Inkstick Media

In December 2020, the company FireEye noticed that it had been the victim of a cyberintrusion. And it wasn’t the only one. About 18,000 companies and government agencies were breached — everything from the agency that controls America’s nuclear weapons to the agency that regulates the electric grid to a company whose products you probably use every day: Microsoft. So, what did they have in common? They were all using the same software monitoring service: a platform called Orion, from the company SolarWinds. The breach leaves the US open to nightmare scenario after nightmare scenario. In this episode of “Things That Go Boom,” The World’s partner podcast from PRX, host Laicie Heeley examines how we got here, and explores how can we prevent similar attacks in the future.

Darlene Turner is an Inupiaq Eskimo living on a battle line. Not the military kind, the climate change kind. With less sea ice to buffer storms, the ocean is washing away chunks of her village and its residents have made a difficult decision to relocate. “Would you relocate?” she asks. Experts believe stories like Turner’s are just a precursor to a massive migratory trend that could have millions of Americans on the move before mid-century. In this episode of “Things That Go Boom,” The World’s partner podcast from PRX, host Laicie Heeley examines how “climigration” could play out, and how climate change can become a threat multiplier.

Just after President Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed office on Jan. 20, 1953, deep in the middle of the Cold War, his greatest adversary died. The speech that followed is considered one of his best, though not his most well-known. Today, it’s not hard to imagine Eisenhower standing up before us and making the same case he did almost 70 years ago. In this episode of “Things That Go Boom,” The World’s partner podcast from PRX, host Laicie Heeley sits down with US Sen. Chris Murphy, someone in a position to offer a unique perspective on Eisenhower’s “Chance for Peace.”

In 1958, a movie about a man-eating, bloodcurdling mass from outer space introduced the world to “The Blob.” But in recent years, that term has taken on a whole new meaning among foreign policy professionals in Washington. What exactly defines this Blob can be as amorphous as the movie monster, so we reached out to three people to explain who exactly belongs in this group. The term, we learned, describes a perspective that transcends party lines and has remained relatively unchallenged for decades. In this new episode of “Things That Go Boom,” The World’s partner podcast from PRX, host Laicie Heeley explores the moment all of that changed, and the Blob came face-to-face with … the anti-Blob.

For many, 2020 has been a scary year. In an effort to get to the root of why many people feel this way, the first thing we did was something we probably should have done a long time ago — we reached out to a psychiatrist. In a new season of “Things That Go Boom,” The World’s partner podcast from PRX, host Laicie Heeley also asked listeners, friends and family to answer what might seem like a pretty simple question: How safe do you feel? The answers weren’t simple at all.

Why did the US Navy reinstate celestial navigation as part of its curriculum a few years ago? Well, you can’t hack a sextant. In the seventh episode of the third season of “Things That Go Boom,” our partner podcast from PRX, host Laicie Heeley looks at some of the vulnerabilities that come with an overreliance on high-tech defense systems.

Disinformation and misinformation have been blurring the line between fantasy and reality since the start of communication itself. But over the last decade, they’ve posed an increasing threat to democracy in the United States, with the 2016 presidential election becoming a major flashpoint in Americans’ understanding of the consequences of fake news. In episode six of the third season of “Things That Go Boom,” our partner podcast from PRX, host Laicie Heeley looks into how false information flooding the internet and spreading like wildfire on social media poses risks not just to national and election security, but to our health and safety.

As the US reckons with systemic racism and a less-than-democratic past, China is doubling down on its authoritarian ways. Meanwhile, research on the health of democracy from across the globe indicates the patient is not well. In episode five of the third season of “Things That Go Boom,” our partner podcast from PRX, host Laicie Heeley traces China’s rise from the 1990s, when American pop music held a place alongside patriotic education, to its more recent political assertiveness — not to mention its chokehold on civil rights in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. As China moves to assert itself on the world stage, is democracy losing?