There's More to That

Italian researcher Isabella Dalla Ragione has a most unusual job. An “arboreal archaeologist,” Dalla Ragione scours Renaissance paintings and medieval archives, discovering endangered fruits that might be revived. Her life’s work offers a possible solution to the problem of monocrops.  Year after year, agricultural giants cultivate the same varieties of the same fruits and vegetables, while many o...

Smithsonian magazine covers history, science and culture in the way only we can — through rich reporting sparked by our editors’ insatiable curiosity. On There’s More to That , meet the magazine’s journalists and hear what they think about the biggest issues of our time. Find out how much more there is to… almost everything.

We’re busy at work on our new season, which will hit your feeds later this month. In the meantime, we’re bringing you an episode of the Smithsonian Institution’s podcast Sidedoor to tide you over. Smithsonian curator of political history Jon Grinspan takes you inside the story of the Wide Awakes, a group of torch-bearing young activists who helped elect Abraham Lincoln and spurred the nation towar...

[First released in 2023.] The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was the only unit comprised entirely of Black women to have been deployed overseas during World War II, and it had served a critical function: clearing the backlog of mail that marked the only line of communication between American soldiers in Europe and their loved ones back home. In this episode, we speak with retired Army C...

After Hurricane Ike destroyed thousands of homes and inflicted an estimated $30 billion in damages in 2008, engineers hatched an ambitious plan to protect southeast Texas and its coastal refineries and shipping routes from violent storms. The $34 billion collaboration spearheaded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is a harbinger of the type of massive public works projects that could be required...

Have you ever felt embarrassed by the need to carry a towel, or even a fresh shirt, with you during the most sweltering months of the year? You shouldn’t. Sweating is one of the most remarkable ways our bodies protect themselves when the mercury heads north. With summer temperatures spiking around the world as the sweat-filled Olympic Games begin in Paris, we’re joined by Sarah Everts, a Smithsoni...

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Four decades ago, Pablo Escobar brought to his Medellín hideaway four hippopotamuses, the centerpieces of a menagerie that included llamas, cheetahs, lions, tigers, ostriches and other exotic fauna. After Colombian police shot Escobar dead in December 1993, veterinarians removed the animals—except the hippos, which were deemed too dangerous to approach. The hippos fled to the nearby Magdalena Rive...

The past hundred years have seen more than one high-profile prosecution branded as the “crime of the century.” The shocking 1924 crime that was among the first to carry the title turned out to be a harbinger of how public mania around criminal cases could influence the legal system, and how psychiatry would be used and abused by prosecutors and defense attorneys alike as the 20th century wore on a...

African cuisine has always been well represented in the United States, particularly in dishes characterized as “Southern” in origin, like gumbo or hoppin’ john. But even before chef Serigne Mbaye’ s New Orleans eatery Dakar NOLA was named the Best New Restaurant of 2024 at the James Beard Awards this week, the contributions of the African diaspora to the American diet had at last begun to enjoy a...

In 1918, Lulu Hunt Peters—one of the first women in America to earn a medical doctorate—published the best seller Diet and Health With Key to the Calories , making a name for herself as an apostle for weight reduction in an era when malnutrition was a far greater public health threat than obesity. She pioneered the idea of measuring food intake via the calorie, which at the time was an obscure uni...

Last summer, news reports of orcas deliberately tearing the propellers off of yachts in the Strait of Gibraltar thrilled observers who were eager to cast these intelligent and social pack hunters as class warriors striking a blow for the “common mammals” against the one percent. That turned out to be wishful thinking, according to guest Lori Marino , a biopsychologist who studies whale and dolphin...

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., it covered the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum under tons of ash. Millennia later, in the mid-18th century, archeologists began to unearth the city, including its famed libraries, but the scrolls they found were too fragile to be unrolled and read; their contents were thought to be lost forever. Only now, thanks to the advent of artificial intellig...

As highways encroach ever further into animal habitats, drivers and wildlife are in greater danger than ever. And off the beaten path, decaying old forest roads are inflicting damage as well. “Roads are this incredibly disruptive force all over the planet that are truly changing wild animals’ lives and our own lives in almost unfathomable, unaccountable ways,” says science journalist Ben Goldfarb,...

Eclipses have been a subject of fascination throughout human history, and the fact that we now have a clearer understanding of what they actually are—at least in the celestial mechanics sense—than we did in centuries past has not made them any less exciting. With the North American total solar eclipse just days away as we’re releasing this episode, and the next one visible from the contiguous Unit...

Before it was even published in 2006, historian James Swanson’s book Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer attracted the notice of Hollywood. After several prior attempts to adapt the nonfiction thriller for the screen, the first two episodes of the seven-part Apple TV+ miniseries Manhunt finally premiered on March 15, with the subsequent five arriving weekly. Meet Swanson — a self-descri...

Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have achieved a degree of power in the music industry that singer/songwriters of earlier eras like Joan Baez —as the folk icon tells us—never even contemplated. Six decades ago, Baez was part of a folk revival that regarded music not merely as entertainment but as a vessel for political engagement and social change. In the documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise , the now-83-y...

The facts of Sojourner Truth’s life are inspiring: Born into slavery in the late 1790s, she became an influential abolitionist and Pentecostal preacher, transfixing audiences from the mid 1840s through the late 1870s with her candid and powerful voice, not to mention her singing. Tall and strong, Truth was physically formidable, too. No one was using the term “intersectionality” in the 19th centur...

Christopher Nolan's epic new film "Oppenheimer" is no mere biopic… nor is it the first attempt to capture the father of the atomic bomb in fiction. We look at prior dramatizations of this very complicated man—including one wherein J. Robert Oppenheimer played himself!—and examine why they worked or didn't. In this episode: Physicist-turned-photographer Minesh Bacrania shares his experience photogr...

You can describe what a journalist does in any number of ways. One definition that’s as accurate as any is that a journalist is someone who liked having homework back when they were in school so much that they decided to keep doing homework for a career. That certainly describes the team here at Smithsonian magazine. We’re all big readers. So we thought that before our brief winter hiatus—a time w...

Photographer Drew Gardner has a passion for history. His long-term project,  “The Descendants,”  wherein he recreates famous portraits of historical figures featuring their direct offspring, is his most visible expression of this interest. But like a lot of people who study history, Gardner has in recent years begun to contemplate more deeply the question of whose stories have been judged worthy o...

The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP28, begins this week in Dubai. A new topic on the agenda this year is how wildfires are emerging as a serious health risk not just to those in their immediate vicinity, but even to people thousands of miles away. Last summer, smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted not only as far south as the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, but even...

Capturing a piece of an asteroid and bringing it to Earth is even more difficult than it is time-consuming. After four years in space, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx craft made a brief landing on the asteroid Bennu to collect samples of the ancient rock. Six months later, part of the spacecraft began its journey home to Earth, and earlier this fall, that sample collection canister landed, via parachute, in Uta...

Every Veterans Day, Jeremy Redmon thinks about his father, Donald Lee Redmon — an Air Force veteran who survived more than 300 combat missions over Southeast Asia, but who took his own life when Jeremy was 14. This year, Redmon traveled back to Hanoi with a group of former prisoners of war, many of whom had flown the same missions as his dad. Jeremy asked these veterans questions he was never able...

A true-life saga involving organized crime, racial prejudice, and evolving American identity, David Grann ’s 2017 nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I. seemed at first glance like a perfect fit for Martin Scorsese , the beloved filmmaker whose dozens of critically adored movies include Taxi Driver, GoodFellas, and The Departed . But when Jim Gray...