A riot, a voyage at sea, and a movement to break up the greatest city in the country. The first Black mayor of New York City faces off with the borough president of Staten Island and tries to hold his city together.

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Ten years ago, Malcolm inveighed against the exclusive country clubs of Los Angeles in an episode of Revisionist History called "A Good Walk Spoiled." This November, thanks to a Los Angeles City Council member who heard the episode, Los Angeles voters will have the opportunity to take up Malcolm's cause. Today, Malcolm revisits "A Good Walk Spoiled," and speaks with Councilmember Adrin Nazarian about his proposed ballot measure. 

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On the 250th anniversary of the United States, Revisionist History investigates the overlooked story of New York City almost breaking apart as Staten Island threatened to secede. 

Over the course of five episodes, The Staten Island Problem reconstructs the battle for New York City amidst the turbulent early 1990s — the rise of Rudy Giuliani, the peak of the homicide rate, the Wu-Tang Clan, a young Donald Trump, and the first Black mayor of New York — all through the prism of the city’s Forgotten Borough. And ultimately asks: What do you do when a democracy looks like it’s falling apart?

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Would a tomato by any other name taste as sweet? What about a steak? Malcolm sends Ben on a mission to investigate the cutting edge of food technology and two mistakes: one from the 1990s and one that’s unfolding as we speak.

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Sharing Malcolm’s latest project, a podcast called Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise. 

Imagine a time when the United States was split in two. And then had to put itself back together.  It was a time of chaos and sometimes violence as millions of people fought for the right to become citizens. Americans struggled over questions like: who gets to be a citizen? Who has the right to vote? To own property? In short, who belongs? This was Reconstruction…the era following the Civil War. When Americans ended slavery and expanded voting rights. But none of this was easy. Many people consider the promise of Reconstruction unfulfilled. Why? 

In this episode, journalist Kai Wright shares the story of the legendary abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass and how he navigated a world without Abraham Lincoln. Find Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise on Audible or wherever you get podcasts.

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Revisionist History revisits an episode from season two and Malcolm tells the story of a phone call that set in motion a collaboration with President Barack Obama, which we'll preview next week. 

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Scene on Radio is a two-time Peabody-nominated podcast that dares to ask big, hard questions about who we are—really—and how we got this way. Their new season, The News, asks: what’s really wrong with the news? Some have called the news media the oxygen of a functioning democracy. But if that’s true, America’s lungs are in rough shape. Most Americans say they don’t trust the media. The business model for local journalism has all but collapsed. And we all know about the barrage of misinformation that flows from our splintered mediascape. You can’t separate the state of our news media from the other profound crises that America keeps on failing to solve. John Biewen explores the roots of this crises. Here's episode 1. Find The News, from Scene on Radio, wherever you get podcasts.

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A single line of a building code proposal filled out by a fire inspector in Glendale, Arizona has had a devastating impact on the way housing is built across the entire United States. Malcolm enlists Stephen Smith, Executive Director of the Center for Building in North America, to investigate.

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The episode centers on the dilemma of a man with an advanced, metastatic case of prostate cancer. His name is Dan. Every doctor he spoke to had a different opinion on what he should do — or whether it was even worth doing anything at all. His question was: which of these many opinions should I trust? The episode centers on which doctor he ended up committing to, how he made that decision of where to place his trust, and how his choice probably saved his life. What Dan will explain — and he is someone who has spent his life as a crisis communications specialist — is that trust only comes at the end of a careful and intentional process.

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Jim Balsillie, the one time co-CEO of Research in Motion, reflects on the mistake that led to the downfall of BlackBerry, once named the fastest growing company in the world.

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In light of our current series on mistakes, we're sharing an episode from Cautionary Tales—a podcast that’s all about mistakes and what we can learn from them. This story is about a poet—some say the worst poet in the world–William McGonagall. McGonagall's works were full of jarring meter, banal imagery, and awkward rhymes. They made him a laughing stock in 19th Century Scotland and are still derided to this day.

What can we learn from such a disastrous poet? And it is possible we’ve misunderstood McGonagall all along?  

We'll be back with a new mistake next week.

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