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."
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Why is it that certain people bounce back after a relationship ends, whereas for others it takes years to recover? Graduate researcher Lauren Howe says it has to do with the stories we tell ourselves.
Sarah Churchwell tells Steve Paulson that Marilyn Monroe was an ambitious, complex woman not simply the victim of the Hollywood star machine.
Stephen Thompson is an editor at The Onion newspaper, and editor of “The Onion A.V. Club: The Tenacity of the Cockroach.”
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.
Maybe you're not interested in football. Maybe you prefer your Sundays productive or peaceful. If so, then this interview is for you. Here's Craig Harling on Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl.
According to one estimate, the average young person spends about 8 hours a week playing video games. While many parents are worried about all that screen time, there's an emerging body of research that suggests some social and psychological benefits to gaming. And now there's a new generation of educators who want to bring video games into the classroom, not only to make it more fun, but also more effective. Journalist Greg Toppo writes about their efforts in "The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter."
Memory is a hot topic in neuroscience, and it turns out the context of our memories is as important as the event itself. Dartmouth neuroscientist Jeremy Manning has found that people can intentionally forget past experiences by changing how they think about the context of their memories.
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