Four Lost Cities with Annalee Newitz

Factually! with Adam Conover

Headgum

Comedy

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2021

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Where do cities… come from? Are they created by committee? Or do they just spring up out of the earth? Adam explores this question with journalist Annalee Newitz, author of the new book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. They take an audio tour from Cahokia, an indigenous city near St. Louis that somehow got left out of American textbook; the Neolithic city of Çatalhöyük, where people buried their ancestors under their living room floors; Angkor, which declined due to lack of government care of infrastructure; and everyone’s favorite lost city - Pompeii! You can find Four Lost Cities wherever books are sold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a HeadGum podcast.
0:04.0	Hello everyone.
0:29.0	Welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Connover.
0:31.0	Let's talk about Pompeii.
0:33.0	Remember Pompeii?
0:34.0	You might have heard about it in your sixth grade global studies class like I did.
0:38.0	If you didn't, I'll refresh your memory.
0:40.0	Pompeii is a Roman city south of Naples in Italy.
0:44.0	And in the year 79 AD, almost 2,000 years ago, the volcano Vesuvius went in what I think is
0:50.0	the correct geological term, a cablui, an ash rain down on the entire city, boiling hot ash.
0:57.0	And this ash, while it did destroy Pompeii, it also more or less preserved the city in layers
1:04.0	and layers of ash until a surveying engineer rediscovered it in 1748 and found the entire city
1:12.0	preserved.
1:13.0	I'm talking the shells of human bodies, entire buildings, wall art, even graffiti,
1:19.0	all of it preserved under ash.
1:22.0	Now what happened to Pompeii was a disaster, but it was also really cool, right?
1:28.0	I mean, come on.
1:30.0	Pompeii is awesome.
1:31.0	What is it about it that pulls us to it so much?
1:34.0	What is it about ruins in general that draws us in?
1:39.0	I mean, come on, admit it.
1:41.0	You love ruins.
	...

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