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Actually... Forgotten Stories for Curious Minds

Cortex Creative Media

Actually... is a deep-dive podcast that digs up the stories history left behind - the ones that got buried, dismissed, or quietly erased. Each episode pulls apart a piece of pop culture, true crime, or hidden history to find the version nobody tells you: the hoaxes, the cover-ups, the myths that calcified into "fact." 

Join us each week for the stories that are stranger, messier, and far more interesting than the official version.

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  • 4 episodes
  • Updated Tuesday

Episodes4

Newest first
  • Tuesday · 21 min

    Episode 4: A Complicated Man - Emily Wilson and the Translation that Changed The Odyssey

    In November 2017, Emily Wilson published something unprecedented in more than four hundred years of English literature: the first complete English translation of Homer’s Odyssey by a woman. But the real story isn’t simply who translated it - it’s how. In the very first line, one deceptively simple phrase: “A complicated man,” rather than the more familiar “man of twists and turns” reopened an ancient question: What kind of hero was Odysseus, really? And what had generations of translators softened, embellished, or left out along the way? This episode explores Wilson’s five-year, line-for-line translation of Homer’s 12,110-line epic; why everybody is suddenly talking about the Greek word “polytropos”; and how one revealing choice in Book Twenty-Two challenged generations of assumptions about the women in Odysseus’s household. And with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey currently dominating the box office, this three-thousand-year-old story is suddenly part of the cultural conversation again. Nolan has cited Wilson’s description of Odysseus as “a complicated man” as an inspiration - proof that one translation choice can reshape a character we thought we already understood.

  • July 21 · 39 min

    Episode 2: Go Ask Alice — The Fake Diary That Fooled America for 50+ Years

    In 1971, a "real diary" from an anonymous, drug-addicted teenage girl hit bookshelves — and terrified a generation. Except the girl never existed. "Go Ask Alice" was invented by Beatrice Sparks, a struggling writer with no real diary, no credentials, and no shortage of ambition. This week on Actually..., we trace how Sparks turned a fabricated hoax into a publishing empire, exploited a grieving mother's trust to fictionalize her son into a Satanist for "Jay's Journal," helped ignite the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and somehow kept the con running for over five decades — right up to her death in 2012, still maintaining every word was true. Show Notes: Referenced in this episode: Unmask Alice by Rick Emerson — the definitive investigation into Beatrice Sparks and the "Go Ask Alice" hoax.

  • July 21 · 34 min

    Episode 3: Whatever Happened to D.B. Cooper’s Money? —The Perfect Crime’s Imperfect Ending

    In 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a plane, collected $200,000 in ransom, and vanished into a storm over the Pacific Northwest — parachute, cash, and all. Nine years later, an eight-year-old boy digging in the sand along the Columbia River found $5,800 of it, badly deteriorated but still rubber-banded together. It's the only physical trace ever recovered — and it raises more questions than it answers. This week on Actually..., we follow the money: the diatom analysis that upended the leading theory of how it got there, the FBI's surprisingly short-lived search for the marked bills, a clip-on tie that's become the center of a decades-long DNA fight, and the family that's spent fifty years wondering if their own father was Cooper. Plus, where the case actually stands as of the FBI's quiet, unexplained move in December 2025.

  • July 21 · 27 min

    Episode 1: Project Acoustic Kitty — The CIA’s Most PURR-Posterous Idea

    In 1966, the CIA spent five years and roughly $20 million (in today's money) turning a house cat into a surveillance device — implanting a microphone in its ear canal, a transmitter at the base of its skull, a battery in its abdomen, and threading an antenna wire down its spine and out through its tail. The mission to eavesdrop on Soviet agents outside their embassy in Washington, D.C. lasted less than 30 seconds before it ended in the street. This week on Actually..., we dig into the real, declassified story behind Project Acoustic Kitty — the surgeries, the training that never stood a chance, the conflicting insider accounts of what actually happened when those van doors opened, and how one of the strangest chapters in Cold War espionage still echoes in intelligence work today.