The Frontier Curator

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Behind the Bastards

7 episodes this week

Mar 10, 2026

Incels' fringe online culture now subtly shapes mainstream internet slang and widely adopted concepts.
The "looksmaxing" trend, exemplified by figures like Clavicular, traces a direct lineage from incel anxieties about attractiveness.
Despite its violent origins and toxic core, incel terminology has become surprisingly influential across youth culture.

Mar 7, 2026

Mutual aid in Israel, like the Culture of Solidarity, operates as a political act, directly challenging state systems that perpetuate poverty and oppression, especially in Palestinian communities.
The organization explicitly connects food insecurity and community needs to Israeli policies of occupation and ethnic cleansing, refusing to be a neutral charity.
Working as an anti-institutional collective, they aim to educate Israelis about the root causes of injustice, a difficult process in a society where state narratives often dominate.

Mar 5, 2026

Dr. Harry Bailey, infamous as "Dr. Sleep," used immense charisma and charm to deceive colleagues, patients, and staff.
His personal failings, including chronic lying, drunken rages, and sexual misconduct, were often tolerated or overlooked due to his magnetic personality and the prevailing medical culture of the 1960s.
Bailey's contradictory nature, combining dogmatic beliefs with a purported understanding of scientific method, ultimately enabled his dangerous and unethical treatments.

Mar 3, 2026

Harry Richard Bailey, an Australian psychiatrist born in 1922, killed a significant number of patients using "deep sleep therapy" — a treatment that started with legitimate medical interest before Bailey turned it into something lethal.
The therapy began with real doctors and scientists cautiously exploring prolonged sedation as a psychiatric treatment. Bailey became its true believer and chief butcher.
Behind the Bastards host Robert Evans frames this as a case study in how fringe medicine goes wrong: not with obvious quackery from the start, but with a plausible premise that gets driven off a cliff by one obsessed practitioner.

Feb 28, 2026

Tenant organizers in Minneapolis assembled a citywide tenant union federation in 4.5 days, building on months of grassroots organizing against ICE raids, and are now planning what could be the largest rent strike in a century.
The strike leverages an unprecedented coalition between tenant unions, organized labor (including SEIU Local 26), and community organizations — a depth of labor-community alignment that organizers say has no parallel elsewhere in the country.
The deeper structural crisis: a person earning minimum wage can't afford a two-bedroom apartment in any U.S. county, and tenants at the bottom of the housing chain face worsening conditions from landlords who know exactly how desperate the situation is.

Feb 26, 2026

Feb 24, 2026