Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod. The show about the past, rediscovered.

He was tall. She was short. His family was well off. Hers wasn't. He had not a care in the world. She was a worrier.

If you looked up mismatch in the dictionary, this couple, Martin D. Ginsburg, and Ruth Bader, fit the definition perfectly.

And yet, in the early 1950s, as undergrads on Cornell University's bucolic campus, they fell in love.

Mostly, they fell for each other's brains.

Bader, the future Supreme Court justice, idolized their literature professor Vladimir Nabokov.

One day in class, Ginsburg was the only student to correctly answer

Nabokov's quiz question about Dickens.

Oh, how her heart swelled.

Ginsburg, in turn, admired her, quote, intellectual luminosity.

He was, she later said, the only young man I dated, who cared that I had a brain.

This remarkable and ultimately heartbreaking love story is chronicled in historian Jane S. DeHart's new 722-page biography,

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, A Life. In chronicling their courtship, marriage, and careers, DeHard keys in

on perhaps the most extraordinary part of their relationship, Marty's, quote, proto-feminism.

Early on in Coupled him, Ruth and Marty agreed they should pursue dual careers in the law

and that they would never get in each other's way, a novel idea in the 1950s as traditional

gender roles were still evolving.

And their love flourished.

They held hands on long walks around a lake not far from campus.

They drove around in Marty's gray Chevrolet for hours, sharing, as Ruth put it, an intense,

intellectual and emotional connection.

Not long after graduating in 1954,

...