No One Saw It Coming

A bizarre castle in American suburbia becomes the starting point for Jon Ronson’s conversation with Marc Fennell about the man who lived inside it. From Cerberus to cages and princess costumes, the episode uses one surreal house to explore the manosphere and modern male retreat.

Australia’s sugar and cotton boom relied on more than 62,000 Pacific Islanders who were kidnapped, tricked, or coerced into labour. Ryan Butta and Emelda Davis explore how this system was masked by euphemism and how it ended under deeply racist legislation.

The episode explores the 1838 Pastry War, when France turned a pastry chef’s grievance and unpaid debts into a blockade, siege, and assault on Mexico. With food historian Seren Charrington-Hollins joining Marc Fennell, it asks whether the baker’s claim was ever the real cause at all.

The episode follows the Pig War, a border dispute on San Juan Island that escalated after a farmer shot a trespassing pig in his potato patch. Marc Fennell and historian Mike Vouri explore how a small incident turned into a dangerously tense military stand-off.

The episode dives into the 1932 Emu War, when Australia deployed soldiers with machine guns against emus tearing through wheat fields. With Dr Ruth Morgan and host Marc Fennell, it explores how a bizarre campaign became a national embarrassment and why the real problem was bigger than the birds.