Journalist and author Suki Kim tells us about the six months she spent undercover in Kim Jong Il’s North Korea, teaching the children of the country’s elite while in constant danger of being discovered. She recounted her experiences in a […]
In the Golden Age of Korean Cinema in the ’60s, director Shin Sang-ok and actress Choi Eun-hee were making acclaimed films as a glamorous power couple. But their lives took a turn for the worse as their divorce and new […]
Friend of the show Scott Bunn (Run That Back) returns so we can co-pitch an adaptation of Lloyd Alexander’s delightful YA fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain, which was upending genre tropes only a decade after Tolkein had established them. We […]
It’s not a secret that Coca-Cola’s original formula included cocaine. But what’s less well-known is that the soft drink still uses coca leaf, just not the part that gets you high. One plant in all of America is legally allowed […]
Franklin Roosevelt was wildly popular when he was in office, and is universally acknowledged as one of our greatest presidents. But in 1933, not everyone agreed. Shortly after FDR took office, a cabal of wealthy businessmen who were worried the […]
Billy Haines was a silent movie star who made the transition to sound, but when the studio head made the openly gay actor an ultimatum — a sham marriage to a woman, or the end of his movie career. Haines chose […]
Boo Morcom was heavily favored to win the gold in pole vault at the 1948 Olympics. But he was playing hurt, in the rain, and missed his shot at the gold. So he tracked down the competitors who beat him, […]
Mark Olmstead found out he had HIV at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when the disease was a death sentence. Figuring he had nothing to lose, he pulled off a string of scams including credit card fraud, insurance fraud, […]
For forty years, police in Saskatchewan, Canada were in the habit of arresting Indigenous men for minor offenses – or sometimes no reason at all. Rather than bring him to jail, the captive was instead paraded outside – taken on […]
In 1966, an El Paso theater actor bet his screenwriter friend he could produce a horror movie all on his own. The result was Manos: The Hands of Fate. This incoherent, no-budget movie is considered one of the worst films […]
