Throughline
Episodes
Winter Book Club: Octavia Butler’s Visionary Fiction
01 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Octavia Butler gave us a new kind of science fiction: not only as one of the first writers to use history to talk about the future, and not only as on...
Winter Book Club: Why You'll Love 'Dune'
30 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As a kid, Ramtin fell in love with Frank Herbert's 1965 epic sci-fi novel, Dune. Today, he joins NPR's Books We’ve Loved crew, Andrew Limbong and B....
Winter Book Club: A Christmas Carol
25 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Christmas wasn't always a national shopping spree — or even a day off work. But when Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 19th-century Lon...
Winter Book Club: The Story of Us?
18 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What if the real story of human history is a story itself? To kick off our winter book club, we talk with bestselling author Tamim Ansary about his bo...
Pride, Prejudice, and Peer Pressure
11 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Rund takes Ramtin on a tour of the enduring world of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice... and our two hosts make a bet.Guests:John Mullan, professor ...
The Bitter History of Chocolate
04 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What's better than holiday hot chocolate? If just thinking about it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, well – that’s by design. Chocolate's big hi...
The Mother of Thanksgiving
27 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On today's show, a Thanksgiving story you might never have heard -- not about Pilgrims or Native people, but instead about a woman who, as civil war l...
What Happened to Vladimir Alexandrov?
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Rund Abdelfatah and Cristina Kim try to unravel the mystery of a Soviet scientist who was helping to spread the word about nuclear winter theory—unt...
Democracy Dies in a Day
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How quickly can a government fall? Chile was once one of Latin America's oldest democracies, but that all changed in a matter of hours after a militar...
The Creeping Coup
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On the surface, the story of Sudan’s war is about two generals vying for power. But it’s also about a vast web of international interests involvin...
Winter is Coming
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Late last month, President Trump announced that the United States would be restarting nuclear weapons tests after a break of over 30 years. We’ve si...
Prosecuting Genocide
30 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The word "genocide" can seem like it’s everywhere right now: So it can be easy to forget that, fundamentally, it's a legal term that dates to World ...
Throughline Dances
29 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Stuck in traffic? Glued to your desk chair? Folding yet another pile of your kids’ laundry? We GOT you!! Take a break, turn up the volume, and shake...
The Internet Under the Sea
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What powers the global internet? The answer might surprise you: not satellites, but hundreds of thin cables that run along the ocean floor. They’re ...
The Rise of the Right Wing in Israel
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Israel and Hamas have agreed to a plan to end fighting in Gaza, just over two years after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023 and Isra...
A History of Hamas
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With peace talks once again underway between Israel and Hamas, and hopes again growing for a permanent ceasefire, we’re bringing you our episode on ...
From the Frontlines
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Journalism is under unprecedented threat worldwide. At least 220 journalists have been killed in Gaza alone since the October 7th, 2023 Hamas-led atta...
Throughline Sleeps
30 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Life can be tough. Every day brings new challenges. And in order to get through the waking hours we need rest. Good quality sleep. In this bonus episo...
The Anti-Vaccine Movement
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The alleged link between vaccines and autism is back in the news this week, being regularly speculated on by both President Trump and Health and Human...
The Business of Migrant Detention
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The U.S. immigration detention system is spread out across federal facilities, private prisons, state prisons, and county jails. It’s grown under bo...
Line. Fence. Wall.
11 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The U.S. - Mexico border, according to a video on the official White House website, is very quiet: nothing but tires crunching on gravel and the wind ...
ICE
04 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What is ICE? What was it created to do? And what’s changed in 2025? Today on the show, the history of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and how it...
A History of Settlements
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Israeli government recently approved a new settlement project in the occupied West Bank that would effectively cut it in half. The plan is illegal...
A Primer On The Federal Reserve's Independence
26 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
President Donald Trump has been loudly critical of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for years now. Since January, the President has accused him of ...
The Queen of Tupperware
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Who ushered housewives into the workforce and plastic storage containers into America’s kitchens? Today on the show, the rise and fall of Brownie Wi...
We the People: Succession of Power
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The 25th amendment. A few years before JFK was shot, an idealistic young lawyer set out on a mission to convince people something essential was missin...
We the People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
07 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide its boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagi...
We the People: The Right to Remain Silent
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Fifth Amendment. You have the right to remain silent when you're being questioned in police custody, thanks to the Fifth's protection against self...
Embedded: The Network
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the mid-1980s, an OBGYN in Brazil noticed that far fewer pregnant women at his hospital were dying from abortion complications. It wasn't a coincid...
We The People: Canary in the Coal Mine
24 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Third Amendment.Maybe you've heard it as part of a punchline. It's the one about quartering troops — two words you probably haven't heard side b...
Congress has voted to eliminate government funding for public media
18 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Act now to ensure public media remains free and accessible to all. Your donation will help this essential American service survive and thrive. Visit d...
Edward Said and the Question of Palestine
17 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Edward Said brought the question of Palestine into the American mainstream. He taught at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, and today, more than...
What Makes Us Free?
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What's the role of government in society? What do we mean when we talk about individual responsibility? What makes us free? 'Neoliberalism' might feel...
Does America Need a Hero?
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Captain America: an all-American superhero. Clad in red, white, and blue, he carries only a shield. And he fights only when he must. When it's right.B...
Iran and the U.S., Part Three: Soleimani's Iran
29 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Iran-Iraq war, 9/11, and the story of Iranian Revolutionary Guard general Qassem Soleimani, from his rise to power, to his assassination, by the U...
Iran and the U.S., Part Two: Rules of Engagement
28 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Military confrontations, early-morning attacks, and digital warfare: the story of Iran and the U.S. from the 1979 Iranian revolution to the fraught mo...
What the Supreme Court Does in the Shadows
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Supreme Court is issuing its final decisions of the term this month. But it's been extraordinarily active since January, in part because the Trump...
Iran and the U.S., Part One: Four Days in August
24 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The U.S. and Iran have had a tense relationship for decades — but when did that begin? This week, we feature our very first episode about an event f...
Abortion Before Roe
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Abortion wasn't always controversial. In fact, in colonial America it would have been considered a fairly common practice: a private decision made by ...
The First Department of Education
12 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Whose job is it to educate Americans? Congress created the first Department of Education just after the Civil War as a way to help reunify a broken co...
The Woman Behind The New Deal
05 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From Social Security and the minimum wage to exit signs and fire escapes, Frances Perkins transformed how people in the U.S. lived and worked. Today o...
We the People: Search and Seizure
29 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Fourth Amendment is the part of the Bill of Rights that prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures." But — what's unreasonable? That question...
War Crimes
22 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On today's episode, we travel from the battlefields of the U.S. Civil War, through the rubble of two world wars, to the hallways of the Hague, to see ...
The Tax Collector
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Gangsters, banksters, and politicians. Today on the show, how the hunt for Al Capone helped turn the IRS into one of the U.S. government's most powerf...
California's 'Bum Blockade'
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The story of the Los Angeles police chief who, faced with one of the largest internal migrations in American history, tried to close California's bord...
Motherhood
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Baby bonuses, childless cat ladies: the rhetoric around motherhood is politically charged right now. And the fantasy of an ideal mother remains powerf...
The Deadly Story of the U.S. Civil Service
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When James Garfield won the Presidency in 1880, Charles Guiteau got ready to accept his new government job. No one had actually offered him a job – ...
The Alien Enemies Act
17 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order invoking a centuries-old law: the Alien Enemies Act. The Act allows a president to detain or ...
When Things Fall Apart
10 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Climate disaster, political unrest, random violence: Western society can often feel like what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls "a thin layer of ice o...
Get Rich Quick: The American Lottery
03 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Want to get rich quick? You're not alone. Right now, Americans spend over $100 billion, yes billion, every year on lottery tickets. Today on the show,...
We the People: The Right to Remain Silent
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Fifth Amendment. You have the right to remain silent when you're being questioned in police custody, thanks to the Fifth's protection against self...
Sesame Street
20 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Big Bird, politics, and the ABCs: how a television show made to represent New York City neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bronx became beloved by fami...
Winter is Coming
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dinosaurs, Carl Sagan, and nuclear war. There was a moment in the not-so-distant past when we learned what drove the dinosaurs extinct — and that di...
We the People: Succession of Power
06 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The 25th amendment. A few years before JFK was shot, an idealistic young lawyer set out on a mission to convince people something essential was missin...
Health Insurance in America
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Millions of Americans depend on their jobs for health insurance. But that's not the case in many other wealthy countries. How did the U.S. end up with...
The Evolution of Presidential Power
20 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What can and can't the president do — and how do we know? The framers of the U.S. Constitution left the powers of the executive branch powers delibe...
The Anti-Vaccine Movement
13 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The alleged link between vaccines and autism was first published in 1998, in a since-retracted study in medical journal The Lancet. The claim has been...
The History of Birthright Citizenship
06 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Wong Kim Ark was born in the U.S. and lived his whole life here. But when he returned from a trip to China in August of 1895, officials wouldn't let h...
The Kingdom Behind Glass
30 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Who owns stolen art? Today on the show, the bloody journey of a Benin Bronze from West Africa to the halls of one of England's most elite universities...
We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide its boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagi...
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
16 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Whether it's pesticides in your cereal or the door plug flying off your airplane, consumers today have plenty of reasons to feel like corporations mig...
History of the Self: Dreams
09 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our dreams can haunt us. But what are we to make of them? From omens and art to modern science, we tell the story of dreams and the surprising role th...
History of the Self: Aging
02 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Defeating old age? In 1899, Elie Metchnikoff woke up in Paris to learn he had done just that. At least, that's what the newspaper headlines said. Befo...
History of the Self: Love
26 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How did love – this thing that's supposed to be beautiful, magical, transformative – turn into a neverending slog? We went searching for answers, ...
Embedded: The Black Gate
24 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the Xinjiang region of western China, the government has rounded up and detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups. M...
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"History" can seem big and imposing. But it's always intensely personal – it's all of our individual experiences that add up to historical events. O...
Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
16 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Throughline associate producer Anya Steinberg talks to supervising senior editor Julie Caine about her reporting trip to Owens Valley in northeastern ...
When Christmas Went Viral
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Christmas wasn't always a national shopping spree — or even a day off work. But in 19th-century London, it went viral. When Charles Dickens publishe...
Seeking Asylum in the U.S.
05 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The U.S. has long professed to be a country where people can seek refuge. That's the promise etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty. But it's n...
The Lord Of Misrule (Throwback)
28 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
By the time his book went to press in London, on November 18, 1633, Thomas Morton had been exiled from the Puritan colonies in Massachusetts. His crim...
The Mother of Thanksgiving
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Thanksgiving story most of us hear is about friendship and unity. And that's what Sarah Josepha Hale had on her mind when she sat down to write a ...
Behind the Scenes of Throughline
14 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today on the show, we're taking you behind the scenes. We'll tell you how Throughline was born, some of what goes into making our episodes, and a litt...
The Electoral College (Throwback)
07 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What is it, why do we have it, and why hasn't it changed? Born from a rushed, fraught, imperfect process, the origins and evolution of the Electoral C...
A History of Settlements
31 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The question of settlements has loomed over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades, and has only intensified in the past year. According to a UN...
The Swing State Power Brokers
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today on the show, two stories of building power in swing states: from the top down, and the bottom up.First, how a future Supreme Court justice helpe...
How We Vote (Throwback)
17 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Drunken brawls, coercion, and lace curtains: believe it or not, how regular people vote was not something the Founding Fathers thought much about. Ame...
A History of Christian Nationalism
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
References to God and Christianity are sprinkled throughout American life. Our money has "In God We Trust" printed on it. Most presidents have chosen ...
The Battle For Jerusalem
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today, the city of Jerusalem is seen as so important that people are willing to kill and die to control it. And that struggle goes back centuries. Nea...
A History of Hezbollah (Throwback)
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Hezbollah is a Lebanese paramilitary organization and political party that's directly supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the wake of the Oc...
When Things Fall Apart (Throwback)
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Climate change, political unrest, random violence - Western society can often feel like what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls, "a thin layer of ice o...
The Conspiracy Files
12 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
9/11 was an inside job. Aliens have already made contact. COVID-19 was created in a lab.Maybe you rolled your eyes at some point while reading that li...
How U.S. Unions Took Flight (Throwback)
05 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Airline workers — pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, baggage handlers, and more — represent a huge cross-section of the country. And for decade...
Water in the West
29 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to do the greatest good for the greatest number? When the Los Angeles Aqueduct opened in 1913, it rerouted the Owens River from its ...
We The People: Canary in the Coal Mine
22 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Third Amendment. Maybe you've heard it as part of a punchline. It's the one about quartering troops — two words you probably haven't heard side ...
We The People: Equal Protection
15 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Fourteenth Amendment. Of all the amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the 14th is a big one. It's shaped all of our lives, whether we realize it o...
We The People: Legal Representation
08 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Sixth Amendment. Most of us take it for granted that if we're ever in court and we can't afford a lawyer, the court will provide one for us. And i...
Tested: Questions of a Physical Nature
06 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1966, the governing body of the Olympic track and field event started mandatory examinations of all women athletes. These inspections would come to...
We the People: Gun Rights
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Second Amendment. In April 1938, an Oklahoma bank robber was arrested for carrying an unregistered sawed-off shotgun across state lines. The robbe...
We The People: Free Speech
25 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The First Amendment. Book bans, disinformation, the wild world of the internet. Free speech debates are all around us. What were the Founding Fathers ...
The Creeping Coup
18 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sudan has been at the center of a deadly and brutal war for over a year. It's the site of the world's largest hunger crisis, and the world's largest d...
The Roots of Poverty in America
11 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, yet over 10 percent of people – nearly 40 million – live in poverty. It's somet...
Road to Rickwood: The Holy Grail of Baseball
04 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Birmingham, Alabama was one of the fiercest battlegrounds of the Civil Rights Movement. And in order to understand the struggle, you don't have to loo...
Pop Music's First Black Stars
27 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today, the U.S. popular music industry is worth billions of dollars. And some of its deepest roots are in blackface minstrelsy and other racist genres...
The Lavender Scare (Throwback)
20 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
One day in late April 1958, a young economist named Madeleine Tress was approached by two men in suits at her office at the U.S. Department of Commerc...
A History of Zionism
13 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Since October 7th, the term Zionism has been everywhere in the news. It's been used to support Israel in what it calls its war against Hamas: a refrai...
The Whiteness Myth (Throwback)
06 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1923, an Indian American man named Bhagat Singh Thind told the U.S. Supreme Court that he was white, and therefore eligible to become a naturalized...
The Rules of War
30 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
International courts investigating alleged war crimes have made headlines often in recent months. An arrest warrant has been issued for Russian Presid...
Mythos and Melodrama in the Philippines (Throwback)
23 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the "Epic of Marcos." In this tale of a family that's larger than life, Ferdinand Marcos, the former dictator of the Philippines, is at the...
The Mandela Effect
16 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For nearly thirty years, the South African government held a man it initially labeled prisoner number 46664, the anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandel...
The Labor Of Love (Throwback)
09 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There's a powerful fantasy in American society: the fantasy of the ideal mother. This mother is devoted to her family above all else. She raises the k...