Things That Go Boom
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Things That Go Boom
Stories about the ins, outs, and whathaveyous of what keeps us safe. Hosted by Laicie Heeley.
Episoade Recente
105 episoade
Taser Town
When a 77-year-old Vietnam vet and former city councilman takes on a luxury apartment development in Scottsdale, Arizona, it sounds like classic NIMBY...
Big Promises, Small Print
Why do local governments keep handing out tax breaks to defense contractors… even when the promised jobs don’t materialize? In the first episode of ou...
Trailer: MIC Drop
Across the country — from DC to Los Angeles to Chicago — the military is more visible in daily life than it’s been in years. But behind the boots on t...
MAGA, Mahmoud Khalil, and the War for Free Speech on Campus
Mahmoud Khalil became the face of Palestinian rights at Columbia University when the Syrian-born refugee refused to wear a mask and negotiated on beha...
Hit Print for War
If you live in the US, buying a gun can be as easy as going to Walmart. In countries with strict gun laws, such as most of Europe or Australia, you ne...
It’s All an Illusion
Nearly everyone has played dress up at some point in their lives, whether putting on mom or dad’s clothes as kids, for Halloween, as their favorite Ma...
A Walkman and a Wire
Initially assigned to $100 million bank failure investigations, Mike German’s FBI career took a pivotal turn in 1992, when he went undercover to infil...
Pardon Me? Pardon You
True to his promise, on the first day of Donald Trump’s second term as president, he pardoned more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the at...
The Militias Next Door
Amy Cooter has been studying US militias since 2008 when, as a graduate student in Michigan, she attended a public meeting of a group that was thought...
What a Tipping Point Looks Like
In 1970, Canada’s streets were full of troops and the country was on edge. Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte had been captured by a militant Fren...
Season 10: Coming Soon!
When Members of Congress are sworn into office, they say an oath.
To protect the country from all enemies… foreign and domestic.
But wha...
Monologues (The War Horse Sessions): The Reason Why Soldiers’ Christmas Care Packages Wind Up in the Trash
When former US Navy Intelligence Officer Andrew McCormick spent the holiday season in Kandahar in 2013, attempts at holiday cheer were everywhere. But...
Monologues (The War Horse Sessions): One Step From Nuclear War, and I Didn’t Even Know It
One night In 1968, Ed Meagher was finishing his last shift at Clark Airways, which included authenticating and repeating messages for the nuclear-arme...
Monologues (The War Horse Sessions): What Poetry Taught Me About Moving Past War
This month on Things That Go Boom, we’re passing the mic to three veterans to share their memories in their words.
In this first entry: When pa...
Bringing it Home
After a season spent examining feminist foreign policies around the world, we turn our attention back to the US. Will the US adopt a feminist foreign...
Where Are the Women, Really?
Political Scientist Cynthia Enloe is, arguably, the reason we’re all here. She was one of the first to explore gender in international relations, and...
Is Anybody Listening?
As civilian casualties mount in Gaza and many more conflicts around the world kill and displace vulnerable people, we ask, "What can feminist foreign...
The End of the World as We Know It
When news of a new disaster seems to roll in every day… it can feel like there’s little hope.
But what if we had… another option? Not just to re...
Inside Poland’s Abortion Crossroads
When does something as deeply personal as abortion become a matter of foreign policy?
Maybe when it becomes a stand-in for national values and b...
The War at Home
Mexico's gotten a lot of praise for its feminist foreign policy — despite ongoing femicide in the country. But Mexican women are doing more than just...
Fika and Feminism: Part 2
It took two years, after holdups from Turkey and Hungary, but Sweden has officially joined NATO. A move not everyone in Sweden is super psyched about....
Fika and Feminism: Part 1
This season on Things That Go Boom, we’re on a mission to figure out this new thing spreading like wildfire across the world: feminist foreign policy....
Season 9: The F-Word
With more than 50 elections set to take place around the world, 2024 will be a battle for democracy. It will also be a battle for peace. Because after...
Things That Go Boom Introduces: Click Here
Click Here is a podcast, hosted by Dina Temple-Raston, that tells true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world.
Earlier t...
Well, What Do You Know?
What do swarms of autonomous drones, facial recognition, and nuclear test site monitoring have in common? They are all things we were still curious ab...
Least Cost Paths
On Sunday, the people of Poland cast their votes in an election that some have called a battle for the country’s soul. When we released this episode,...
Tobacco, Trust, and the Artist Formerly Known as Twitter
We’re about a year out from a presidential election, and former President Donald Trump is leading the Republican pack in spite of his supporters’ atta...
Will the Internet Suck Us Dry?
When we say that we’re going to store something “in the cloud” it sounds like an ethereal place somewhere in the atmosphere. But the online cloud is g...
Who Gets To Shut It All Down?
Internet blackouts — when internet service is shut down in a country or region — have become much more common over the last decade. But who gets to de...
How to Break a Fish
It’s one of our biggest problems in 2023, and it can feel distinctly human. But it's not. All sorts of animals deal with all sorts of misinformation e...
Lost in Translation
Greg is an artist whose clients include Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons. And much like a lot of the folks striking in Hollywood right now...
Can You Hack a Nuke?
In the age of Oppenheimer, nuclear weapons didn’t have much to do with computers. And, for a long time, most nukes were running on 1970s-era floppy di...
The Internet Is at the Bottom of the Sea
We need the internet. No, seriously. In 2023, the digital realm isn’t so much a portal as it is the undercurrent of our lives: The web carries our cul...
Coming Soon: Troubleshooting
You know the internet — that big, vast, expanse that powers our lives and every single thing we do. It’s all we seem to talk about these days: spyware...
How a US Reporter Was Imprisoned in Putin’s Russia
We’re hard at work on Season 8 of Things That Go Boom, coming your way July 10. But in the meantime, we wanted to drop in and share a special episode...
Getting L-A-O-D
America’s war on communism in southeast Asia dragged the entire region into the fray, and the impacts are still an ever-present danger. (You might rem...
Mr. Fonio
There are tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of edible plants in the world. But humans only cultivate a couple hundred of those at any significant s...
What’s Next for Brazil After Bolsonaro?
Just two years ago, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was in prison. It’s a fairytale-like comeback story. But his life is also a food sto...
Can Cluster Bombs Show Us How To Stop a Nuclear War?
Despite being banned, anti-personnel landmines and unexploded submunitions still litter fields from Bosnia to Bangladesh. And they’re even being used...
How Xi Jinping Plans to Fill China’s ‘Rice Bowl’
One morning in the 2010s, a rural midwestern farmer called the cops. There was a guy in a suit sniffing around a field near town. A big SUV dropped hi...