The durian, a spiky fruit that grows across Southeast Asia, has a polarizing reputation for its pungent odor and strong taste. There are the durian haters — people who experience waves of revulsion at the mere thought of consuming one. And then there are the superfans who sing its praises and travel the world to experience the rare and complex bliss it inspires on the palate. Those who relish this fruit say there’s a lot to love. It can be eaten raw (shortly after falling from the tree) or prepa...
Jun 26, 2025•24 min•Season 2Ep. 12
Natural Trap Cave is a pit in northern Wyoming into which countless animals have fallen and met their untimely demise since the Pleistocene. Paleontologists today find the cave a treasure trove — a stunning record of the species that have long roamed the area. The mammalian fossils left behind shed light on the climate, food sources and migration patterns of these species from earlier eras. Careful excavation work over the years that has involved sifting for bones, extracting ancient DNA, and lo...
Jun 12, 2025•27 min•Season 2Ep. 11
In the fall of 1944, Japanese fighters opened fire on a wave of U.S. planes near Palau, including a bomber carrying pilot Jay Ross Manown Jr., gunner Anthony Di Petta and navigator Wilbur Mitts. Their aircraft crashed into the sea, and the three men were “presumed dead.” They were assigned by the Navy, like so many others, to a purgatorial category—not likely to be alive, but not declared dead, either. Decades later, a group known as Project Recover worked relentlessly to track down the wreckage...
May 29, 2025•38 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Tourism is surging in many places around the world—swarmed national parks, throngs of visitors amassing in churches and museums, and sidewalk cafes overburdened with diners. In this episode, we’d like to offer a less crowded way to be a tourist: consider going underground. This summer is a Jubilee Year in Rome, so the city will be more packed than ever. But below the traffic jams and bustle of pedestrians in the streets of Rome lie its subterranean sites, which include ancient aqueducts, pagan s...
May 15, 2025•21 min•Season 2Ep. 9
After multiple wildfires ripped through greater Los Angeles earlier this year, Californians were left to rebuild communities and grapple with the loss of life, nature and property. Thousands of homes were destroyed, and as many as 180,000 residents were under evacuation orders until the flames could be controlled. Unfortunately, this seems to be the new order in California; officials are already working to prepare for the next fire season. In this episode, host Ari Daniel speaks with photographe...
May 01, 2025•29 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Two hundred and fifty years ago this month, silversmith Paul Revere took to his horse on a midnight ride to warn American rebels that British troops were approaching. The famous ride and an ensuing battle at Lexington and Concord touched off the American Revolution. But there are other stories involving the role that enslaved Africans and Southern colonists played in launching and sustaining the rebellion that led to the founding of the United States of America. Host Ari Daniel speaks with Nikki...
Apr 17, 2025•29 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Baseball was a way of life in the camps that incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II. The United States government stripped the Americans who lived in these camps of their liberties, but for those communities, having played the game for generations, baseball brought them closer to each other and, paradoxically, to their country. At Manzanar, one such site at the foot of the Sierra Nevada in California, dozens of baseball and softball teams played regularly. Decades after the camps cl...
Apr 03, 2025•38 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Native bees in the United States are dying due to pesticides, disease and habitat loss. These insects play a critical role in nature and on farms, yet we know very little about native bees in part because they’re a challenge to study. That’s where a legion of bee enthusiasts and amateur experts, called “beeple,” come in. Armed with nets and jars, they fan out across the country to find, document and study native bees, both common and rare. Host Ari Daniel interviews Smithsonian writer Susan Frei...
Mar 20, 2025•25 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Before he was a civil rights activist, James Felder was a member of the elite U.S. Honor Guard who helped bury John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery after his assassination in 1963. In a move that was unrehearsed, after laying the casket to rest, the members of the Honor Guard placed their military hats upon the gravesite in what James Felder called “a final salute to President Kennedy.” Years later, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis commissioned a bronze wreath to be made in honor of her husb...
Mar 06, 2025•40 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Dinosaurs are often thought of as aggressors—giant beasts that dominated our planet for millions of years. But these prehistoric animals almost certainly had a softer side. In the last decade, researchers have gained tantalizing insights into the sex lives and mating habits of these ancient reptiles. In this episode, Smithsonian contributing writer Riley Black describes new evidence that reveals how and when dinosaurs mated—including ancient behavior recorded in rock, a new theory around dinosau...
Feb 20, 2025•30 min•Season 2Ep. 3
For millennia, auroras have both enchanted and haunted human beings. Ancient lore is filled with myths attempting to explain what caused the celestial phenomenon. More recent historic documentation of auroras may even help us predict damaging solar storms in the future. As we head into a year expected to bring the best northern lights in two decades, we consider the science behind auroras and why they are suddenly so plentiful—even in places that hardly qualify as northern. In this episode, Jo M...
Feb 06, 2025•30 min•Season 2Ep. 2
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 other varieties have fallen to the wayside. Monocrops contribute to climate change and are highly susc...
Jan 23, 2025•26 min•Season 2Ep. 1
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.
Jan 16, 2025•7 min
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 toward Civil War. Grinspan recently wrote about the Wide Awakes in an issue of Smithsonian magazine. We’l...
Jan 09, 2025•36 min
[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 Colonel Edna Cummings , who made it her business to get the 6888 their belated recognition, and with ...
Dec 19, 2024•38 min
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 to protect coastal cities like New York and Miami as sea levels rise and hurricanes become less pred...
Aug 08, 2024•33 min•Season 1Ep. 26
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 Smithsonian contributor and the author a marvelous book called The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Persp...
Jul 25, 2024•30 min•Season 1Ep. 25
We're over here making podcasts, and you're over there listening. Let's bridge that gap! We want to know more about you, like: why you're listening, what your favorite topics are, and what Smithsonian magazine can do to make "There's More to That" even better. Tell us what you think at smithsonianmag.com/podcastsurvey .
Jul 15, 2024•34 sec
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 River and multiplied. Today, the descendants of Escobar’s hippos are believed to number nearly 200. Thei...
Jul 11, 2024•30 min•Season 1Ep. 24
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 and gave way to the 21st. Smithsonian editor Meilan Solly introduces us to teens Nathan Leopold and R...
Jun 27, 2024•35 min•Season 1Ep. 23
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 long-overdue reappraisal via reality television, Netflix docuseries and, most important, a number of...
Jun 13, 2024•27 min•Season 1Ep. 22
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 unit of measurement familiar only to chemists. A century later, the Centers for Disease Control and Pre...
May 30, 2024•37 min•Season 1Ep. 21
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 intelligence. She told us that these six-ton whales were just having fun—if they wanted to harm the...
May 20, 2024•29 min•Season 1Ep. 20
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 intelligence and machine learning, scholars of the ancient world have partnered with computer programmers to...
May 02, 2024•36 min•Season 1Ep. 19
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, author of the 2023 book Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. Ben wrote ...
Apr 18, 2024•26 min•Season 1Ep. 18
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 United States not due until 2044, we’ll learn about the eclipses from astronomy obsessive (and Smithsoni...
Apr 02, 2024•29 min•Season 1Ep. 17
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-described Lincoln obsessive — and hear about what moved him to write the book, what his role in its long-g...
Mar 21, 2024•33 min•Season 1Ep. 16
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-year-old musician and activist reflects on her career and legacy. Smithsonian senior editor Jennie Ro...
Mar 07, 2024•32 min•Season 1Ep. 15
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 century, but Truth embodied this idea, declaring that her Blackness and her womanhood were equally essenti...
Feb 22, 2024•38 min•Season 1Ep. 14
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 photographing inside the top-secret labs at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where J. Robert Oppenheimer and...
Jan 23, 2024•19 min•Season 1Ep. 1
