In Other Words
In Other Words is a podcast about how we know what we know—and why it matters. The stories we inherit, the systems we trust, and the “truths” we repeat are rarely as simple as they seem. Most have been shaped, spun, and repackaged until the lines between fact and narrative blur.
This show peels back those layers. Each episode looks at the assumptions beneath our politics, history, and culture, tracing how they took shape and what they leave out.
In other words, come unlearn with us.
In Other Words
We teach in stories
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The episode moves from developmental neuroscience to curriculum politics, showing how the United Daughters of the Confederacy helped normalize the Lost Cause through textbooks and monuments, and how modern textbook markets and state standards can still standardize sanitized history at national scale through bodies like the Texas State Board of Education. The throughline is epistemology: children learn through simplicity because complexity is cognitively expensive, and institutions exploit that necessity by deciding which “simple story” becomes default. The result is a public trained for narrative coherence before it is trained for verification, which leaves democracy vulnerable when persuasion starts replacing method.