Throughline

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Origins of the Affordable Care Act Nov 12, 2026

Show notes

Today on the show, we have a story about healthcare from our friends over at GBH News. Mitt and Ted, hosted by Ian Coss, tells the story of how Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy began their political careers on very different sides of the healthcare debate, but for a short while, worked together to pass a law that provided healthcare to everyone in Massachusetts. Their work eventually paved the way for what became the Affordable Care Act. We bring you Part One of their series, which takes us all the way back to the Nixon era.
You can listen to the whole series over at: https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/mitt-ted-a-healthcare-story
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How college football's deadliest year built the NCAA Nov 10, 2026

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A listener emailed the Throughline team with a stunning factoid: Teddy Roosevelt helped create the NCAA to make college football safer. But is it true? What we find is weirder, grislier, and pettier than we expected.
Guests:
Denis Crawford, historian and exhibit designer at the College Football Hall of Fame
Eric Moyen, Dean of the Bagwell College of Education at Kennesaw State University and author of College Sports: A History
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Health Insurance in America Nov 05, 2026

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Millions of Americans depend on their jobs for health insurance. But that's not the case in many other wealthy countries. How did the U.S. end up with a system that's so expensive, yet leaves so many people vulnerable? On this episode, how a temporary solution created an everlasting problem. This episode originally ran in 2020 as The Everlasting Problem.
Guests:
Sherry Glied, Dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University
Paul Starr, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University
Jim Morone, political science professor at Brown University and co-author of the book, The Heart of Power
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Remembering Noah Adams Nov 03, 2026

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Today on the show, we honor the late Noah Adams, longtime NPR All Things Considered host. We bring you three of his stories about the complicated and messy parts of being human in an ever-changing world.
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Shadows, war, and finding Moomin joy Oct 29, 2026

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The Moomins have been a beloved children’s series around the world for decades. And now these bright, whimsical, and colorful Finnish characters are starting to gain steam in America. Today on Throughline, the story of their creator and the tragic circumstances that gave them life.
Guests:
Boel Westin, professor emerita of literature at Stockholm University, and author of Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words
Stina Ekblad, actor (as the voice of Tove Jansson)
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The dramatic race to discover Insulin Oct 22, 2026

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Looksmaxxing, weight loss, and muscle building have fueled a massive craze for injectable peptides. Some natural and some synthetic. These injectables have unleashed a multi-billion-dollar gray-market industry online and a high-stakes frontier for the pharmaceutical industry.Today, we reach back to the quest to manufacture the first peptide-based medicine: Insulin.
Guests:
Alison Li, historian of science and medicine, author of J. B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada: Extracts and Enterprise
Grant Maltman, curator of Banting House National Historic Site
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Can the polygraph test really spot a lie? Oct 20, 2026

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From dating shows to police interrogation rooms, the polygraph test has long been marketed as a way to detect deception. But can it really? And who decided we needed a truth machine in the first place? In this episode, a Throughline listener sends us on a quest to uncover the story of the lie detector.
Guests:
Ken Alder, professor of history at Northwestern University and author of The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession
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Is the death penalty cruel and unusual? Oct 15, 2026

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The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide the amendment's boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagine it might change? In this hour, the shifting definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
This episode was originally published in January 2025.
Guests:
John Bessler, law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, and adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Author of The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights.
Carol Steiker, law professor at Harvard Law School and author of Courting Death: the Supreme Court and Capital Punishment.
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Why does everything get a standing ovation now? Oct 13, 2026

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Call it standing ovation inflation: these days, it feels like it's mandatory to stand and clap for live performances. Has our please clap era gone too far? That's what one Throughline listener wanted to know. So we traced the winding road from Shakespeare’s epilogues to Broadway divas to ridiculously long film festival ovations… and how they helped engineer the way we applaud.
Guests:

Roger Gilbert, professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell
Kyle Buchanan, reporter and columnist for the New York Times
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Four Seasons of Ceasefire in Gaza Oct 08, 2026

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NPR’s Anas Baba is one of the last remaining journalists in Gaza working full-time for an American news organization. A year into the ceasefire, more than 1400 people have been killed in Israeli attacks, nearly 5,000 injured. And those numbers rise nearly every day. What has the last year looked and felt like on the ground? In this episode, Baba takes us through four seasons of ceasefire—as both a resident trying to survive and a reporter trying to document reality.
Guests:
Anas Baba, NPR Gaza reporter
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