Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks.

Wrong. It was her stepmother. It was eighteen or nineteen blows, not forty. And a jury in New Bedford acquitted her in about an hour.

So why does Netflix’s new series say, in its own official logline, that she kills her parents?

This episode isn’t about whether she did it. It’s about how she walked. The confession-adjacent inquest testimony the court threw out, given without a lawyer and under prescribed morphine. The attempted prussic acid purchase the day before the murders, which the jury was never allowed to hear about. A defense attorney who was a former Governor of Massachusetts — and who had personally appointed one of the three judges to the bench. And a jury charge from that same judge, which other judges later described as a plea for the defense.

Plus the detail that reframes all of it: women could not serve on a Massachusetts jury until 1950. The same belief that kept them out of the jury box — too delicate, too pure, too easily upset — is exactly what her lawyer sold to the twelve men who let her go.

Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.

The most famous photograph of the fall of Saigon has been captioned incorrectly for fifty years. The photographer spent the rest of his life trying to fix it, and nobody listened.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer gets read as a clever spy novel about identity and double lives. It's that, but also a record of almost every institutional detail in it is documented history, and the parts that sound most invented are the parts that happened.

This week: the emergency legal workaround that let roughly 300,000 Southeast Asians into a country with no refugee law on the books, the sponsorship rule that split families at the camp gates, the typhoon that Hollywood remembers as a production delay, and the exile army that raised money in California strip malls to restart the war. And that, according to the FBI's own declassified files, was behind the murders of five Vietnamese-American journalists on American soil. Nobody was ever arrested.

Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.

Everyone tells you Uncle Vanya is a play about sad Russians sighing in a drawing room. Everyone is wrong. It's a play about a real estate crime.

This week: the 1861 emancipation that charged twenty-three million people six percent interest on their own freedom, the forest law nobody remembers, and the reason Professor Serebryakov has no legal right whatsoever to sell the house he spends Act III trying to sell.

Nobody asked. But let's talk about it.

I want to introduce what I'm trying to do with this podcast! A little bit of history and a whole lot of literature! That's my thing.