The Electoral College

What’s today’s secret word? Paul Reubens spent years bringing to life one of America’s most beloved characters, Pee-wee Herman, an icon of joy for weirdos of all ages. In the first of this two part series, Pee-wee superfan-turned-historian Jamie Loftus lets us into the playhouse for a journey through Paul’s early life and art school days, his collaborations and relationships, and the beginnings of a kind of fame that would blur the line between character and creator. More about Jamie Loftus: ...

What happens when you’re just a little too good at forging the diaries of Adolf Hitler? And why did so many people want to read them? In 1983, the West German news magazine Stern bought sixty volumes of forged journals and held a press conference to announce their publication. This week, Adrian Daub of podcasts In Bed With the Right and The Feminist Present is here to tell us all about what would be the publishing hoax to end all hoaxes…if only the book in question wasn’t so boring. Mor...

For many of us, house cleaning is a daunting, unpleasant affair, but for You’re Wrong About editor Miranda Zickler, it is a love language. Continuing the Peg Bracken Book Club tradition set forth by our I Hate Cookbook episode with Sarah Archer, we discuss The I Hate to Housekeep Book, a tongue-in-cheek guide for housewives that came out in 1962. Miranda also shares her background as a housecleaner as she and Sarah get into all the figurative cracks and crevices of the archetypal Home to fi...

Who is out there behind the howling midnight parties in the distance? For generations we have coexisted in varying degrees of rivalry, conflict, and admiration with the North American canine known as the coyote. From pre-colonization to our modern backyards, through the wild west and the streets of San Francisco, award-winning NPR science reporter and YWA Maligned Animal correspondent Lulu Miller takes our pack on a journey toward a better understanding of these resilient creatures. *EDITOR'...

Where did all these teens come from? Harmony Colangelo, co-host of This Ends at Prom, is here to explain how, before Americans got to worry about what teenagers were up to, we first had to decide what they were—and how a boom in postwar educational films taught a generation of adolescents what not to do. Skipper Learns a Lesson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8kJzBJrOkU 1950 Family Date: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8kJzBJrOkU More about Harmony Colangelo: https://www.instagram.com/v...