Steadcast

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Tuesday, August 11, 2026 · Vol. 1

Steadcast

A curated magazine of the podcasts worth your time.

From the editor· Updated Mon, Aug 10

For fifteen years the Swedish Navy hunted a sound it was certain came from Soviet submarines. Sonar operators watched the contact split apart and re-form on their screens. We picked Red Herring because of what it turned out to be: schools of herring releasing air from their swim bladders, identified when two biologists squeezed dead fish in a lab and then went out and recorded wild ones. A Cold War panic that was, the whole time, biological noise. Elsewhere, Shapur I: Rome's Greatest Enemy? covers the Sasanian king who killed one Roman emperor at Mishike in 244 and took another alive at Edessa in 260 — the first capture of a sitting emperor in battle, which Shapur then carved into trilingual rock reliefs claiming he did it with his own hands. And Land Vs. Sea answers a question we had not thought to ask: ninety percent of lightning strikes land, because the ocean supplies a thunderstorm's water vapor but not the heat differential that sets one off. The ocean gets its own back on superbolts, where dissolved salt conducts better than soil.

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