Numlock Sunday: Nicole Hemmer on This Day in Esoteric Political History

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Nicole Hemmer a historian and the host of a new Radiotopia podcast called This Day In Esoteric Political History.

The show looks back at historical events with some pretty great guests, and Nicole makes the show with my friend and former FiveThirtyEight colleague Jody Avirgan, who appeared in a Sunday edition last year talking about the ESPN 30 for 30 podcast miniseries he produced about Donald Sterling.

Nicole and I talked about the reason they’re making the show, why it’s instructive to look back in order to better understand our times, and all sorts of great stories from their run so far, including how Woodrow Wilson catching the flu meant world peace would be deferred and the real motivations of John Wilkes Booth.

The podcast can be found wherever…