Can't Make This Up

James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr. is one of the most infamous organized crime leaders in modern American history. As leader of Boston's Winter Hill Gang, Bulger would eventually earn a place at #1 on the FBI's Most Wanted List. Bulger went on the run in 1994 and became a ghost for the law enforcement agencies tasked with finding him.

Today, I am joined by bestselling authors Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge to talk about their new book, Hunting Whitey: The Inside Story of the Capture and Killing of America's Most Wanted Crime Boss. Casey and Dave both have backgrounds in journalism and have developed a dynamic partnership writing about topics related to the Boston area. In today's true crime episode, the three of us discuss Whitey Bulger's criminal career, his 16 years spent as a fugitive, and the breaks in the case that ultimately led to Bulger's arrest in 2011.

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Are we alone in the universe?

Since humans first gazed up into the cosmos, we have tried to answer to this question, sometimes using theology and sometimes philosophy. In our literature, particularly in the science fiction genre, we have speculated what contact with otherworldly beings could look like. In recent centuries, we have used science and our ever-increasing advances in technology to look out into the heavens and search for tell-tale signs that someone else is out there.

Studying the stars for alien life has a long and interesting history, most notably with the founding of SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) nearly sixty years ago. My guest today is Keith Cooper, author of The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, who joins me to discuss the history surrounding academic efforts of "seeking out new life and new civilizations." Keith has a background in astronomy and astrophysics and has served as the Editor of Astronomy Now since 2006. His articles on cosmology, planetary science, astrobiology, and related disciplines have appeared in Sky & Telescope, Physics World, and the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. In our conversation, Keith and I discuss early searches for ET intelligence and the origins of the SETI program, what SETI has done to listen for signals from other worlds, and the controversy surrounding the idea of whether or not we should respond if we do indeed intercept an alien signal. Keith and I then dive into our own evolutionary history to speculate on how life might have evolved elsewhere, and we explore examples from Earth's history of first contact between cultures to see what lessons we might be able to apply to first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization.

Check out the massive selection of sci-fi comics, books, toys, and games available at Things from Another World!

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I am joined today on Alternate Histories by Gretchen Berg. "Gretchen was was born on the East Coast, raised in the Midwest, and spent a number of years in the Pacific Northwest. She has taught English in South Korea and in Northern Iraq and has traveled to all the other continents." She joins me on the podcast from Chicago via Skype to discuss her debut historical fiction novel, The Operator.

"Nobody knows the people of Wooster, Ohio, better than switchboard operator Vivian Dalton, and she’d be the first to tell you that. She calls it intuition. Her teenage daughter, Charlotte, calls it eavesdropping.

Vivian and the other women who work at Bell on East Liberty Street connect lines and lives. They aren’t supposed to listen in on conversations, but they do, and they all have opinions on what they hear—especially Vivian. She knows that Mrs. Butler’s ungrateful daughter, Maxine, still hasn’t thanked her mother for the quilt she made, and that Ginny Frazier turned down yet another invitation to go to the A&W with Clyde Walsh.

Then, one cold December night, Vivian listens in on a call between that snob Betty Miller and someone whose voice she can’t quite place and hears something shocking. Betty Miller’s mystery friend has news that, if true, will shatter Vivian’s tidy life in Wooster, humiliating her and making her the laughingstock of the town.

Vivian may be mortified, but she isn’t going to take this lying down. She’s going to get to the bottom of that rumor—get into it, get under it, poke around in the corners. Find every last bit. Vivian wants the truth, no matter how painful it may be.

But as Vivian is about to be reminded, in a small town like Wooster, one secret usually leads to another. . . ."

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Today on Alternate Histories, I am joined by Caroline Scott, who "is a freelance writer and historian specializing in WWI and women's history, with a PhD from Durham University. Born in the UK, Caroline currently resides in France. She has published two nonfiction books on WWI."

"The Poppy Wives," Caroline's first novel, is set in 1921 and follows "survivors of the Great War who are desperately trying to piece together the fragments of their broken lives. While many have been reunited with their loved ones, Edie’s husband Francis is still missing. Francis is presumed to have been killed in action, but Edie knows he is alive.

Harry, Francis’s brother, was there the day Francis went missing in Ypres. And like Edie, he’s hopeful Francis is living somewhere in France, lost and confused. Hired by grieving families in need of closure, Harry returns to the Western Front to photograph soldiers’ graves. As he travels through France gathering news for British wives and mothers, he searches for evidence his own brother is still alive.

When Edie receives a mysterious photograph that she believes was taken by Francis, she is more certain than ever he isn’t dead. Edie embarks on her own journey in the hope of finding some trace of her husband. Is he truly gone, or could he still be alive? And if he is, why hasn’t he come home?

As Harry and Edie’s paths converge, they get closer to the truth about Francis and, as they do, are soon faced with the life-changing impact of the answers they discover.

An incredibly moving account of an often-forgotten moment in history—those years after the war that were filled with the unknown—The Poppy Wife tells the story of the thousands of soldiers who were lost amid the chaos and ruins in battle-scarred France; and the even greater number of men and women hoping to find them again."

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