For nearly all of history, hearing music required someone physically making it nearby and the only music humans ever heard was whistling or singing. Even when instruments became widespread, music was rare. The idea that people could hear any music they wanted at the push of a button was undreamed of. Listen along with Virginia, Charles, and special guest musician/historian/engineer John Hardin as they play the chords of the great transformation of music from dearth to digital, from scarcity to Spotify.

When George Washington was inaugurated, he had only one natural tooth left—a condition far more typical in the past than modern people realize. For thousands of years, tooth pain was simply part of human life. A primary reason for the problem: effective tooth-cleaning methods simply didn’t exist. Join Virginia and Charles as they celebrate two overlooked but vitally important technological innovations: the toothbrush and toothpaste.

Evening after evening, billions of people march into the kitchen and cook dinner. Standing over the stove seems like a timeless activity—an impression reinforced if one comes across old TV shows like those starring Lucille Ball or Dick Van Dyke. Watching those black-and-white families in the kitchen, it’s easy to believe you are looking through the screen into the long-ago past. But for most of human history, people neither cooked nor ate the way modern families do. Kitchens were hidden, meals were irregular, and “family dinner” barely existed. Sit at the table with Virginia and Charles as they serve up a survey of the long line of convulsive changes that led to the “long-standing tradition” of cooking dinner in the kitchen. 

I worked out after work: Few sentences would have been more baffling to people in the 19th century, especially if spoken by a woman. Join Virginia and Charles as they explore a little-noticed revolution in daily life: the transformation of hard physical labor from a daily burden to an emblem of personal virtue—and a globe-spanning, multibillion-dollar industry whose omnipresence is as much a sign of our time as social media beefs or flying drones.