Rosencast

The disappearance of Jack McLennan remains one of Australia’s strangest unsolved missing-person cases. The 27-year-old vanished from Ficks Crossing in Queensland in October 2024, leaving behind scattered belongings, missing clothing and a phone that has never been found. Two years later, there is still no body, no publicly identified suspect and no clear explanation for what happened to Jack McLen...

A woman’s body turns up at a Wichita fire station inside a suitcase.  The Pentagon releases footage of six mysterious spherical objects over the Middle East.  An amateur astronomer may have spotted an enormous ancient impact crater on Google Maps. Scientists describe one of the strangest dinosaurs yet, and a tiny wildcat from Bolivia turns out to be an entirely new species. Then there’s the Unknow...

Can Ozempic Make You Live Longer? AI Jedi Mind Tricks & Other Strange Things | Episode 6 What do longevity drugs, accidental inventions, ancient discoveries, strange plants, dinosaurs, and gullible artificial intelligence have in common? Apparently, they all ended up in this episode. I start with a fascinating new study in which older mice treated with semaglutide—the active ingredient in Ozem...

There's a cup sitting on my desk. It seems ordinary. But inside that cup is a history of religion, information, commerce, empire, labor—and one of the most widely consumed psychoactive drugs on Earth. Long before coffee became the fuel of offices, factories, night shifts and morning commutes, people gathered around it to pray, talk, exchange news, argue about politics and do business. In this epis...

What happens when the future destroys the past? The automobile replaced the horse economy. Streaming wiped out video rental stores.  The internet transformed newspapers.  And now artificial intelligence may be reshaping the world all over again. In this episode of Rosenberg, we explore the idea of Creative Destruction—the strange process by which old industries disappear, new ones emerge, and soci...

In 1938, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann created a compound called LSD-25. Nobody thought much about it. The company shelved it, and it sat there for years. Then something strange happened. Hofmann couldn't stop thinking about it. What followed would become one of the most unusual stories of the twentieth century—a story involving accidental discovery, secret government experiments, the count...

Today we think of the printing press as one of humanity's greatest inventions. But when it first appeared, many people feared it. Some worried about misinformation. Others feared job loss. Some believed it threatened society itself. In this episode, Rosenberg explores how the fears surrounding the printing press sound surprisingly similar to today's anxieties about artificial intelligence. Topics...

Most people think the attention economy began with social media. It didn't. In this first episode of Rosenberg, we explore how newspapers transformed from political tools into commercial businesses competing for attention. Along the way, we look at how media shapes our understanding of the world, why shared stories matter, and what the rise of newspapers can teach us about today's digital platform...