Football helmets can prevent devastating injuries, but they may also help make an inherently violent game feel safer than it really is.

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A closer look at the messy, beautiful bricks hiding across Chicago.

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Comedian, writer, and podcaster Jamie Loftus has always known about Alcoholics Anonymous. As a kid, she loved the album where her dad kept all his AA chips – that little piece of plastic that marks a day, a month, a year of sobriety. Now as an adult, Jamie has her own AA sobriety chip, and getting it made her wonder where it came from. What she found is that imbued in that little chip is a hidden history — from Prohibition to women’s suffrage — of America’s relationship to gender, religion, and morality.

A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.

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