Specials

The biggest turtle ever described wasn’t an ancestor of today’s leatherback turtles or any other living sea turtles. But it looks like there are some things about being a giant, skin-shelled sea turtle that just work, no matter where, or when, you lived.

In February of 1942 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government issued an executive order to incarcerate people of Japanese descent. That legacy has become a defining story of Japanese American identity.

Through a series of experiments, we can see how horses read human expressions.

Deep in the Great Dismal Swamp, thousands of Black people created a hidden free society, one that defied slavery for centuries. This is the story of the rebels who turned a swamp into a sanctuary.

Stylist Law Roach grew up in Chicago watching his grandmother get ready for church. He said observing her process first exposed him to the art form of being a woman. Since then, Roach has become what he calls an "image architect," styling celebrity clients like Zendaya, Celine Dion and Anya Taylor-Joy.

In Richard Powers' new novel Playground, technology and the environment meet on the island of Makatea in French Polynesia. The book weaves stories together from across decades, but revolves around core themes like awe for the vastness of our oceans and the centrality of play in the story of human survival.

Seven-hundred-million years ago, ice threatened to make our planet uninhabitable, snuffing out new complex life forms. From this climate catastrophe, new forms of life arose, eventually leading to the living world today. But it was a close call.

The evolution of our ability to speak is its own epic saga and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. It’s taken several million years to get to this moment where we can tell you about how it took several million years for us to get here.

To celebrate the history of Black romance, Gene and Parker are joined by reporter Nichole Hill to explore the 1937 equivalent of dating apps — the personals section of one of D.C.'s Black newspapers. Parker attempts to match with a Depression-era bachelor, and along the way we learn about what love meant two generations removed from slavery.

Temnodontosaurus fossils prove that this large predator fed on small ichthyosaurs.