Throughline

Jack Johnson was the first world Black heavyweight champion, but winning the title was only part of the battle. Every time Johnson stepped into a boxing ring, he struck a blow to white supremacy. In this week’s episode, the story of Jack Johnson and the legacy of Black athletes pushing for social change in America.

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Starbase. Prospera. California Forever. Mars. From private cities to interstellar colonies, tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have backed experiments designed to operate beyond the borders — and laws — most of us live by. So we wondered: has this happened before? In this episode, we visit an Arctic archipelago, homesteads floating in the ocean, and a startup city in Honduras to explore where places built with the ultra-rich in mind leave all the rest of us.

Guests:

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of The Cosmopolites and The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World

Wayne Gramlich, retired computer engineer

Dan Girma, producer on NPR's Embedded podcast

Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

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As the United States expanded into a global superpower, it simultaneously strengthened its national borders and began to limit who could come in and out of the country. In this week’s episode, the story of how one of the very first walls meant to divide people was built on the US Southern border.

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When we call something "clickbait," we don't mean it as a compliment. But let's be real: we also click. It's hard to resist a spicy story, and 19th-century newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst knew it. At a time when most papers merely reported events, his papers created them, sending reporters out to perform daring rescues, solve sensational murders, and even meddle in geopolitics. Today on the show: the man who brought spectacle and scandal to the news — and changed journalism forever.

Guests:

Karen Roggenkamp, professor of English at East Texas A&M University and author of Narrating the News and Sympathy, Madness, and Crime

W. Joseph Campbell, emeritus professor of communication at American University and author of The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms and Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections

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In the late 1890s, the United States fought wars and backed independence movements around the world. By the time the fighting was over, the US emerged as a new global power —and with it, a new identity. This week: how the U.S. became an empire, and why it started calling itself America.

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