” says science journalist Ben Goldfarb, author of the 2023 book Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet.

Ben wrote about this problem for the March 2024 issue of Smithsonian. For Earth Day, we’ll talk to Ben about what’s being done to make the relationship between roads and lands more harmonious, and we’ll meet Fraser Shilling — a scientist at UC Davis who’ll tell us what he’s learned from his rigorous scholarly examination of… roadkill. Meep meep!

Learn more about Ben and his work at his site.

Learn more about Fraser and the UC Davis Road Ecology Center here.

Find prior episodes of our show here.

There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.

From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.

From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Rye Dorsey, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson.

Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz.

Music by APM Music.

Eclipses have been a subject of fascination throughout human history, and the fact that we now have a clearer understanding of what they actually are—at least in the celestial mechanics sense—than we did in centuries past has not made them any less exciting. With the North American total solar eclipse just days away as we’re releasing this episode, and the next one visible from the contiguous United States not due until 2044, we’ll learn about the eclipses from astronomy obsessive (and Smithsonian science correspondent) Dan Falk and hear from Indigenous astronomer Samantha Doxtator about how the Haudenosaunee people have observed and interpreted these mysterious daylight darkenings of the skies over many centuries.

You can read Dan’s Smithsonian story about how ancient civilizations responded to eclipses here.

Find prior episodes of our show here.

There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.

From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.

From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Rye Dorsey, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson.

Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz.

Music by APM Music.

Before it was even published in 2006, historian James Swanson’s book Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer attracted the notice of Hollywood. After several prior attempts to adapt the nonfiction thriller for the screen, the first two episodes of the seven-part Apple TV+ miniseries Manhunt finally premiered on March 15, with the subsequent five arriving weekly. Meet Swanson — a self-described Lincoln obsessive — and hear about what moved him to write the book, what his role in its long-gestating adaptation was, and how he came to be so obsessed with our most-admired president in the first place.

Smithsonian magazine related articles:

The real history behind the events dramatized in “Manhunt,” 

James Swanson’s favorite Lincoln artifacts.

Find prior episodes of our show here.

There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.

From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.

From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Rye Dorsey, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson.

Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz.

Music by APM Music.

Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have achieved a degree of power in the music industry that singer/songwriters of earlier eras like Joan Baez—as the folk icon tells us—never even contemplated. Six decades ago, Baez was part of a folk revival that regarded music not merely as entertainment but as a vessel for political engagement and social change. In the documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, the now-83-year-old musician and activist reflects on her career and legacy.

Smithsonian senior editor Jennie Rothenberg Gritz interviewed Baez about the film and about the shifting intersection of art and activism. We present excerpts from that conversation in this episode. Then, veteran music critic Evelyn McDonnell discusses how the political dimensions of pop music have changed since Baez’s era, and what it means that many fans now look Beyoncé and Taylor Swift not just for great music, but for comment on the state of the world.

Clips from Joan Baez: I Am a Noise in this episode are used with permission from Magnolia Pictures & Mead Street Films. Learn more about that film here.

Evelyn McDonnell’s latest book is The World According to Joan Didion. You can learn more about Evelyn and her work at her site, Populism.

Find prior episodes of our show here.

There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.

From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.

From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Rye Dorsey, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson.

Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz.

Music by APM Music.

The facts of Sojourner Truth’s life are inspiring: Born into slavery in the late 1790s, she became an influential abolitionist and Pentecostal preacher, transfixing audiences from the mid 1840s through the late 1870s with her candid and powerful voice, not to mention her singing. Tall and strong, Truth was physically formidable, too. No one was using the term “intersectionality” in the 19th century, but Truth embodied this idea, declaring that her Blackness and her womanhood were equally essential facets of her identity.

But many people, both in Truth’s lifetime and in the approximately 140 years since her death, have found it useful to recast Truth as they wish to remember her instead of as she was. There’s no better example of this than “Ain’t I a woman?,” the hypothetical that Truth supposedly put to the audience when she addressed a women’s rights convention in 1851 in Akron, Ohio—the city where a public plaza will be dedicated in her honor this spring. There’s reason to doubt she said that, or at least that she said it in that way.

In this episode, we speak with two historians who’ve dug into Truth’s complicated legacy and challenged much of what’s been written about this American icon. Cynthia Greenlee reported on recent efforts to honor Truth for the March 2024 issue of Smithsonian. Nell Irvin Painter wrote the groundbreaking 1996 biography Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, and she’s hard at work on a follow-up volume titled Sojourner Truth Was a New Yorker and She Didn’t Say That. Together, Greenlee and Painter help us understand us who Sojourner Truth really was, and why several generations of activists have claimed her as a symbol — at the expense of our understanding of her as a person.

Read Cynthia Greenlee’s March 2024 Smithsonian story about Sojourner Truth here. You can learn more about Dr. Greenlee and her work at her site.

You can learn more about Dr. Nell Irvin Painter’s work as an author, artist, and historian at her site.

And read more here for the history of Mar-a-Lago mentioned in our dinner party fact.

Find prior episodes of our show here.

There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.

From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.

From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Rye Dorsey, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson.

Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz.

Music by APM Music.

Christopher Nolan's epic new film "Oppenheimer" is no mere biopic… nor is it the first attempt to capture the father of the atomic bomb in fiction. We look at prior dramatizations of this very complicated man—including one wherein J. Robert Oppenheimer played himself!—and examine why they worked or didn't.

In this episode:

Physicist-turned-photographer Minesh Bacrania shares his experience photographing inside the top-secret labs at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where J. Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists created the first nuclear weapon. Next, with Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer exceeding commercial expectations, Smithsonian magazine writer Andy Kifer discusses the complexities of Oppenheimer's genius and how prior attempts to depict him in film and television and on stage have fared.

Read Andy Kifer’s “The Real Story Behind Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer” here.

See Minesh Bacrania’s photographs of Los Alamos and read Smithsonian senior editor Jennie Rothenberg Gritz’s text here or in the July/August 2023 issue of Smithsonian.

Original release date: July 27, 2023

There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.

From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.

From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Genevieve Sponsler, Adriana Rozas Rivera, Terence Bernardo, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz.

Music by APM Music.

You can describe what a journalist does in any number of ways. One definition that’s as accurate as any is that a journalist is someone who liked having homework back when they were in school so much that they decided to keep doing homework for a career.

That certainly describes the team here at Smithsonian magazine. We’re all big readers. So we thought that before our brief winter hiatus—a time when many of us are trying to think of gift ideas to please the empathetic, curious people in our lives—we’d poll the staff of Smithsonian on their favorite books they read this year. Because we’re primarily a history and science magazine, we tried to steer them toward nonfiction published in 2023, but as you’ll hear, we weren’t sticklers for either criterion. We thought it better to let you hear from our staff about the books they were most genuinely excited to share. You’ll recognize some of these voices if you’re an avid listener, but this episode also provides the chance to hear from some of the talented staffers we haven’t been able to feature on the show before now.

Find prior episodes of our show here.

There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.

From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.

From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Rye Dorsey, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson.

Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz.

Music by APM Music.

Photographer Drew Gardner has a passion for history. His long-term project, “The Descendants,” wherein he recreates famous portraits of historical figures featuring their direct offspring, is his most visible expression of this interest. But like a lot of people who study history, Gardner has in recent years begun to contemplate more deeply the question of whose stories have been judged worthy of preservation, and whose have been allowed to fade into obscurity. That was how he decided to shift his specific focus to locating and photographing Black American descendants of Civil War veterans.

You can take a look at Gardner’s photographs and read magazine editor Jennie Rothenberg Gritz’s exploration of their meaning here.

On the latest episode of the Smithsonian podcast “There’s More to That,” I speak with Janisse Flowers and her 9-year-son, Neikoye, who are descended from the Civil War drummer boy David Miles Moore Jr. After some reflection, Janisse and her husband decided to grant Gardner’s request to photograph Neikoye dressed in a replica of Moore’s Union Army uniform. Both Janisse and Neikoye share their surprise over how this experience made them more conscious of their heritage.

I’m also joined by Gardner himself, who describes the challenges—and, he hopes, the potential benefits—of asking Black Americans to revisit one of the most painful chapters of America’s history by (almost) literally stepping into their ancestors’ shoes.

You can learn more about Drew and his work at his website.

Find prior episodes of our show here.

There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.

From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.

From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Rye Dorsey, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson.

Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz.

Music by APM Music.

The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP28, begins this week in Dubai. A new topic on the agenda this year is how wildfires are emerging as a serious health risk not just to those in their immediate vicinity, but even to people thousands of miles away. Last summer, smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted not only as far south as the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, but even across the Atlantic Ocean.

We speak with John Vaillant, whose book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World recounts a 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray, Canada that dislocated tens of thousands of people and caused billions of dollars in damage. That natural disaster seemed like a terrifying outlier when Vaillant began his reporting, but 2023’s unprecedented fire activity suggest that Fort McMurray was merely the shape of things to come. John explains how climate change is making wildfires hotter and harder to contain. Next, we’re joined by photojournalist Andria Hautamaki, who observed a “prescribed burn” in Plumas County, California. Andria shares how these kinds of carefully planned, intentionally set fires can be a useful tool for preventing more destructive blazes.

Read an excerpt from John’s book Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World here, and learn more about John and his other books here.

Andria’s reporting for her wildfires story from the April/May 2023 issue of Smithsonian was supported by the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. You can learn more about Andria and her work at her website. Andria recommends these resources for anyone seeking more information about prescribed burns:

Find prior episodes of our show here.

There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.

From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.

From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Rye Dorsey, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson.

Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz.

Music by APM Music.