Sidequests

President Trump ordered the U.S. Navy to abandon electromagnetic aircraft catapults and return to 1950s-era steam launch systems — despite Navy reports that the electromagnetic system is now working as designed and contributing to higher aircraft sortie rates than older carriers. This episode of Sidequests covers how aircraft carrier catapults actually work, why EMALS was genuinely problematic during development and why Trump's original criticism was fair, what has changed since then, and why the order to reverse course now — with one carrier already under construction around the new system and steam manufacturing capacity largely dormant — may cost far more than the alternative it's meant to replace.

On the night of August 14-15, 1945, Japanese Army officers stormed the Imperial Palace, killed a senior general, forged military orders, and searched desperately for the recordings of Emperor Hirohito's surrender speech — determined to destroy them and continue the war. They failed. At noon on August 15, Japan surrendered. This episode of Sidequests covers Japan's last days: the political deadlock that persisted even after Hiroshima, Soviet entry into the war, and Nagasaki; the emperor's unprecedented personal intervention to break it; and the attempted coup that reveals just how contested the surrender actually was — and what all of it tells us about the enduring debate over whether the atomic bombs were necessary to end World War Two.

On the night of August 12-13, 1961, East German soldiers erected barbed wire across Berlin's streets while the city slept, separating families, severing train lines, and dividing a city overnight. This episode of Sidequests covers the construction of the Berlin Wall — why it was built (East Germany was losing nearly 20 percent of its population to the West and couldn't stop the exodus), how it evolved from barbed wire to a lethal concrete barrier with guard towers and a death strip, what it cost the people who tried to cross it, and why the Western powers allowed it to stand despite their stated commitment to freedom. The wall wasn't built to keep capitalism out. It was built to keep people in — and that distinction is the whole story.

On August 6, 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was walking through Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb detonated. He survived — burned, his eardrums ruptured, temporarily blind. Three days later, still bandaged, he reported to work in Nagasaki. At 11:02 AM on August 9, the sky lit up again. This episode of Sidequests tells the story of the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both atomic bombings: an ordinary marine engineer on a business trip who forgot an identification stamp and ended up at the center of the two most consequential moments of the nuclear age, then spent the rest of his long life bearing witness to what those weapons actually do to human beings.

At 12:01 AM on August 1, 1981, MTV launched in a handful of cable markets with fewer than two million viewers, an ironic first video, and enough content to fill maybe a week before repeating. This episode of Sidequests marks the anniversary by tracing how a long-shot cable experiment transformed music, television, fashion, and advertising within a decade — how Michael Jackson's "Thriller" crystallized the shift from music as something you hear to something you watch, and why every music video, performance clip, and visual album since traces back to a midnight launch that almost nobody saw.

On July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa pulled into a restaurant parking lot in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, around 2 PM. He was expecting a meeting with two Mafia figures. He made a couple of phone calls complaining that nobody had shown up. Then he vanished. His car was found abandoned in the lot. No struggle. No blood. No signs of violence. Just an empty car where one of the most powerful men in America used to be.This week marks fifty years since the disappearance, and it remains unsolved. The FBI has investigated hundreds of leads, excavated golf courses, dug up driveways, searched underneath stadiums, and followed tips from informants, conspiracy theorists, and supposed deathbed confessions. Nobody has found him.This week's Sidequests covers the full story: how a working-class teenager from Detroit built the Teamsters into the most powerful union in America — one that could stop commerce across the country if the trucks stopped moving — and how that power put him at the center of one of the most complicated webs of organized crime, federal prosecution, and political manipulation in American history. Robert F. Kennedy spent years targeting Hoffa as Attorney General, eventually landing convictions for jury tampering and pension fraud. Nixon commuted Hoffa's sentence in 1971 with one condition: stay out of union activities until 1980.Hoffa agreed. Then immediately started working to take the Teamsters back.That's where it got dangerous. The current union leadership didn't want him back. Organized crime figures who had grown comfortable with the existing arrangement — and the Teamsters' enormous pension fund that came with it — had no interest in disruption. Hoffa had made himself a threat to everyone who benefited from the status quo. By July 1975, he had powerful enemies with both the motive and the means to make a problem disappear permanently.The people who knew what happened in that parking lot either died without talking or kept the secret. The body has never been found. The case remains open.Some mysteries stay mysteries not because nobody looked, but because the people who knew the truth made absolutely sure it went with them.

On June 28, 1914, a young Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip stepped from a crowd in Sarajevo and fired two shots at the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. Both died within the hour. Thirty-seven days later, all the major European powers were at war.The free episode covers the essential arc: the powder keg of nationalism and military buildup that made 1914 Europe so volatile, the "blank check" Germany issued to Austria-Hungary that removed any remaining brake on escalation, and the cascade of mobilizations where each step seemed logical in isolation and catastrophic in aggregate. By the time anyone understood what was happening, the machinery was already moving. The war that was supposed to be over by Christmas lasted four years and killed between 15 and 20 million people.The full sixty-minute premium episode tells the complete story — the political complexity, the military strategy, the decisions that shaped the century, and the consequences we're still living with today.

On July 20, 1944, a briefcase bomb planted beneath a conference table at Hitler's field headquarters came within an architectural accident of ending World War II. The conference had been moved from a concrete bunker to a wooden barrack — and that single change dissipated the blast enough for Hitler to survive. This episode of Sidequests covers Operation Valkyrie: the conspiracy involving hundreds of German military officers, lawyers, clergy, and civil servants who concluded that assassination was the only remaining moral option, how close they came to succeeding, why the coup unraveled in hours, and what the attempt reveals about resistance, complicity, and moral choice under tyranny.