After one year of island confinement, your host joins AlamoFort – a clubhouse alternative, and discovers a new community in the #covid1984 room. Plus the true meaning of the Island of the Blue Dolphins.
This year your host wrote an original crime thriller for Audible Originals. Listen to the first chapter here, then go to Audible.com/Convolution and you can listen to the rest of the story. Rhea Seehorn leads an incredible cast as cybercrimes detective Sydney Birch. This 10-part police drama begins in Los Angeles with an investigation into a group of con men using machine learning to improve their scams and ends in Tibet with a long con involving reincarnation and an evolved artificial intelligence.
As the Trump years finally come to an end, your host contemplates collective guilt and shame.
In 1945 Thomas Mann ignited a controversy when he wrote “there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt, and ruin.” After the German writers Walter Von Molo and Frank Thieß accused Mann of disparaging the good German writers who crafted a space of inner emmigration, a space Hitler was unable to conquer Mann went further. He wrote, “All books published in Germany between 1933 and 1945 should be pulped.”
On May 10th 1941 Rudolf Hess flew from Germany to Scotland. He hoped to bring the Nazis and the British together. He failed. But the details behind his flight remain one of the greatest mysteries of World War II. Historians and Amateur scholars have spent decades trying to unravel this mystery. On this episode we look into one of the strangest theories of them all.
This episode is part of a network-wide project to welcome Over the Road, Radiotopia’s newest show, into the family.
May 10th, 1941 wasn’t Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess’s first choice for a date to fly to Britain to make a peace deal – but, according to his astrologer it was the best chance for success!
Ian Fleming, the author of James Bond, had an older brother that was also a Mi6 agent… and a novelist. Arguably his novel The Flying Visit has had as much of an effect on the world as we know it as his brother’s more famous novels.
When the Nazis Invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd 1941, Churchil pledged his support to the Soviet People. Germany was now fighting a war on two fronts. Hess had failed to forge an alliance between the Nazis and the Capitalists.
Or did he?
Six months later and still in France your host tries to make sense of his situation: Refugee? Exile? Retiree? Plus a conversation about the writing life with novelist Todd London whose new book was published just as the Coronavirus shut the world down
When your host dropped off his kid at school in France, the child pulled him aside and whispered, “Please, papa – don’t speak! This way no-one will know you can’t parle francais…”
So Benjamen is finally taking French classes.
Thanks to the coronavirus, Todd London never got a chance to do a reading from his new book — until now!! Todd a section from If You See Him, Let Me Know about celebrating a president’s demise!
Broken Windows policing is one of the reasons so many people are out protesting in the streets right now.
We revisit CRIME FILES a Police Foundation TV show from the 80s to better understand where Broken Windows comes from. PLUS 30 years ago falling glass from a Trump Tower window struck and killed one of two pedestrians. We go looking for the one who survived.
In 1982, the Police Foundation created a TV show with Broken Windows policing creator James Q. WIlson in the host chair. Here we can see the underlying principles of the theory of policing that dominates today.
The following year, Donald Trump killed a man on the street with glass from his tower. A nearby woman was merely injured. Almost 40 years later… does Trump finish the job?
My good friend Sean Cole guest hosted TAL this week and we spoke about my trip to Kenya and going karura so I am going to post the original again to the feed for the folks who may find their way here.
While reporting in Nairobi, Kenya a group of striking Uber drivers turn your host on to a revolutionary strategy of resistance. Plus: stuck in a broken elevator!
Listen as your host meets Captain, struggles to get around Kenya, and finds the Mau Mau Cave in which the freedom fighters hid from the colonial British government.
Curse the USA and America will strike you up. That’s what happened to the Man Without a Country. They stuffed him in a hot air balloon and sentenced him to ride sea to shining sea for the rest of his days. I made my own version of Edward Everett Hale’s classic tale back in the early aughts. It was one of the first long form audio fiction pieces I ever wrote. Sadly, like many items in the ToE vaults the relevance is increasing with age. Here is a condensed remix for your summer 2020 travels, whether it’s a trip across the country or a back and forth from the kitchen to the bedroom. You can find the original 3 part series in the ToE archive.
As statues of slaveholders and Confederate War losers come down, we imagine what could go up in their stead, revisiting a conversation with artist and rememorialization expert Chris Vargas. And since the Trump administration has banned any official raising of the rainbow flag to commemorate Pride month we revisit our audio memorial to the artist Henry Darger.
The artist Chris E. Vargas walks us thru his replacement for the Gay Liberation Monument outside the Stonewall Inn. Hear the full story on Institutionalized.
Henry Darger is one of the art world’s most famous mysteries. Was Henry part of a Gay or Transgender subculture? We have no way of knowing for sure. But Jim Elledge reveals in his biography of Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy that he definitely had a long term serious relationship with a man.
As the island (and the world) reopens, your host tries his best to join the celebrations, Dr. Lauren Powell explains the risks of protesting during a pandemic and ToE’s special correspondent Chris brings us inside the COVID19 task force!
ToE’s man in D.C. “Chris” tells us what dr. fauci is like in person and the REAL reason the US federal government never got serious about coronavirus testing (i.e. trump is racist).
Benjamen sits at a cafe as the french celebrate déconfinement. Not a lot of masks around… and it starts to rain. Meanwhile, he doubts his abilities as a father when Artaud tells his zoom class that he wants to grow up to be a police officer.
Dr Lauren Powell, head of health care at Time’s Up, tells us about how racism is at the core of both police violence and the coronavirus’s disproportionate impact on black people.
Read her op-ed here!
