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This, Again

This, Again

By: Mallory Faust
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You may think you know these stories, but not like this. This, Again is where historical disasters, delusions, downfalls, and déjà vu collide with human psychology. From palace scandals, space shuttle explosions, nightclub fires to witch trials, host Mallory Faust takes the moments in history you thought you understood and reveals the blind spots, egos, and eerie echoes you missed. It’s darkly funny, sharp, and empathetic - and it just might change how you see the past repeating in real time.

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Episodes
  • Pocahontas, Galileo, and Isaac Newton: Why We Change the Stories (1600s)

    Pocahontas, Galileo, and Isaac Newton: Why We Change the Stories (1600s)
    May 21 2026
    This week on This, Again, we look at three figures from the 1600s whose stories became cleaner, simpler, and easier to pass down over time: Galileo GalileiPocahontasIsaac Newton Galileo becomes the ultimate symbol of science versus religion, even though the reality was tangled up in politics, ego, public pressure, and institutional instability. Pocahontas becomes a romantic bridge between worlds, despite the fact that much of her life survives only through English interpretation, political messaging, and a story later generations softened into something easier to emotionally live with. Newton becomes the image of effortless genius, reduced to an apple falling from a tree, while the obsessive, competitive, deeply complicated person underneath that myth slowly fades into the background. But this episode isn’t really about “debunking” history. It’s about asking why stories evolve this way in the first place. Do we simplify history because we’re trying to manipulate people? Or because human beings naturally remember stories better when they feel emotionally organized and easy to carry forward? And at what point does simplification stop being an introduction… and quietly become the final version? This episode explores historiography, memory, narrative psychology, and the uncomfortable reality that most of us were probably taught the first layer of history… without ever being brought back for the second one. Attribution Notes: Every effort was made to cross-check primary sources and modern research. Where paraphrasing is used, it’s drawn from the texts below with narrative license for clarity and flow.If you spot an error or have a source to suggest, DM @thisagainshow Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. Galileo Galileo Galilei. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Translated by Stillman Drake. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft1t1nb0d5&chunk.id=d0e180&brand=ucpressGalileo Galilei. The Essential Galileo. Edited and translated by Maurice A. Finocchiaro. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2008. https://hackettpublishing.com/the-essential-galileoFinocchiaro, Maurice A. Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/retrying-galileo/paper Heilbron, J. L. Galileo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Galileo - John L. Heilbron - Oxford University PressVatican Observatory. “The Galileo Affair.” https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/education/the-galileo-affair/ Pocahontas John Smith. The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624). https://archive.org/details/generallhistorie00smit Camilla Townsend. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780809077380/pocahontasandthepowhatandilemmaNational Park Service. “Pocahontas.” Jamestown Colonial National Historical Park. https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/pocahontas-her-life-and-legend.htmEncyclopaedia Britannica. “Pocahontas.” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pocahontas-Powhatan-woman Helen C. Rountree. Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/2782/William Apess. A Son of the Forest and Other Writings. Edited by Barry O’Connell. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. https://www.umasspress.com/9781558491076/a-son-of-the-forest-and-other-writings/ Newton Isaac Newton. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520088177/the-principia Richard S. Westfall. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/never-at-rest/45515EFB2D1A3B1D8764A3558D3A4E4B Patricia Fara. Newton: The Making of Genius. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/newton/9780231128063The Royal Society. “Newton and Leibniz: The Calculus Controversy.” https://royalsociety.org/blog/2015/02/newton-leibniz-calculus-dispute/ Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/295742/isaac-newton-by-james-gleick/ Historiography / Philosophy / Historical Memory E. H. Carr. What Is History? New York: Vintage Books, 1961. https://archive.org/details/whatishistory00ehca Hayden White. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/metahistory Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. https://monoskop.org/images/5/5d/...
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    38 mins
  • Going Undercover: The People Who Entered and Exposed the Psychiatric System

    Going Undercover: The People Who Entered and Exposed the Psychiatric System
    May 7 2026

    What would it take to be labeled insane?

    In 1887, Nellie Bly checked herself into a New York asylum to find out. She got in with surprising ease. Getting out was something else entirely.

    Nearly a century later, David Rosenhan ran an experiment to see if anything had changed. Healthy people walked into psychiatric hospitals, claimed to hear a single voice, and were admitted. Once inside, they acted completely normal. It didn’t matter.

    This episode follows both investigations from the inside and looks at what they revealed about how systems make decisions and why those decisions are so difficult to reverse.

    Attribution Notes:

    • Every effort was made to cross-check primary sources and modern research. Where paraphrasing is used, it’s drawn from the texts below with narrative license for clarity and flow.
    • If you spot an error or have a source to suggest, DM @thisagainshow

    Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

    This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust.

    Bly, Nellie. Ten Days in a Mad-House. New York: Ian L. Munro, 1887. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59899

    Rosenhan, D. L. “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Science 179, no. 4070 (1973): 250–258. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1735662

    Grob, Gerald N. The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

    Scull, Andrew. Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

    Spitzer, Robert L. “On Pseudoscience in Science, Logic in Remission, and Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Critique of Rosenhan’s ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places.’” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 84, no. 5 (1975): 442–452. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1976-00177-001

    Zimbardo, Philip G. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007.

    Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/140

    Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.
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    33 mins
  • Mass Hysteria Through History: Laughter Epidemic, Dancing Plague, and Tik Tok Tics

    Mass Hysteria Through History: Laughter Epidemic, Dancing Plague, and Tik Tok Tics
    Apr 23 2026
    In 1962, a group of schoolgirls in Tanganyika began laughing and could not stop. The episode spread to multiple schools, eventually forcing closures and affecting hundreds of students. More than four centuries earlier, in 1518, residents of Strasbourg took to the streets and danced for days at a time. Contemporary accounts describe exhaustion, collapse, and a response from local authorities shaped by the medical beliefs of the time. During the industrial era in Europe and the United States, physicians documented similar patterns in factories and schools. Groups of workers developed symptoms such as fainting, tremors, and nausea without a clear environmental or biological cause. In that same year, 1962, a U.S. textile factory experienced what became known as the June Bug Epidemic. Workers reported being bitten by an unseen insect. Investigations found no physical cause, but the symptoms spread through proximity and shared interpretation. More recently, clinicians have documented a rise in rapid-onset tic-like behaviors in adolescents, many of whom were exposed to similar content online. This episode looks at these cases side by side, not as isolated events, but as examples of a recurring pattern. Under certain conditions, behavior, emotion, and even physical symptoms can move through groups in ways that feel personal, but are not entirely individual. Attribution Notes: Every effort was made to cross-check primary sources and modern research. Where paraphrasing is used, it’s drawn from the texts below with narrative license for clarity and flow.If you spot an error or have a source to suggest, DM @thisagainshow Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic (1962) Rankin, A. M., and P. J. Philip. “An Epidemic of Laughing in the Bukoba District of Tanganyika.” Central African Journal of Medicine, 1963. https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA00089176_6171 Hempelmann, Christian F. “The Laughter Epidemic of 1962: A Study of Collective Behavior.” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 2007. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/HUMOR.2007.003/html Dancing Plague of Strasbourg (1518) A Time to Dance, a Time to Die Waller, John. A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518. Icon Books, 2008. Waller, John. “A Forgotten Plague: Making Sense of Dancing Mania.” The Lancet, 2009. A forgotten plague: making sense of dancing mania - The Lancet Backman, E. Louis. Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine. Routledge, 1952. Religious dances : in the Christian church and in popular medicine : Backman, E. Louis (Eugène Louis), 1883-1965, author : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Industrial Era / Factory & School Outbreaks Bartholomew, Robert E., and Simon Wessely. “Protean Nature of Mass Sociogenic Illness: From Possession to Mass Hysteria.” British Journal of Psychiatry, 2002. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/protean-nature-of-mass-sociogenic-illness/ Micale, Mark S. Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton University Press, 1995. Robinson, Harriet Hanson. Loom and Spindle: Or Life Among the Early Mill Girls. 1898. Loom and Spindle : Harriet H. Robinson : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive June Bug Epidemic (1962, United States) Kerckhoff, Alan C., and Kurt W. Back. “The June Bug Epidemic: A Study of Hysterical Contagion.” Journal of Social Psychology, 1968. (Accessible summary of case) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3588562/ Modern Case: Functional Tic-Like Behaviors (COVID Era) Pringsheim, Tamara, et al. “Rapid Onset Functional Tic-Like Behaviors in Young Females During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Movement Disorders, 2021. https://movementdisorders.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mds.28778 Müller-Vahl, Kirsten R., et al. “Increase of Functional Tic-Like Behaviors During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” European Journal of Neurology, 2022. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ene.15263 Paulus, Walter, et al. “Functional Movement Disorders: Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Journal of Neurology, 2021. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-021-10578-7 Tourette Association of America. “Rising Incidence of Functional Tic-Like Behaviors.” https://tourette.org/rising-incidence-of-functional-tic-like-behaviors/ Psychology & Mechanism (Supporting Framework) Hatfield, Elaine, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson. Emotional Contagion. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Engert, Veronika, et al. “Stress Contagion in Humans: Empathic Stress Induction.” The Contagiousness of Stress: How It Affects Our Brains and Bodies - ScienceDirect Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Laila Craighero. “The Mirror-Neuron System.” Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2004. https://...
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    26 mins
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