The story of Boeing's unraveling

Listen to the five-part podcast series that reconstructs how Challenger failed

The "American Scandal" podcast devotes a five-part series to Challenger, tracing the engineering warnings, internal pressure to launch, the moment of the explosion, and the long aftermath that reshaped NASA's safety culture.

How a panel blew off a Boeing plane in mid-air

As Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 climbed just over 16,000 feet into the sky, a refrigerator-sized panel was ripped from its side, forcing it to land. Few of the 171 passengers were injured. This infographic explains how the panel tore from the body of the Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane, which had only been in service for eight weeks.

A deep dive into Enron, one of the largest accounting scandals in history

Investing comes with great opportunities for reward, but it also carries great risk. Investors learned that the hard way when Enron collapsed. Everyone lost money—from the largest institutions on Wall Street to mom-and-pop investors who bought S&P 500 index funds. This series from American Scandal starts with a close-up into an investment manager at Enron who started to unravel the accounting scandal happening behind the scenes. Listen here.

WeWork, once a unicorn, declared bankruptcy in 2023

This podcast episode chronicles the complete rise and fall of WeWork—from its founding in 2010 to its eventual 2023 bankruptcy.

Airbus is a rare European industrial success story that overtook a rival American firm

After World War II, the US dominated aviation, particularly Boeing. To compete, Europe's major industrial nations pooled resources to form Airbus, a customer-centric airplane manufacturer. Its A320 family of planes became the most popular in airliner history, leading to profitability in the 1990s. Amid Boeing's major hurdles in recent years, Airbus remains the industry leader.

Six stories of survivors who fell from the sky

Rarely are there survivors when airplanes explode in air or crash due to the extreme speeds and elevation of the craft. Sometimes, though, people survive. Here are six stories of people who defied the odds and lived after falling from a plane.

Find out how airlines quietly became banks

Some experts suggest airlines lose money on every flight. This video dives into how airlines have leveraged their loyalty programs to make billions of dollars, effectively evolving into banks.

Surviving the crash: a personal story of burnout

Jennifer Moss founded a tech company, had a baby in the middle of the start-up process, and crashed after months of rising exhaustion and disconnection from a career she once felt passionate about. She shared her story of burnout and the techniques she used to turn her life around and repair her relationships in this piece.

Airbnb started as a vacation rental startup and soon disrupted the hospitality industry

In this podcast episode, Airbnb gets the "How I Built This" treatment. The "How I Built This" host speaks with the entrepreneurs behind today's largest businesses about how they got started. In this episode, Airbnb's cofounder Joe Gebbia talks about how he built Airbnb.

Explore a timeline of advancements in American aviation

From the Wright brothers' flight of the first powered plane in 1903 near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to SpaceX's debut of the Falcon 9 rocket in 2010 with reusable boosters, this interactive shows off the technological evolution of flight, from mechanical propulsion to ballistic spaceflight. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

How black boxes made flying safe

Black boxes—which are actually orange—were not universally present in airplanes until roughly 1967, a process which grew out of frustration over frequent, unexplained crashes in the industry's first few decades. This piece tells the origins of...

A podcast unpacking Pakistan’s political turmoil

Pakistan has been immersed in political crises for over 20 years. Despite being one of the world’s few nuclear powers, Pakistan’s internal instability has caused experts to question whether the country is, in fact, a failed state. Deep divisions...

Paperwork errors cost families millions in life-insurance payouts

This podcast episode reveals how human missteps by employers and insurance providers caused hundreds of families who paid life-insurance premiums to be denied millions of dollars in death benefits. A Wall Street Journal reporter breaks down how flaws in the system made this happen.

How Netflix battled Blockbuster

The most consequential business stories involve intense rivalries. The story of Netflix versus Blockbuster is one of those: an agile upstart versus an entrenched incumbent. This nine-part podcast explores the key strategies and pivotal moments in the rivalry that upended the entertainment business, setting the stage for the streaming wars.

The attack at Pearl Harbor led to the world's first around-the-world commercial flight

A World War II-era commercial flight was forced to change course when Pearl Harbor was bombed, leading the 12-member crew on the world's first commercial flight to circumnavigate the globe. The Boeing 314 crossed the equator four times during the journey, which totaled more than 30,000 miles and required the crew to strip the plane of any identifying marks.

Abandoned Detroit: the decline of America's car mecca

Detroit, Michigan, began as a fur trading post in the 1700s but would become the world epicenter of car manufacturing in the 1900s after Henry Ford developed his paradigm-shifting assembly line at a plant there. Racial tensions, a lack of economic diversification, and poor leadership would plunge the city into poverty and decay in the late 1900s, culminating in a 2014 bankruptcy. Browse the somber images of the city's abandoned spaces here.

The world's 50 most valuable private companies

While public companies typically have the highest valuations, private companies get close. This list breaks down the top 50 as of 2025, with SpaceX at the top with a value of $350B, followed by ByteDance. Over three-fifths of the list are located in the US, with eight in China.

The drama of the car dealership quota

Car salespersons are often under a ton of pressure to meet quotas at their dealership, at least partly explaining why they are known to stoop to such lows to sell cars. In this now legendary podcast episode, "This American Life" host Ira Glass and...

The US national debt has become more important in recent months

In a moment of deep economic uncertainty, the national debt now matters more than ever. Listen to this podcast to find out why and also explore answers to questions like, "Who does the US owe money to and why?"

How the American takeover of world football failed.

What happened behind the scenes at Europe’s top clubs as their Super League plans were pitched and ripped apart in a matter of days

What 9/11 did to one family: the heartbreaking story of Bobby McIlvaine

Grief, conspiracy theories, and a family's search for meaning in the two decades since the attacks. On Sept. 11, 2001, Bobby McIlvaine was killed, along with nearly 3,000 other Americans. In the years since, his parents and brother have searched for...

A pod of orcas takes down a yacht

The pod rammed the boat’s rudder for about 45 minutes. Authorities were able to get crew members to land safely, but their yacht was irreparably damaged. Check out the story and photos here.

The ‘Bullshit Bombers’ of the Vietnam War and their mountain ghost

Armed with marketing insight and leaflets, these US soldiers tried to use propaganda to get the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese military to abandon their weapons and leave the war. But what’s more effective than a leaflet’s promise of a decent cup of coffee amid bombing? Ghostly threats from the great beyond. Learn more about weaponized superstition in this 42-minute podcast episode.

The history of the World Trade Organization

This episode of the "Brettonomics with Nancy Jackson" podcast explores the history of the WTO and its predecessor, the GATT, revealing the key people, negotiations, and decisions that shaped today's international trade rules.

BP only makes up about 1% of global oil production after many missteps

BP’s market cap has never recovered from the dive it took following the 2010 Deep Water Horizon oil spill. This video details some of BP’s corporate missteps along the way.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Discover the catastrophic consequences of a failure of the US electrical grid—something that is more likely than many Americans think.

The idea for the Federal Reserve was conceived in secret in 1910—with bankers donning duck hunt gear for disguise while traveling to a remote country club on Georgia's Jekyll Island

US consumers collectively owe more than $1T to credit card companies—almost as much as they owe in auto loans.

Listen to an in-depth conversation on the links between Parkinson's disease and herbicide exposure and the challenging pace of scientific investigation.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

Explore the history, structure, and species of Australia's Great Barrier Reef with this interactive journey narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

The United States has had a tumultuous relationship with Cuba since its 1959 revolution, highlighted by a nuclear crisis and a decades-long trade embargo.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

See 33 images that became central to huge scandals, including a young Charles and Camilla, Michael Jackson's baby on a hotel balcony, and Hugh Grant's mugshot.

In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon, until it was revealed that he was at home the whole time.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

In 1984, Operation Smash Hit intentionally crashed a 239-ton train into a nuclear waste canister at 100 miles per hour to prove the canister's safety, which remained completely intact and lost just 0.29 of its 100 pounds of pressure.

This real-time tracking of the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak in May 2026 offers a unique glimpse into the global reach of the outbreak and whether the virus sickened passengers and their communities around the world.

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery guarantee was responsible for the chain's 1980s surge, but it was discontinued after the company was found liable for delivery driver accidents.

After 25 people used virtual reality headsets to practice flying with virtual wings—flapping their arms—their visual cortex responded to the wings almost as if they were real arms, treating them as body parts.

Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are historically hard to sell because they're old, subject to local landmark commissions, and often unfashionable

In 1945, Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and legendary animator Walt Disney began collaborating on a short film that was not completed until 2003, years after both men had died.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, star of 'Schitt's Creek' and 'Home Alone,' quit 'Saturday Night Live' after just one week to return to her old job.