After every assassination, the same questions seem to follow. How did this happen? Why wasn't it prevented? What warning signs did people miss?

From William McKinley in 1901 to John F. Kennedy in 1963, Ronald Reagan in 1981, and Shinzo Abe in 2022, each attack exposed vulnerabilities that suddenly seemed obvious in hindsight. Security systems changed. Procedures evolved. New lessons were learned.

But what if the deeper story isn't about the attacks themselves?

In this episode, we explore how societies learn from catastrophe, why institutions often become experts at preventing the last disaster, and what psychologists call the availability heuristic: our tendency to focus on the risks we can easily imagine while overlooking the ones we can't.

Because the future rarely arrives in the form we expect.

And sometimes the most important blind spots are hiding inside assumptions that feel perfectly reasonable today.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Sources and Further Reading:

William McKinley

Merry, Robert W. President McKinley: Architect of the American Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Library of Congress – William McKinley Papers

Miller, Scott. The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century. New York: Random House, 2011.

John F. Kennedy

Blaine, Gerald, and Lisa McCubbin. The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence. New York: Gallery Books, 2010.

President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964.

National Archives:

Ronald Reagan

Wilber, Del Quentin. Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan. New York: Henry Holt, 2011.

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum

Shinzo Abe

BBC News – Shinzo Abe assassination coverage

https://www.bbc.com/news/62095447

National Police Agency of Japan

Psychology, Risk & Organizational Learning

Availability Heuristic

Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. "Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability." Cognitive Psychology 5, no. 2 (1973): 207–232.

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9

High Reliability Organizations

Weick, Karl E., and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. Managing the Unexpected: Sustained Performance in a Complex World. 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015.

Publisher:

Normal Accident Theory

Perrow, Charles. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7srgf

Organizational Failure & Challenger

Vaughan, Diane. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo22781921.html

Horizon Scanning & Future Risk

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Enhancing Horizon Scanning and Foresight Capacity of the Federal Government. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2020.

Free Full Report:

Black Swan Events

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. 2nd ed. New York: Random House, 2010.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/176226/the-black-swan-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb/

This week on This, Again, we look at three figures from the 1600s whose stories became cleaner, simpler, and easier to pass down over time:

Galileo becomes the ultimate symbol of science versus religion, even though the reality was tangled up in politics, ego, public pressure, and institutional instability.

Pocahontas becomes a romantic bridge between worlds, despite the fact that much of her life survives only through English interpretation, political messaging, and a story later generations softened into something easier to emotionally live with.

Newton becomes the image of effortless genius, reduced to an apple falling from a tree, while the obsessive, competitive, deeply complicated person underneath that myth slowly fades into the background.

But this episode isn’t really about “debunking” history.

It’s about asking why stories evolve this way in the first place.

Do we simplify history because we’re trying to manipulate people? Or because human beings naturally remember stories better when they feel emotionally organized and easy to carry forward?

And at what point does simplification stop being an introduction… and quietly become the final version?

This episode explores historiography, memory, narrative psychology, and the uncomfortable reality that most of us were probably taught the first layer of history… without ever being brought back for the second one.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Galileo

Pocahontas

Newton

Historiography / Philosophy / Historical Memory

What would it take to be labeled insane?

In 1887, Nellie Bly checked herself into a New York asylum to find out. She got in with surprising ease. Getting out was something else entirely.

Nearly a century later, David Rosenhan ran an experiment to see if anything had changed. Healthy people walked into psychiatric hospitals, claimed to hear a single voice, and were admitted. Once inside, they acted completely normal. It didn’t matter.

This episode follows both investigations from the inside and looks at what they revealed about how systems make decisions and why those decisions are so difficult to reverse.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Bly, Nellie. Ten Days in a Mad-House. New York: Ian L. Munro, 1887.

Rosenhan, D. L. “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Science 179, no. 4070 (1973): 250–258.

Grob, Gerald N. The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Scull, Andrew. Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Spitzer, Robert L. “On Pseudoscience in Science, Logic in Remission, and Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Critique of Rosenhan’s ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places.’” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 84, no. 5 (1975): 442–452.

Zimbardo, Philip G. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906.

Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

In 1962, a group of schoolgirls in Tanganyika began laughing and could not stop. The episode spread to multiple schools, eventually forcing closures and affecting hundreds of students.

More than four centuries earlier, in 1518, residents of Strasbourg took to the streets and danced for days at a time. Contemporary accounts describe exhaustion, collapse, and a response from local authorities shaped by the medical beliefs of the time.

During the industrial era in Europe and the United States, physicians documented similar patterns in factories and schools. Groups of workers developed symptoms such as fainting, tremors, and nausea without a clear environmental or biological cause.

In that same year, 1962, a U.S. textile factory experienced what became known as the June Bug Epidemic. Workers reported being bitten by an unseen insect. Investigations found no physical cause, but the symptoms spread through proximity and shared interpretation.

More recently, clinicians have documented a rise in rapid-onset tic-like behaviors in adolescents, many of whom were exposed to similar content online.

This episode looks at these cases side by side, not as isolated events, but as examples of a recurring pattern. Under certain conditions, behavior, emotion, and even physical symptoms can move through groups in ways that feel personal, but are not entirely individual.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic (1962)

Rankin, A. M., and P. J. Philip.

Hempelmann, Christian F.

Dancing Plague of Strasbourg (1518)

A Time to Dance, a Time to Die

Waller, John.

Backman, E. Louis.

Industrial Era / Factory & School Outbreaks

Bartholomew, Robert E., and Simon Wessely.

Micale, Mark S.

Robinson, Harriet Hanson.

June Bug Epidemic (1962, United States)

Kerckhoff, Alan C., and Kurt W. Back.

(Accessible summary of case)

Modern Case: Functional Tic-Like Behaviors (COVID Era)

Pringsheim, Tamara, et al.

Müller-Vahl, Kirsten R., et al.

Paulus, Walter, et al.

Tourette Association of America.

Psychology & Mechanism (Supporting Framework)

Hatfield, Elaine, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson.

Engert, Veronika, et al.

Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Laila Craighero.

Provine, Robert R.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1439-0310.1986.tb00611.x

In May 1536, Anne Boleyn was still Queen of England.

Seventeen days later, she was executed.

This episode looks at how that kind of collapse is even possible.

Anne’s rise wasn’t just personal. Her marriage to Henry VIII forced England to break with the Catholic Church, reshaped the law, and required oaths of loyalty across the country. By the mid-1530s, she had become tied to the most disruptive political and religious changes of the era.

When pressure built around succession, legitimacy, and reform, the system didn’t slow down or reassess. It moved quickly. Charges were brought. Trials were held. Executions followed.

This episode examines that moment not just as a Tudor story, but as a pattern.

What happens when someone stands at the center of power and becomes the most visible part of a system under strain?

To answer that, we follow the same pattern beyond Tudor England. The downfall of Thomas Cromwell shows how proximity did not protect even the people building the system. The 1954 security hearing of Robert Oppenheimer shows how removal can shift from execution to loss of access while serving a similar function. And modern corporate examples show how leadership removal can signal control even when deeper issues remain unresolved.

This is not a story about whether Anne Boleyn was guilty.

It is a story about how systems respond under pressure, and why the person closest to power can become the fastest way to prove that something has been done.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

(Search “Anne Boleyn 1536” within this: these are actual state papers)

In the second episode of this two-part series on cults, we look at what happens when cult psychology collides with the digital world.

The online relationship movement known as Twin Flames Universe promised followers that a single destined partner existed for each person and that spiritual coaching could reunite them with that soulmate. Behind the scenes, former members describe a system that pressured followers to pursue relationships that had already ended and invest thousands of dollars in coaching programs.

We also examine the strange and disturbing story of Love Has Won, a livestreamed spiritual movement built around a woman who claimed she was guiding humanity through a cosmic transformation. For years, followers broadcast their lives online while building a belief system around the figure they called Mother God.

These modern movements raise an unsettling question.

Are we witnessing the emergence of a new age of cults driven by digital platforms and online communities?

Or are the same psychological patterns that fueled earlier cults simply finding new ways to organize and spread?

Drawing on research from psychologists and sociologists who study high control groups and digital culture, this episode explores how belief, belonging, and identity operate in the networked world.

Because while the technology surrounding these movements may look new, the forces shaping them may be far older.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Sources and Further Reading

Hines, Alice. “Inside the Twin Flames Universe and Its Always Online, All-Consuming World.” Vanity Fair, December 3, 2020.

Associated Press. “Michigan Attorney General Says She Is Investigating a Company Promoting ‘Twin Flame’ Romance.” Associated Press, March 5, 2025.

Netflix. Escaping Twin Flames. Accessed March 12, 2026.

Borden, Jane. “Mother God, Robin Williams, and Alcohol as Medicine: Inside Love Has Won.” Vanity Fair, November 14, 2023.

Buchanan, Kyle. “The True Story Behind HBO’s Love Has Won.” Time, November 14, 2023.

Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Hassan, Steven. Combating Cult Mind Control. Freedom of Mind Press.

Tufekci, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Yale University Press, 2017.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

Cialdini, Robert. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Harper Business, 2006.

Lalich, Janja, and Madeleine Tobias. Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships. Bay Tree Publishing, 2006.

In this episode of This, Again, we trace the evolution of cults from the obvious monsters of the 1960s and 70s, the Manson Family, Jonestown, and Heaven’s Gate, to the respectable reinventions of the 1980s and 90s like NXIVM, Scientology, and multi-level marketing empires.

What do these groups share beneath the costumes, the jargon, and the business cards? The same psychological mechanics: obedience, conformity, charisma, sunk cost fallacy, and the intoxicating promise of belonging. Drawing on scholars like Robert Lifton, Margaret Singer, Janja Lalich, Steven Hassan, and Philip Zimbardo, I explore how cult leaders weaponize trust and how ordinary people, people like us, become devoted enough to give up their freedom, their money, even their lives.

And by the end, we land on a harder question. If the robes and UFOs were easy to spot, what happens when cult dynamics put on a suit and walk into the boardroom?

This is Part 1 of a two-part series. In Part 2, we move into the modern era, where cult dynamics no longer stand out at all, but blend into our feeds, our fandoms, and our politics.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Books and Major Works Cited

Historical and Case Sources

Academic Studies and Classic Social Psychology

Authoritative Summaries and Reporting on Cults

Psychology Theory Summaries

In the early 20th century, hundreds of women were employed to paint luminous watch dials using radium-based paint. Despite early warnings from medical experts, companies continued to insist the work was safe. This episode examines the history of the Radium Girls, focusing on what corporate leaders knew, how they delayed accountability, and the lasting legal and public health consequences. It also draws a direct line to modern chemical exposure cases, including PFAS contamination. Supported by court records, contemporaneous news reports, and government data, this episode explores how institutional denial functions, and why the same patterns persist today.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

While this episode has some narrative interpretations, it draws heavily from primary source materials, historical journalism, and expert reporting.

Moore, Kate. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2017.

Clark, Claudia. Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Martland, Harrison S., Philip Conlon, and Joseph P. Knef. “Some Unrecognized Dangers in the Use and Handling of Radioactive Substances.” Journal of the American Medical Association 85, no. 23 (1925): 1769–76.

Rich, Nathaniel. “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.” The New York Times Magazine, January 6, 2016.

Library of Congress. “Radium Girls: Living Dead Women.” Headlines and Heroes (blog), March 11, 2019.

Fryer v. U.S. Radium Corporation, Superior Court of New Jersey, Essex County, 1927–1928. Records Related to Radium Dial Painters, 1917–1949

Leach v. E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Circuit Court of West Virginia, Wood County, No. 01-C-698, filed 2001. Class action settlement available via DuPont C8 Health Project.

United States Environmental Protection Agency. PFAS Strategic Roadmap: EPA’s Commitments to Action 2021–2024. Washington, DC: EPA, October 2021.

How do you justify rebellion when you are fighting for freedom, and then justify suppressing it once freedom is yours?

In this episode of This, Again, we rewind to the years immediately after American independence, when the Founding Fathers were forced to confront a problem they had not fully planned for. Americans were rebelling again, this time against them.

We begin with the Boston Tea Party before it became a founding myth, when it was still risky, debated, and unresolved. Then we follow that same logic of resistance as it reappears during the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, when farmers in western Pennsylvania challenged a federal law passed by a government that claimed to represent them.

Along the way, we sit with the anxiety, fear, and reasoning that shaped how early American leaders explained the difference between rebellion they celebrated and rebellion they suppressed. This is not an episode about whether the Founders were right or wrong. It is about how people reason under pressure, how legitimacy hardens after survival, and how the logic that creates a revolution does not disappear once power changes hands.

Primary sources from Alexander Hamilton and George Washington anchor the episode, alongside historians who explore the psychological and political aftermath of the American Revolution.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Hamilton, Alexander. Federalist No. 15. 1787.

Hamilton, Alexander. Federalist No. 6. 1787.

Hamilton, Alexander. Federalist No. 9. 1787.

Hamilton, Alexander. Letter to George Washington, August 18, 1794.

Hamilton, Alexander. “Tully No. IV.” 1794.

Washington, George. Proclamation Calling Out the Militia. September 25, 1794.

Petition of the Inhabitants of Washington County, Pennsylvania. 1792.

Secondary Sources

Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution.

Bouton, Terry. Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution.

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

Wood, Gordon S. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789 to 1815.

Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765 to 1776.

Archival Collections

Avalon Project, Yale Law School.

National Archives.

Petition of the Inhabitants of Washington County, Pennsylvania, 1792, quoted in

Hamilton, Alexander. Letter to George Washington, August 18, 1794.

Hamilton, Alexander. “Tully No. IV,” 1794.

In this episode of This, Again, we look at three familiar figures from late medieval and early modern Europe and ask a different kind of historical question.

Not whether they were heroes or villains.

We start with Christopher Columbus, whose brutality was documented while he was alive and whose authority collapsed long before he became a national symbol. His later transformation into a heroic origin story tells us less about new discoveries and more about what later generations needed him to represent.

From there, we step back to Spain in the late 1400s, where Ferdinand and Isabella unified the crown through religious purity, expulsion, and surveillance. By tracing royal decrees alongside firsthand accounts, we can hear the story being shaped in real time, with moral justification first and consequences handled quietly afterward.

Finally, we look at Henry V of England, a king whose short reign and timely death helped solidify one of England’s most enduring legends. Victories like Agincourt were interpreted as divine approval, while moments that complicated the image were absorbed and sidelined. Over time, Henry became less a man and more a standard against which later instability was measured.

Taken together, these stories show how historical narratives harden not because evidence disappears, but because meaning gets organized around what feels necessary, stabilizing, or reassuring in a given moment.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Primary and Contemporary Sources

Columbus, Christopher. The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493. Edited by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley Jr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.

Columbus, Christopher. Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, with Other Original Documents Relating to His Four Voyages to the New World. Translated and edited by R. H. Major. London: Hakluyt Society, 1847.

Las Casas, Bartolomé de. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Translated by Nigel Griffin. London: Penguin Classics, 1992.

Henry V and the Hundred Years’ War

Allmand, Christopher. Henry V. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Curry, Anne. Agincourt: A New History. Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2005.

Curry, Anne. Henry V: From Playboy Prince to Warrior King. London: Yale University Press, 2015.

Prestwich, Michael. Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Spain, the Reconquista, and the Inquisition

Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Kamen, Henry. Spain 1469–1714: A Society of Conflict. London: Routledge, 2005.

Netanyahu, Benzion. The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain. New York: Random House, 1995.

The Black Legend and Historical Memory

Gibson, Charles. The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New. New York: Knopf, 1971.

Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Columbus, Mythmaking, and National Memory

Irving, Washington. A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. New York: G. and C. Carvill, 1828.

Prescott, William H. History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic. London: Richard Bentley, 1838.

Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: The New Press, 2018.