Sidequests

On July 11, 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel on the cliffs above the Hudson River — over political insults. Hamilton was the architect of America's financial system. Burr was the sitting second-in-command of the United States. He finished his term as a wanted man in two states and never held office again. This episode of Sidequests tells the full story o...

Even if advanced alien civilizations exist and are actively searching for other life, finding Earth would be extraordinarily difficult — not because we're hidden, but because space is almost incomprehensibly vast. This episode of Sidequests walks through the actual physics and astronomy: why detecting a rocky planet around a distant star is like spotting a firefly next to a stadium spotlight, why...

Around July 1, 1947, a New Mexico rancher found strange debris on his property. The military announced they'd recovered a "flying disc." Then, within 24 hours, they changed the story to "weather balloon" and the incident faded — until it came roaring back thirty years later as the most famous UFO story in the world. This episode of Sidequests covers what Project Mogul actually was, why the militar...

On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Sidequests corrects one of American history's most persistent myths: the famous image of all 56 delegates signing the Declaration together on July 4, 1776 is almost entirely fictional. Congress voted for independence on July 2. They approved the final text on July 4. The actual signing happened primarily on August 2 — and then continued...

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific during the final leg of an attempted circumnavigation of the globe, sparking one of aviation's most enduring mysteries. This episode of Sidequests, marking the anniversary, argues that the disappearance is the least interesting part of her story — and tells the one that actually matters: how a Kansas-born woman...

The bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil began almost by accident — a Confederate division wandering into a Pennsylvania crossroads town in search of shoes, triggering an unplanned collision between two massive armies. This episode of Sidequests, marking the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, covers the three days of fighting that turned the tide of the Civil War: the cavalry office...

On June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer split his cavalry regiment, ignored his scouts' warnings, and led roughly 200 men into a Native encampment far larger than he understood. Every one of them died within the hour. This episode of Sidequests, marking the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, takes apart the "Custer's Last Stand" myth and tells the real story: a genuine military tri...

On June 22, 1633, Galileo Galilei knelt before the Roman Inquisition and renounced the truth he'd discovered with his own telescope: that the Earth orbits the Sun. The Church sentenced him to house arrest for life. Nearly 360 years later, the Vatican formally acknowledged it had been wrong. Today it runs its own astronomical observatory — and the current Pope holds a mathematics degree. This episo...

Episode 10 closes out the Titanic series. Carpathia arrives at Pier 54 with 706 survivors and thirty thousand people waiting in the rain. The inquiries begin almost immediately — eighteen days in Washington, thirty-six in London, J. Bruce Ismay and Captain Stanley Lord both put through public crucifixions that would define the rest of their lives. The free episode covers the arrival, the reunions...

In 1859, an American farmer shot a pig belonging to the British Hudson's Bay Company on a disputed island in the Pacific Northwest, and two major world powers spent the next thirteen years facing each other down over the incident. American troops dug in under George Pickett — that George Pickett. Britain responded with five warships and two thousand soldiers. Both sides were ready to fight. Neithe...

In 1980, Dennis Hope filed paperwork claiming ownership of the Moon and sent formal notice to the United Nations. Nobody objected. So he started selling. This episode of Sidequests traces how a struggling used-car salesman from San Francisco built a multimillion-dollar real estate business on a gap in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, generated roughly twelve million dollars in revenue, sold property t...

Episode 8 of our ten part series The Titanic Disaster covers what happened after the ship disappeared — five hours of darkness and cold in the lifeboats, the arrival of Carpathia at dawn, and the ship that sat ten to twenty miles away watching distress rockets and did nothing. It’s a story with a clear hero and a clear villain, and both earned their reputations entirely. The free episode covers Ca...

Antonio López de Santa Anna was President of Mexico eleven times, fought the Texas Revolution, and declared himself the Napoleon of the West. He was also the man who, after losing his leg to cannon fire, had the limb preserved, paraded through Mexico City in a glass coffin, and buried with full military honors. Then a mob dug it up. Then he accidentally helped invent bubble gum. This is the strang...

Americans received 52.5 billion robocalls in 2025 — 160 per person, per year, most of them offering loans you never applied for. But where do these calls actually come from? This episode of Sidequests traces the full ecosystem: the fake websites harvesting your data, the brokers selling it dozens of times over, the overseas call centers placing millions of calls at near-zero cost, and the reason b...

Episode 8 of our ten part series The Titanic Disaster covers the two hours and forty minutes between the collision and the moment Titanic vanishes. The bow descends, the stern rises, the ship breaks in two, and 1,517 people die in water that is four degrees above freezing. The free episode follows the evacuation — the band assembling on deck, the lifeboats launching half-empty, the separations, th...

NASA has announced plans for a permanent lunar base. Which is exciting — and also something NASA has announced before. This episode of Sidequests covers the missions that were seriously planned, thoroughly engineered, and never flew: a human Venus flyby designed around existing Apollo hardware, a nuclear rocket engine that actually worked and could have reached Mars in the 1980s, a U.S. Army Moon...

Five moments in history when weather wasn't background — it was the deciding factor. A Scottish meteorologist's forecast that made D-Day possible. The Atlantic storms that destroyed the Spanish Armada when cannons couldn't. The Russian winter that turned Napoleon's invasion into one of history's greatest military catastrophes. The typhoons that protected Japan from Mongol conquest — twice — and ga...

Episode 7 of our ten part series The Titanic Disaster covers the last day. Sunday, April 14 — church services in the morning, elegant dinners in the evening, ice warnings arriving all day and going mostly unacted upon. Then, at 11:39 PM, Frederick Fleet sees a dark shape ahead. He rings the bell three times, grabs the telephone, and delivers the four words that ended an era: “Iceberg right ahead.”...

A volcano no one had heard of explodes. The sun goes pale. And somehow humanity responds with monsters and bikes. This Sidequest looks at 1816 — the Year Without a Summer. Famine in Ireland. Food riots in France and Germany. Mass westward migration out of New England as families abandoned farms that simply wouldn’t grow anything. Religious revivals. Apocalyptic panic. And in a villa on a cold, gra...

By 1945, the Allies had tried nearly everything to undermine Nazi Germany from the inside. Leaflets dropped from planes. Radio broadcasts. Forged documents. And then someone in the Office of Strategic Services — the forerunner to the CIA — had an idea that was either brilliant or completely unhinged, possibly both. What if they weaponized the mail? This week's Sidequests covers Operation Cornflake...

Episode 5 of our ten-part series on The Titanic Disaster takes place entirely before anything goes wrong. It’s Friday and Saturday, April 12 and 13. Ireland is 300 miles behind. America is still three days ahead. The engines are warming up — 386 miles Thursday to Friday, 519 miles Friday to Saturday, 546 on Sunday before the iceberg ends the count. The ship is a self-contained world of 2,208 peopl...

Before telegrams and treaty negotiations, before summits and press conferences, European diplomacy played out in royal courts where every detail was scrutinized — including, with surprising frequency, what was growing on your face. This Sidequest covers the War of the Whiskers: the era when a clean-shaven diplomat could cause an international incident, when ambassadors were quietly briefed on the...

In the fifth century BC, Athens was rising. Wealthier, more powerful, more ambitious than it had ever been. And Sparta — the dominant military power for generations — was watching, and growing afraid. What happened next gave us one of the most important ideas in the study of power and conflict: the Thucydides Trap. The historian Thucydides watched Athens and Sparta drag each other into a 27-year w...

Episode 5 of our ten-part series on The Titanic Disaster follows the ship to her final port: Queenstown, Ireland, April 11, 1912. One hundred twenty Irish emigrants board, carrying everything they own and leaving behind everything they know. Seven passengers disembark, including a Jesuit priest named Francis Browne whose telegram-ordered departure would save his life and preserve the most comprehe...

The monuments on the National Mall feel timeless. Inevitable. As if they rose from the earth fully formed.. of course the Washington Monument is there, of course it looks like that, of course the Lincoln Memorial anchors the western end of the Mall with the Reflecting Pool stretching out before it. None of it was inevitable. All of it was a fight. This week’s Sidequests traces the 200-year argumen...