Throughline

This year's Oscars were one of the most diverse in history, in all kinds of ways. Everything Everywhere All At Once swept some of the biggest categories, notching incredible victories for Asian and Asian American actors, directors, and writers. At the same time, huge gaps persist – to take just one example, only seven women have ever been nominated for Best Director, and only three have won...

What happens when an accident puts the public at risk? In the early hours of March 28, 1979, a system malfunction set off what would become the worst nuclear accident in American history. What ensued punctured the public's belief in the safety of nuclear energy and became a cautionary tale about the consequences of communication breakdown during a crisis. This week, the fallout of a catastrophic event, and its ramifications for the public trust.

The dream of AI — artificial intelligence — has been around for centuries: the idea of an intelligent machine without free will popped up in ancient Taoist scrolls, Buddhist fables, and the tales of medieval European courts. But it wasn't until the 20th century that science caught up to our imaginations.

Today, AI is everywhere...

Ever since Beyonce's Renaissance dropped last summer, house music has found its way back to mainstream audiences, prompting some to ask "Is house back?" But the truth is, it never went away. Born out of the ashes of disco in the underground clubs of Chicago by Black queer youth in the late 1970s and 80s, house music has been the continued soundtrack of parties around the world, and laid the groundwork for one of the most popular musical genres in history – electronic dance music...

Rats. Love 'em or hate 'em, (though you probably hate 'em), they're part of our world. And they've been out in full force: In New York City, health data show rat sightings doubled in the past year. It turns out they're a lot like us: They've colonized the whole planet; they're incredibly adaptable; they go wherever the resources are. And, they share one-fourth of our genome—meaning that when you look in the mirror, you're kinda seeing a rat staring back at you...

It all started with a photograph. A photograph from 1991 of a prison takeover in rural Alabama. A photograph of a group of men on the roof of that prison holding a bedsheet scrawled with a message: "Pray for us." In the first episode of the new season of White Lies, hosts Chip Brantley and Andrew Beck Grace go searching for answers to the questions raised by this photograph...

In 1923, an Indian American man named Bhagat Singh Thind argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that he was a white man and was therefore eligible to become a naturalized citizen. He based his claim on the fact that he was a member of India's highest caste and identified as an Aryan and therefore white...

In 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said the Black Panther Party "without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." And with that declaration he used United States federal law enforcement to wage war on the group...

Climate change, political unrest, random violence - Western society can often feel like what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls, "a thin layer of ice on top of an ocean of chaos and darkness." In the United States, polls indicate that many people believe that law and order is the only thing protecting us from the savagery of our neighbors, that the fundamental nature of humanity is competition and struggle. This idea is often called "veneer theory...

It's 2074 and a suicide bomber has killed the President of the United States. Months later Marines open fire on protesters killing dozens. The Second American Civil War has just begun and once again the North and South are pitted against each other. This is all according to the dystopian world chronicled in Omar El Akkad's novel, American War...