HeyJaredHalf-Truths
Remember that neat, tidy version of history and science you learned in school? The one with brave explorers discovering continents, brilliant inventors having a single "eureka!" moment, and a food pyramid that was definitely going to make you healthy?It turns out, a lot of it…
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 9
- Latest publication
- Sep 18, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Aug 19, 2026
Latest episodes
EP72 - The Roman Room That Was a Doorway (opens the original)
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For a century and a half the popular imagination has been sure that the ancient Romans had a special room at every feast where they could throw up their dinner and start over. There was a word for it, and the Romans used the word too, but the Romans meant something completely different by it. A five hundred year old piece of crowd engineering is the thing the world has been calling a puke closet.
EP71 - The Headache That Was Never in the Soup (opens the original)
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You have probably said, or at least thought, that Chinese food gives you a headache, and that the culprit is the MSG. Half the world agrees. Sixty years of research say the culprit is something else, and the story of how a one-paragraph letter to a medical journal became an international panic is one of the strangest case studies in modern science.
EP70 - The Fat Buddha Was Never the Buddha at All (opens the original)
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In a thousand Chinese restaurants there sits the same golden figurine, the fat man laughing with his belly exposed, and everyone from the waiter to the menu calls him Buddha. He is not. He is a specific historical person, and the story of how he got that seat by the register is stranger and warmer than any mistake.
EP69 - Diamonds Are Forever, but Rare They Are Not (opens the original)
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You have known since childhood that diamonds are one of the rarest substances on Earth, which is why one costs two months of your salary. But geologists have been quietly saying something else for a century. This is the story of how a common stone became a fortune, and what an advertising agency had to do with it.
EP68 - Why Medieval People Didn't Actually Die at 30 (opens the original)
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Somewhere in your memory, a teacher or a documentary told you that in the Middle Ages nobody lived past thirty. The average life expectancy really was somewhere in the thirties, but the reason is almost the opposite of what you picture. Most people did not drop dead at thirty. The truth has to do with who was counting, and when they started counting.
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