Radiolab: Worst. Year. Ever

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.6 • 16.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2024

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What was the worst year to be alive on planet Earth? We make the case for 536 AD, which set off a cascade of catastrophes that is almost too horrible to imagine. A supervolcano. The disappearance of shadows. A failure of bread. Plague rats. Using evidence painstakingly gathered around the world - from Mongolian tree rings to Greenlandic ice cores to Mayan artifacts - we paint a portrait of what scientists and historians think went wrong, and what we think it felt like to be there in real time. (Spoiler: not so hot.) We hear a hymn for the dead from the ancient kingdom of Axum, the closest we can get to the sound of grief from a millennium and a half ago.

The horrors of 536 make us wonder about the parallels and perpendiculars with our own time: does it make you feel any better knowing that your suffering is part of a global crisis? Or does it just make things worse?"

This week we're sharing a bonus episode from Radiolab: Worst. Year. Ever.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, Rund here.
0:02.0	And Rami, and today we've got something very special for you.
0:07.0	We teamed up with Radio Lab, one of our favorite shows,
0:10.4	to bring you their episode, Worst Year Ever.
0:14.0	I really love this episode and wanted to share it with all of you
0:18.0	because at its core the story is about hope.
0:22.0	It transports us to another time and place where things are very
0:26.0	difficult for humanity and deals with all the philosophical questions that come from that.
0:31.8	But before we play it for you, here's a little chat
0:34.3	Rundin I had with Radio all, we all all we all we all kind of know each other so
0:56.7	We know each other sure yeah, I'm Ram team
0:59.8	Oh, the co-host of the show too. Okay, and on our side, so I'm Lutthiff,
1:05.0	I'm one of the co-host to read a lot,
1:06.6	I'm also, like, I'm also, like, I'm a history nerd.
1:10.6	I'm like a deep history nerd.
1:12.4	I went to grad school and studied history I I love
1:15.8	history and I love your show that's anyway well we love your show
1:20.4	so this is why we're here.
1:24.0	I didn't know that though.
1:25.0	I didn't know even to grad school.
1:26.0	Oh, he is history.
1:28.0	If you pitch, if you put anything on a pitch duck about like an obscure amazing history that is blown
	...

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