Showing results by narrator "Leon Neyfakh" in All Categories

You may think you know Jerry Springer—the iconic TV host who presided over America's most controversial daytime talk show for 27 years. In that time, Springer’s name became synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions, and vicious on-stage fights. But before The Jerry Springer Show made him infamous all over the world, Springer was something else entirely: a respected Midwestern politician whom many saw as a future leader in the Democratic Party. So how did this serious-minded idealist with lofty political aspirations take such a turn in such a radically different direction?

More than a decade since Michael Jackson’s death, his legacy remains complicated and unresolved.

From the co-creators of Slow Burn, Fiasco is a narrative podcast that transports listeners into the day-to-day reality of America’s most pivotal historical events.

In 1984, as a New York City subway train made its way downtown, a white man named Bernhard Goetz shot four unarmed Black teenagers he believed were going to rob him.

When two Stanford graduate students set out to create a new kind of cigarette that wouldn’t kill them, they didn’t foresee all the obstacles that lay ahead — or the powerful forces their invention would unleash. Nearly 10 years after the launch of the JUUL, Backfired: The Vaping Wars asks: Could e-cigarettes have been the solution to one of the world’s most pressing public health problems—or was this technology doomed to introduce a whole new generation to nicotine, and end up perpetuating an intractable addiction?

In this provocative investigation into OnlyFans— the adult platform where subscribers around the world spent more than $7 billion in 2024— journalist Leon Neyfakh teams up with comedian and OnlyFans creator Gracie Canaan for a one-of-a-kind exploration into the current state of human connection. Throughout, they discover that the site originally built for spicy adult content has quietly and surprisingly become something more complicated— an emotional marketplace where desire, performance, care, fantasy, and vulnerability seemingly blur together.

ADHD may be the defining diagnosis of our time. According to the latest data, more than 10 percent of American children (that’s 7.1 million kids) have been diagnosed with ADHD. And the number of stimulant prescriptions for adults in their 30s has shot up nearly threefold since 2012. In recent years, this explosion in demand has combined with other factors to create a widespread stimulant shortage in the US. In the second installment of Backfired, cohosts Leon Neyfakh and Arielle Pardes look at the unintended consequences of the ADHD industry, and trace the surprising path that brought us here.

In 1974, a federal judge ruled that Boston’s public schools were unconstitutionally segregated. The solution? A controversial experiment in desegregation known as “busing,” which would take children from majority-white schools and bus them to predominantly Black schools, and vice versa. In this dramatic audiobook full of surprising twists and fascinating characters, journalist Leon Neyfakh unpacks the history of busing in Boston and brings to life the human stories behind the headlines by talking to the people who saw what happened with their own eyes.