Legendary showman P.T. Barnum once owned a slave named Joice Heth. Barnum claimed she was 161 years old and a former nanny to George Washington. Benjamin Reiss tells the story in his book "The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Restaurants serve food and feelings in this story by Nathan Witkin.
Solar engineer Martha Lenio was the first woman to command a mission on the HI-SEAS — the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. It's a project co-sponsored by NASA and the Univeristy of Hawaii that simulates what it would be like to live on Mars for eight months. To survive in such extremes, they were sequestered into a 1,000 square foot dome, and when they went outside they had to wear space suits. When Lenio got there, she said it didn't feel much like Mars, but she changed her mind after 8 months without the sun and wind on her skin. She spoke with Anne Strainchamps about missing her family — and missing YouTube cat videos.
Stephen Thompson is an editor at The Onion newspaper, and editor of “The Onion A.V. Club: The Tenacity of the Cockroach.”
Steph Davis is a renowned rock climber who's considered one of the best in the world. But after the death of her husband, Mario Richard, nearly a decade ago, she discovered a new and potentially more dangerous career -- as a skydiver, BASE jumper and wingsuit flyer.
Russell Shorto is the author of "Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason."
Novelist Wesley Stace (AKA musician John Wesley Harding) tells Jim what the original novel, "Tristram Shandy," is all about.
The Aleppo Codex, the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible went missing? Where did it go?
This story was done in collaboration with Israel Story, the This American Life of Israel.
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