Welcome to the seedy underbelly of Pittsburgh, where the battle for control over the sex trade turned into an all-out gang war. Caught in the middle: A trans horse riding instructor who turned to a life of crime when he needed money to care for his ailing mother. S.A. Chant joins us today for a conversation about money laundering through paint-your-own ceramics, fighting the cops with birthday cake, and the way respectability politics changes the stories we tell about queer history.
One of Japan’s most famous murderesses took a very intimate souvenir from the lover she murdered. Was she the sex-crazed nymphomaniac portrayed in the media? Was she the symbol of female empowerment described by her supporters? Or was she an abuse victim who broke down after making one terrible mistake?
If you want to tackle the crime problem, why not just get rid of all the laws? In this episode, a group of free thinkers take a utopian experiment to the extreme, and discover in the process that some laws exist for a reason. One of those reasons: preventing bears from eating everyone.
While the United States was panicking about the secret communist conspiracy, the Soviet Union was in the middle of its own panic about a secret cabal of evil conspirators at the very heart of the communist party. Was Joseph Stalin really surrounded by secret fascists? Or did he perhaps have an ulterior motive for accusing his own party members of murder?
Jack Johnson was so good at boxing that he scared an entire generation of racists. White authorities chose to make an example of him with one of America’s most infamous laws.
Our first episode about South America gives us a very different perspective on the American fight against Communism. Was promoting America’s interests in the Cold War really worth propping up a brutal dictatorship? And why did the international attempt to bring Pinochet to justice involve British Law Lords, a fake case of dementia, and a law that gave Spain carte blanche to prosecute all crimes against humanity… except for the ones that happened in Spain?
Get your flags and your bibles, we’re hunting Communists. The Red Menace could be lurking anywhere: in your unions, in your movies, maybe even in the very halls of Congress.
Take a tour around the swamp with America’s favorite rascal. Florida Man’s always making headlines for punching alligators, stealing meat, and fighting cops in the buff. But does Florida really deserve its reputation as the weirdest state in the union? And is our nation’s most beloved rapscallion the villain of our story, or is he the victim of a legal system that accidentally created a media monster?
Meet the man who used his artistic talents to resist Nazi occupation, then planned an elaborate scheme to destroy a public records building by posing as a German official. In the occupied Netherlands, a group of artists fought the law with typography and tailoring. Why did Willem Arondeus go from a little-known WII resistance fighter to a hit with Tumblr teens, and what can his story teach us about resisting fascism today?
Was Mao Zedong’s fourth wife one of history’s most brutal criminals, or was she a scapegoat for a country that needed to preserve the image of its founding father? The answer is complicated, tragic, and involves a surprising amount of high-stakes theater criticism.