Best Dark Dial Studios Podcasts (2025)

51
What Up Holmes? 35:12

Play Pause

3d ago35:12

35:12

Love it or hate it, the freedom to say obnoxious and subversive things is the quintessence of what makes America America. But our say-almost-anything approach to free speech is actually relatively recent, and you can trace it back to one guy: a Supreme Court justice named Oliver Wendell Holmes. Even weirder, you can trace it back to one seemingly o…

1
Content Warning 29:23

10d ago29:23

29:23

Over the past five years TikTok has radically changed the online world. But trust us when we say, it’s not how you’d expect. Today we continue our yearslong exploration of what you can and can’t post online. We look at how Facebook’s approach to free speech has evolved since Trump’s victory. How TikTok upended everything we see. And what all this m…

1
Creation Story 34:53

17d ago34:53

34:53

Ella al-Shamahi is one part Charles Darwin, one part Indiana Jones. She braves war zones and pirate-infested waters to collect fossils from prehistoric caves, fossils that help us understand the origin of our species. Her recent hit BBC / PBS series Human follows her around the globe trying to piece together the unlikely story of how early humans c…

1
Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl 45:29

24d ago45:29

45:29

This is the story of a three-year-old girl and the highest court in the land. The Supreme Court case Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl is a legal battle that has entangled a biological father, a heart-broken couple, and the tragic history of Native American children taken from their families. We originally released this story back in 2013, when that gir…

1
The Longest Drive 24:13

27d ago24:13

24:13

The Longest Drive An entry from the Secret Library Grayson thought it was just another long drive, until the road refused to end. A diner that shouldn’t exist, a trucker who won’t stop following him, and a book that doesn’t want to be left behind. Some journeys don’t take you anywhere... they keep you. From the shelves of the Secret Library comes a…

1101
Voice 1:06:56

1M ago1:06:56

1:06:56

Over the course of millions of years, human voices have evolved to hold startling power. These clouds of vibrating air carry crucial information about who we are–and we rely on them to push ourselves up and out into the physical world. This week, we’re on a journey to understand how we got our unique sonic fingerprint, the power it affords us, and …

1
The Devourer’s Delight - The Secret Library 22:41

1M ago22:41

22:41

A mysterious velvet bound cookbook. A rainbow layered cake that promises beauty with every bite. A woman who wanted to be seen no matter the cost. In this haunting entry from the Secret Library, temptation rises like sponge in the oven, and hunger takes on a life of its own. Jenny just wanted to feel beautiful. The cake made sure she never stopped,…

1
The Spark of Life 36:01

1M ago36:01

36:01

In the 1920s, a Russian biologist studying onion roots made a surprising discovery: underground, down in the darkness, it seemed like the cells inside the onion roots were making their own … light. The “onion root experiment” went on to become something of a cult classic in science, and eventually the biologically-made light was dubbed “biophotons.…

1
The Candlelight Manuscript — The Secret Library 12:34

1M ago12:34

12:34

Dark tales dwell on the shelves of The Secret Library, books that don’t just tell stories… they invite you in. In this episode, one such volume is opened by candlelight. But some books are better left unread.By Dark Dial Studios

1
The Hollow Truth - Part 3 The Hollow House 6:56

1M ago6:56

6:56

The search for answers reaches its breaking point. In the basement, fragments of memory blur with reality, and the line between the hunter and the hunted collapses. The Hollow House holds its final secret, but some truths are more terrifying than lies.By Dark Dial Studios

1
Truth in the Hollow — Part Two, The Hollow House. 20:09

1M ago20:09

20:09

The search for answers grows darker. A letter, a name, and a shadow at the window, pushes the investigation deeper into fear and obsession. Every clue seems to bring the truth within reach, but the closer it comes, the closer something else draws near.By Dark Dial Studios

1
Los Frikis 33:07

2M ago33:07

33:07

How a group of 80’s Cuban misfits found rock-and-roll and created a revolution within a revolution, going into exile without ever leaving home. Reporter Luis Trelles brings us the story of punk rock’s arrival in Cuba and a small band of outsiders who sentenced themselves to death and set themselves free. We originally released this episode back in …

1
Hollow House: Episode 1- The Signal 9:58

2M ago9:58

9:58

In 1984, the Warren family was discovered dead inside their home, no answers, only silence. Now, years later, one man steps inside that same house, where the quiet hum of something unseen still waits. What he uncovers is only the beginning of the horror.By Dark Dial Studios

1
Screaming Into the Void 57:16

2M ago57:16

57:16

In August we performed a live taping of the show from a theater perched on the edge of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River, overshadowed by the wide open night sky. Three stories about voids. One about a fish that screams into the night – and the mystery of its counterpart that doesn’t. Another about a group of women who gazed at the night sky …

1
Music Hat 31:24

2M ago31:24

31:24

With this episode, we’re putting on our music hat. For a program that relies so much on scoring and sound, it’s not often we talk about the musicians and the music they make that inspire us. Today, that changes. Today, we bring you two stories. Each about musicians that our former host and creator of Radiolab, Jad Abumrad, loves. We originally rele…

1
The Medical Matchmaking Machine 1:01:41

2M ago1:01:41

1:01:41

As he finished his medical school exam, David Fajgenbaum felt off. He walked down to the ER and checked himself in. Soon he was in the ICU with multiple organ failure. The only drug for his condition didn’t work. He had months to live, if that. If he was going to survive, he was going to have to find his own cure. Miraculously, he pulled it off in …

1
Weighing Good Intentions 24:09

2M ago24:09

24:09

In an episode first released in 2010, then-producer Lulu Miller drives to Michigan to track down the endangered Kirtland’s warbler. Efforts to protect the bird have lead to the killing of cowbirds (a species that commandeers warbler nests), and a prescribed burn aimed at creating a new habitat. Tragically, this burn led to the death of a 29-year-ol…

1
The Menopause Mystery 38:58

3M ago38:58

38:58

Until recently, scientists assumed humans were the only species in which females went through menopause, and lived a substantial part of their lives after they were no longer able to reproduce. And they had no idea why that happens, and why evolution wouldn’t push females to keep reproducing right up to the end of their lives. But after a close loo…

1
Galaxy Quenching 40:08

3M ago40:08

40:08

This week: the story of astrophysicist Charity Woodrum. Charity is an extragalactic astronomer who studies the life and death of galaxies, why some galaxies burn bright and others dim and sputter out. And in the midst of an unthinkable grief in her personal life, she discovers something in the sky – a new kind of light that would guide her path for…

1
The Nothing Behind Everything 32:54

3M ago32:54

32:54

This week, two conversations from the archives about parts of the world that are imperceptible to us, verging on almost unthinkable. We start with a moment of uncertainty in physics. Inspired by an essay written by physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, called The Accidental Universe (https://zpr.io/4965dUdNqtpQ), taken from a book of the same name.…

1
More Perfect: The Hate Debate 37:20

3M ago37:20

37:20

Back in 2017 our colleagues at More Perfect gathered a room full of people together to debate a straight forward question: Can free speech go too far? Today, eight years have passed and plenty has changed, but this question feels alive as ever. And so we’re re-airing More Perfect’s The Hate Debate. Taped live at WNYC's Jerome L. Greene Performance …

1
Desperately Seeking Symmetry 57:23

4M ago57:23

57:23

This hour of Radiolab, former co-hosts Jad and Robert set out in search of order and balance in the world around us, and ask how symmetry shapes our very existence -- from the origins of the universe, to what we see when we look in the mirror. Along the way, we look for love in ancient Greece, head to modern-day Princeton to peer inside our brains,…

1
On [The Divided Dial]: Fishing In The Night 38:51

4M ago38:51

38:51

Have you heard On the Media’s Peabody-winning series The Divided Dial? It’s awesome and you should, and now you will. In this episode they tell the story of shortwave radio: the way-less-listened to but way-farther-reaching cousin of AM and FM radio. The medium was once heralded as a utopian, international, and instantaneous mass communication tool…

1
Sex, Ducks and the Founding Feud 25:08

4M ago25:08

25:08

Jilted lovers and disrupted duck hunts provide a very odd look into the soul of the US Constitution. What does a betrayed lover’s revenge have to do with an international chemical weapons treaty? More than you’d think. From poison and duck hunts to our feuding fathers, we step into a very odd tug of war between local and federal law. When Carol Ann…

1
Baby Shark 28:12

4M ago28:12

28:12

This is episode five of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks. Today, the strange, squirmy magic behind how sharks make more sharks. Drills. Drama. Death. Even a coliseum of baby sharks duking it out inside mom’s womb. And a man on a small island in the Mediterranean trying, against all odds, to give baby sharks a chance in a little plas…

1
Mystery Bay 21:01

4M ago21:01

21:01

This is episode four of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks. Alison Kock was working at a car wash in Cape Town when she made a discovery that completely changed the course of her life. Inside a customer’s trunk, she found photographs of white sharks flying so high above the water they looked like airplanes. She followed those photogra…

1
The Shark Inside You 28:53

4M ago28:53

28:53

This is episode three of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks. Today, we take a trip across the world, from the south coast of Australia to … Wisconsin. Here, scientists are scouring shark blood to find one of nature’s hidden keys, a molecular superhero that might unlock our ability to cure cancer: shark antibodies. They’re small. They’…

1
The Cage 18:22

4M ago18:22

18:22

This is episode two of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks. Jaws spawned a thousand imitators: sharks in tornados, sharks in avalanches, sharks that battle giant octopuses. Hollywood has officially turned sharks into monsters of every shape and size. And yet, somehow, there will always be more. But drop below the surface, into the cold…

1
Making a Monster 26:38

4M ago26:38

26:38

Episode one of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks. Rodney Fox went into the ocean one summer day in 1963. He came out barely alive, his body torn apart by a great white shark. At the time, it was one of the worst shark attacks ever survived. After he recovered, he was pulled back into the shadowy world he feared most. Again and again …

1
Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks 2:23

5M ago2:23

2:23

In the summer of 1975, Jaws scared an entire generation out of the water. The film burned an idea into our cultural memory: they are mindless, man-eating monsters. We set out to tell a different story about sharks. Five stories over five days. We tear down deep-seated myths about sharks, plunge into the water with them, and find sharks that explode…

1
Double-Blasted 20:54

5M ago20:54

20:54

We first aired this episode in 2012, but at the show we’ve been thinking a lot about resilience and repair so we wanted to play it for you again today. It’s about a man who experienced maybe one of the most chilling traumas… twice. But then, it leads us to a story of generational repair. On the morning of August 6th, 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in …

1
The Elixir of Life 50:59

5M ago50:59

50:59

Doctor and special correspondent, Avir Mitra takes Lulu on an epic journey live on stage at a little basement club called Caveat, here in New York. Starting with an ingredient in breastmilk that babies can’t digest, a global hunt that takes us from Bangladesh to the Mennonite communities here in the US, we discover an ancient symbiotic relationship…

1
A Flock of Two 19:43

5M ago19:43

19:43

Animals rescue people all the time, but not like this. In this episode, first aired more than a decade ago, Jim Eggers is a 44-year-old man who suffers from a problem that not only puts his life at risk—it jeopardizes the safety of everybody around him. But with the help of Sadie, his pet African Grey Parrot, Jim found an unlikely way to manage his…

1
The Echo in the Machine 32:42

5M ago32:42

32:42

Today you can convert speech to text with the click of a button. Youtube does it for all our videos. Our phones will do it in real time. It’s frictionless. And yet, if it weren’t for an unlikely crew of protesters and office workers, it might still be impossible. This week, the story of our attempts to make the spoken visible. The magicians who tri…

1
How to Cure What Ails You 25:01

5M ago25:01

25:01

Now that we have the ability to see inside the brain without opening anyone's skull, we'll be able to map and define brain activity and peg it to behavior and feelings. Right? Well, maybe not, or maybe not just yet. It seems the workings of our brains are rather too complex and diverse across individuals to really say for certain what a brain scan …

1
The First Known Earthly Voice 38:07

6M ago38:07

38:07

What happens when a voice emerges? What happens when one is lost? Is something gained? A couple months ago, Lulu guest edited an issue of the nature magazine Orion. She called the issue “Queer Planet: A Celebration of Biodiversity,” and it was a wide-ranging celebration of queerness in nature. It featured work by amazing writers like Ocean Vuong, K…

1
Terrestrials: The Snow Beast 31:23

6M ago31:23

31:23

Today we bring you a story stranger than fiction. In 2006, paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski took a helicopter to a remote Arctic island near the North Pole, spending her afternoons scavenging for ancient treasures on the ground. One day, she found something the size of a potato chip. Turns out, it was a three and half million year old chunk of bon…

1
The Age of Aquaticus 43:00

6M ago43:00

43:00

For years, scientists thought nothing could live above 73℃/163℉. At that temperature, everything boiled to death. But scientists Tom Brock and Hudson Freeze weren’t convinced. What began as their simple quest to trawl for life in some of the hottest natural springs on Earth would, decades later, change the trajectory of biological science forever, …

1
Ghosts in the Green Machine 33:19

6M ago33:19

33:19

In honor of our Earth, on her day, we have two stories about the overlooked, ignored, and neglected parts of nature. In the first half, we learn about an epic battle that is raging across the globe every day, every moment. It's happening in the ocean, and your very life depends on it. In the second half, we make an earnest, possibly foolhardy, atte…

1
Signal Hill: Caterpillar Roadshow 50:34

7M ago50:34

50:34

A couple years ago, an entomologist named Martha Weiss got a letter from a little boy in Japan saying he wanted to replicate a famous study of hers. We covered that original study on Radiolab more than a decade ago in an episode called Goo and You – check it out here – and in addition to revealing some fascinating secrets of insect life, it also ra…

1
Killer Empathy 25:52

7M ago25:52

25:52

In an episode first aired in 2012, Lulu Miller introduces us to Jeff Lockwood, a professor at the University of Wyoming, who spent a part of his career studying a particularly ferocious set of insects: Gryllacrididae. Or, as Jeff describes them, "crickets on steroids." They have crushingly strong, serrated jaws, and they launch all-out attacks on a…

1
Malthusian Swerve 38:58

7M ago38:58

38:58

Earth can sustain life for another 100 million years, but can we? In this episode, we partnered with the team at Planet Money to take stock of the essential raw materials that enable us to live as we do here on Earth—everything from sand to copper to oil— and tally up how much we have left. Are we living with reckless abandon? And if so, is there e…

1
Everybody's Got One 28:12

7M ago28:12

28:12

We all think we know the story of pregnancy. Sperm meets egg, followed by nine months of nurturing, nesting, and quiet incubation. this story isn’t the nursery rhyme we think it is. In a way, it’s a struggle, almost like a tiny war. And right on the front lines of that battle is another major player on the stage of pregnancy that not a single perso…

1
Growth 58:52

8M ago58:52

58:52

It’s easy to take growth for granted, for it to seem expected, inevitable even. Every person starts out as a baby and grows up. Plants grow from seeds into food. The economy grows. That stack of mail on your table grows. But why does anything grow the way that it does? In this hour, we go from the Alaska State Fair, to a kitchen in Berkeley, to the…

1
More Perfect: Sex Appeal 1:05:21

8M ago1:05:21

1:05:21

In 2017 our sister show, More Perfect aired an episode all about RBG, In September of 2020, we lost Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the annals of history. She was 87. Given the atmosphere around reproductive rights, gender and law, we decided to re-air this More Perfect episode dedicated to one of her cases. Because it offers a unique …

1
Revenge of the Miasma 35:31

8M ago35:31

35:31

Today we uncover an invisible killer hidden, for over a hundred years, by reasonable disbelief. Science journalist extraordinaire Carl Zimmer tells us the story of a centuries-long battle of ideas that came to a head, with tragic consequences, in the very recent past. His latest book, called Airborne, details a largely forgotten history of science …

1
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 34:45

8M ago34:45

34:45

Today, a story that starts small and private, with one woman alone in her bathroom, as she makes a quiet, startling discovery about her own body. But that small, private moment grows and grows, and pretty soon it becomes something so big that it has impacted the life of every person reading this right now… and all that without the woman ever even k…

1
Quantum Birds 34:44

9M ago34:44

34:44

Annie McEwen went to a mountain in Pennsylvania to help catch some migratory owls. Then Scott Weidensaul peeled back the owl’s feathery face disc, so that she could look at the back of its eyeball. No owls were harmed in the process, but this brief glimpse into the inner workings of a bird sent her off on a journey to a place where fleshy animal bu…

1
Vertigogo 25:48

9M ago25:48

25:48

In this episode, first aired in 2012, we have two stories of brains pushed off-course. We relive a surreal day in the life of a young researcher hijacked by her own brain, and hear from a librarian experiencing a bizarre and mysterious set of symptoms that she called “gravitational anarchy.” Special thanks to Sarah Montague and Ellen Horn, as well …

1
Forever Fresh 28:44

9M ago28:44

28:44

We eat apples in the summer and enjoy bananas in the winter. When we do this, we go against the natural order of life which is towards death and decay. What gives? This week, Latif Nasser spoke with Nicola Twilley, the author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Twilley spent over a decade reporting about how…