Long Shadow

Long Lead & PRX•www.longshadowpodcast.com

Through a series of riveting, complex narratives, LONG SHADOW makes sense of what people know — and what they thought they knew — about the most pivotal moments in U.S. history, including Waco, Columbine, Y2K, 9/11, COVID-19, January 6, and beyond.

Hosted by Pulitzer-finalist historian, author, and journalist Garrett Graff, this Peabody-nominated podcast has been called “rigorous, authoritative, and an electrifying listen” by the Financial Times and honored as one of the year's best podcasts by The Atlantic, Audible, Mashable, Rolling Stone, and The Week. A winner of the Edward R. Murrow Award and the RFK Human Rights Journalism Award, it has also been honored with eight Signal Awards, including for Best History, Best Documentary, Best Technology, and Best Activism, Public Service, & Social Impact Podcast.

The second season of LONG SHADOW has been added to the history program at the University of Houston and the third season has been integrated into Harvard Law School's curriculum on the Second Amendment.

Season 4

LONG SHADOW: BREAKING THE INTERNET

LONG SHADOW: BREAKING THE INTERNET retraces 30 years of web history — a tangle of GIFs, blogs, apps, and hashtags — to answer the bewildering question many ask when they go online today: “How did we get here?”

It’s the story of mankind’s greatest invention, a tool that gave everyone access to all the world’s information and unlocked democracy across the globe. But LONG SHADOW: BREAKING THE INTERNET is also about the biggest crisis facing society today: how the web's unlimited feed of data morphed into a firehose of hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and lies that divided Americans over things we once agreed on, like science, diversity, and even democracy itself.

Chronicling innovations, revolutions, cyber attacks, and meltdowns across seven episodes, this limited series podcast untangles the web in a way you’ve never considered before. Featuring memes and moments you know — like when the world became transfixed by the color of a dress — and others you don’t, but should — like how people sent death threats to the woman who posted that meme online — LONG SHADOW: BREAKING THE INTERNET both scales the heights of internet virality and plumbs the depths of social media's depravity.

Within weeks of its launch in 2021, LONG SHADOW became a No. 1 history show on Apple Podcasts, and its first season, 9/11’s LINGERING QUESTIONS, won Best History Podcast at the inaugural Signal Awards. Its second season, RISE OF THE AMERICAN FAR RIGHT, was named Best Podcast at the 2024 Edward R. Murrow Awards. IN GUNS WE TRUST, the show’s third season produced in collaboration with The Trace, was nominated for a Peabody Award and awarded the RFK Human Rights Journalism Award for its coverage of America’s gun violence epidemic.

LONG SHADOW: BREAKING THE INTERNET premiered June 24, 2025 and won three Signal Awards (for Best Technology, Documentary, and History podcast) as well as an Anthem Award for Best Responsible Technology Awareness.

LONG SHADOW is produced by the award-winning journalism studio Long Lead and distributed by PRX.

For more visit www.longlead.com and www.longshadowpodcast.com.

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Episodes

Question Everything: "I Believed Sandy Hook Was a Hoax" (Bonus)

Long Shadow listeners: Today we’re sharing a great episode of the Question Everything podcast in our feed because it's the perfect crossover between "In Guns We Trust" and "Breaking the Internet." Propagandist? Truth teller? Influencer? Question Everything unravels the contested work of journalists and the moral complexities surrounding the stories that impact us all. Episode description: Kate grew up believing the Sandy Hook school shooting was an elaborate false flag operation. For years she t...

Mar 25, 2026•47 min

Panic World: Russiagate (Bonus)

Long Shadow listeners: Today we’re sharing a great episode of the Panic World podcast in our feed because we think you’ll like it. Panic World is a weekly chat show that explores how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality — which is pretty much the story of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet , only we do it in a longform narrative format. The show's host, Ryan Broderick, knows a lot about the web, but he doesn’t quite know what to think about Russian interference in th...

Jan 07, 2026•1 hr 2 min

The Red Pill

A toxic army of trolls goes after women in the gaming industry, giving birth to an online movement of disaffected men. This "manosphere" contributes to the resurgence of Donald Trump and a constitutional crisis that holds American democracy in the balance.

Aug 05, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 4Ep. 7

Going Viral

After the twin disasters of the massacre in Myanmar and the 2016 election, social media undergoes a reckoning in the halls of Congress… until a novel virus uncorks a global pandemic and a contagion of hoaxes, conspiracies, and lies online.

Jul 29, 2025•55 min•Season 4Ep. 6

Weapons of Mass Distraction

North Korea hacks a movie studio over a screwball comedy, inspiring America’s enemies to launch cyberattacks against the U.S. To roil an election, one even unleashes a network of trolls pitting ordinary Americans against each other, online and in the streets.

Jul 22, 2025•44 min•Season 4Ep. 5

Enragement Equals Engagement

With the dawn of the newsfeed, Facebook begins a mass experiment on the human psyche — what we like and hate, what makes us happy and angry. Over the course of a decade, its algorithm drives the world to like, comment, and eventually, kill.

Jul 15, 2025•37 min•Season 4Ep. 4

The Facebook Revolution

In Egypt, a ragtag group of young activists uses social media to spark a revolution and remove a dictator from power. They credit Facebook with the fall of the regime… until the platform is turned against them.

Jul 08, 2025•41 min•Season 4Ep. 3

Establishing Connection

At the dawn of the new millennium, the internet yields powerful tools for coordinating and organizing online. From the 9/11 hijackers to flashmob pranksters to activists, it puts power in the hands of the people, for better and for worse.

Jul 01, 2025•49 min•Season 4Ep. 2

The End of the World as We Know It

The internet as we know it today is a harrowing landscape. But in its quirky infancy, the web changed everything about how we lived, shared, shopped, and communicated. Then a computer bug threatened to shut it all down forever.

Jun 24, 2025•42 min•Season 4Ep. 1

Trailer: Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet

When was the last time you felt good about the internet? Today’s online landscape is a harrowing one. People screaming at each other on social media. Violent videos going viral. Cyberbullying, racism, misogyny. Back in the day, the web gave power to the people, and going online could actually be fun. In LONG SHADOW: BREAKING THE INTERNET, Pulitzer-finalist historian, author, and journalist Garrett Graff retraces 30 years of web history — a tangle of GIFs, blogs, apps, and hashtags — to answer th...

Jun 17, 2025•3 min

Generation Lockdown

Raised on active shooter and lockdown drills, Gen Z has endured an onslaught of violence — and emerged inspiring a wave of activism, a powerful gun safety movement, and hope.

May 22, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 3Ep. 6

A Good Guy with a Gun

Easy to handle and easy to conceal, handguns went boom in the 2000s, the same moment when many Americans — falsely and tragically — began to equate guns with safety.

May 14, 2024•49 min•Season 3Ep. 5

The Right to Bear AR-15s

After a devastating, now largely forgotten, mass-shooting prompted lawmakers to take aim at assault weapons in the 1990s, their ban backfired — and caused gun sales to explode.

May 07, 2024•49 min•Season 3Ep. 4

The Hardliners

In the 1980s, a pair of intimidating NRA leaders recast the organization in their own imposing images as the group went on an all-out offensive against gun regulations.

Apr 23, 2024•46 min•Season 3Ep. 3

Shall Not Be Infringed

The Second Amendment may have begun as a Constitutional afterthought, but a late 20th-century ideological shift caused some to view it as a sacred right in the name of self defense.

Apr 16, 2024•34 min•Season 3Ep. 2

A Uniquely American Problem

Mass shootings have plagued the U.S. for generations. But in 1999, when shots rang out in a suburban Denver school, it was different. What changed? Everything.

Apr 09, 2024•41 min•Season 3Ep. 1

Trailer: Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust

This season host Garrett Graff, in collaboration with The Trace, recounts how a very specific, carefully manufactured fear has driven explosive demand for guns across the U.S. It’s the history of how firearms went from being an ordinary part of rural American life to a menacing element in modern society — and the epidemic of gun violence that’s come with it. How did we get here — how did America get so divided over guns — and can we we find a way forward? Find out, this season on LONG SHADOW. LO...

Apr 02, 2024•4 min

January 6: Day of the Rope

Emboldened by COVID lockdown protests and fighting Black Lives Matter demonstrators, far-right extremists and white power groups prepare to overthrow the government on Jan. 6… or a later date.

May 24, 2023•56 min•Season 2Ep. 7

MAGA: American Carnage

After Trump’s election, far-right extremism explodes, and internet racism boils over into the real world. From Charleston to Charlottesville to Christchurch, experts warn of a race war.

May 17, 2023•51 min•Season 2Ep. 6

The Bundys: A Call to Arms

When the government seizes Cliven Bundy’s cattle over unpaid grazing fees, militias like the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers—which are later at 1/6—aid a standoff on his ranch.

May 10, 2023•44 min•Season 2Ep. 5

Info War: From the Fringe to Fox News

Using conspiracy theories and anger to amass enormous audiences in the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh and Bill Cooper pave the way for Fox News to mainstream far-right outrage.

May 03, 2023•44 min•Season 2Ep. 4

Oklahoma City: Sic Semper Tyrannis

Experts claimed 1995’s Oklahoma City bombing was a lone-wolf event, but Timothy McVeigh’s act of retribution for the Waco siege, shows how domestic extremism has evolved.

Apr 26, 2023•41 min•Season 2Ep. 3

Ruby Ridge: The Revolution Begins

The government lays siege to Ruby Ridge, Idaho, where Randy Weaver and his family are hiding out in the shadow of a growing white supremacist movement, a year before Waco.

Apr 19, 2023•57 min•Season 2Ep. 2

Waco: The Spark

Out of the flames of a tragic government mishap—the 1993 siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas—the modern far-right movement is born.

Apr 12, 2023•39 min•Season 2Ep. 1

Trailer: Long Shadow: Rise of the American Far Right

The Ruby Ridge raid, the Waco siege at the Branch Davidian compound, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Jan. 6 insurrection… they are all explosive moments in recent U.S. history. But connect the dots between these—and other—seemingly disparate, violent events, and you’ll answer some of the most existential questions facing the U.S. today: How did America get the far right so wrong? What will it take now to get it right? In LONG SHADOW’s first season, host Garrett Graff examined the lingering questi...

Mar 29, 2023•3 min

Long Lead Presents: The Depths She'll Reach

Out now from Long Lead, The Depths She’ll Reach, the story of how Alenka Artnik emerged from mental health struggles to become one of the world’s most elite athletes. A multimedia feature by Xan Rice and Daan Verhoeven, produced by Long Lead. https://onjustonebreath.com/

Nov 18, 2021•2 min

How do we move on from 9/11?

When we think about 9/11, we often only think of the tremendous loss of life on that day. But what we sometimes forget about are those who made it; the thousands of people who survived the attacks, but have had to carry it with them every day since. Firefighter Jay Jonas and Port Authority Police Officer Will Jimeno were in the Twin Towers on September 11 — 100 stories of the World Trade Center fell on top each of them. But they got back up and survived. How did they move on from this attack? An...

Sep 11, 2021•53 min•Season 1Ep. 8

What was the Saudi connection to 9/11?

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, which was also the home of al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama Bin Laden. In the days after September 11, dozens of his friends, family members and business associates left the U.S. on secret flights bound for The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. That has led to questions that four presidents have avoided answering: What role did the Saudi government play in the attacks? What did it know? Even worse, did it help?...

Sep 10, 2021•30 min•Season 1Ep. 7

Who was the 20th hijacker?

Immediately after 9/11, investigators began piecing together the plot. In the flight manifests, they discovered a pattern: A team of five terrorists hijacked every plane that day, except for one. United Airlines Flight 93 had only four hijackers. Investigators believed one person was missing from that group. Who was the 20th hijacker — if there even was one? And is there a 9/11 hijacker still on the loose?

Sep 08, 2021•39 min•Season 1Ep. 6

Could 9/11 have been stopped before it happened?

Before 9/11, FBI Special Agent John O’Neill kept setting off alarms about the emerging terrorist organization al-Qaeda and their mysterious leader Osama Bin Laden. As a result of his warnings the FBI knew terrorists were planning a big attack and the CIA even had eyes on two of the eventual hijackers prior to the attacks. So what went wrong? Why didn’t they capture the hijackers? What more could law enforcement have done to stop the attacks? And could they have been prevented?...

Sep 03, 2021•46 min•Season 1Ep. 5

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