Sarah is a journalist obsessed with the past. Every week she reconsiders a person or event that's been miscast in the public imagination.
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If your four-year-old told you about a trip to heaven, would you believe them? For a pastor named Todd Burpo, the answer was yes. In 2010, his book Heaven Is For Real—co-authored by Lynn Vincent—became a runaway bestseller. This week, Sarah tells In Bed with the Right co-host Adrian Daub the story of this strange little book, and how it reveals more about us than it does the afterlife. Digressions…
Send your submissions for our Halloween Listener Spectacular (scary stories or Halloween nostalgia) to sloppyandalive@gmail.com before August 31st! How many maligned women can you name in 30 seconds? For this episode, Sarah gives Chelsey Weber-Smith of American Hysteria a lightning round pop quiz on You’re Wrong About topics over the years with stakes so high that you’ll have to hear them to…
How do I love thee? For this special episode, we asked you to send us a voice message about something you love. From gas station coffee to tap dancing to rocks to the inner lives of rats, you answered—and showed us that when we experience the things that other people love, that love starts to feel like our own. Edited + produced by Miranda Zickler Original music in this episode is brought to you…
But seriously, who really killed JFK? For part two of the JFK Assassination series, law correspondent Mackenzie Joy Brennan takes Sarah through the conspiracy theories that have surrounded the tragedy to see how the combination of too much information and too little information helped solidify a general feeling that things were not as they seemed. Together, they go over the Warren Commission…
Where is Dana Scully when you need her? For the first installment of this two-part episode, legal correspondent Mackenzie Joy Brennan tells Sarah about what happened before, during, and after the moment that John F. Kennedy was shot in that Dallas motorcade, the lasting cultural images that have been burned into the public consciousness, and the story of the man who shot the man and the man who…
Could there be a little crying in baseball as a treat? Sports correspondent Julie Kliegman is here to tell Sarah about the history of women’s baseball and softball and to finally teach her the rules of the game. From the days when women played alongside men, to the first women’s team in the 1940s, to the sexist rules placed on their teams, and the impressive modern players that are changing the…
Why are there so many songs about rainbows (and what’s on the other side)? A bridge between worlds, a map to a pot of gold, the centerpiece of a Lisa Frank trapper-keeper, and of course, an ever-changing symbol of the LGBTQ+ community, the rainbow has been a profound part of the human experience for thousands of years. For this early Pride Month episode, science correspondent and bisexual seagull…
Ada Blackjack wants one thing: To make enough money to bring her son home from an orphanage. But good work is hard to find in 1920s Nome, Alaska, so when four strangers come to town, looking to hire someone for a secret yearlong expedition, Ada embarks on the trip—not knowing that she’ll be the only one of them to survive. This is the first episode of YWA correspondent Blair Braverman's new…
What would you do for a desperation pie? Kitchen correspondent Sarah Archer is here to talk with Sarah about the American food trends that marked the 20th century and how they related to the political and cultural changes of a nation in need of constant culinary inventiveness. They discuss the specialties of the barren Depression Era, the food-related propaganda and rationing of the wartime years,…
Can you use the word in a sentence? For this episode, Spelling Correspondent Gabe Henry takes Sarah through the surprisingly rampageous (r-a-m-p-a-g-e-o-u-s) history of the Spelling Bee, a uniquely American phenomenon. From the earliest examples of late night “spelling matches,” to the rough-and-tumble contests of the early frontier, to the controversy of the first National spelling bee, it turns…