PRESS PLAY
HIV and AIDS changed the United States and the world. In this series, we reveal untold stories from the defining years of the epidemic, and we’ll consider: How could some of the pain have been avoided? Most crucial of all, what lessons can we still learn from it today? Blindspot is a co-production of The HISTORYⓇ Channel and WNYC Studios.
At Harlem Hospital, nurses taste children's medicine first; you get history with its sleeves rolled up.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Kia reframes a hospital marked by grief as a place where love can still be seen.
Blindspot closes its season by tracing the emotional afterlife of AIDS through the ways grief becomes action and memory. Phil keeps pressing until influential allies in the Black community join the fight, while Kia returns to the hospital where her mother died and photographs…
A personal question leads into the policies that shaped HIV, addiction, and harm reduction in the South Bronx.
Blindspot opens with a simple, aching question: what would it have meant to grow old with a brother who is gone? From there, the episode moves into the South Bronx and Joyce Rivera's work at St.
AIDS history comes through a 1986 anthology, a funeral poem, and the Black church's uneasy place in the crisis.
Blind Spot follows a history of AIDS, Black queer life, and the Black church's response through a few carefully held points of entry: Joe Beam's 1986 anthology In the Life, Craig G.
Women living with HIV force their way into a history that institutions had spent years ignoring.
Blindspot begins at a 1990 Centers for Disease Control meeting in Atlanta, where activist Maxine Wolfe arrives with a tape recorder and a blunt account of how women were being left out of the HIV epidemic.
Princess Diana's Harlem Hospital visit leads into a grounded story of AIDS fear, care, and trust.
Blindspot's The Plague in the Shadows revisits Princess Diana's 1989 visit to Harlem Hospital through the fear and suspicion surrounding AIDS, when federal officials estimated that as many as 1.5 million people were living with HIV and a poll found half the country would accept…
Five-minute arguments on American civic life.
Celebrity interviews with true-crime nerve.
Cold War history with teeth.
Fire service shop talk, measured against the old days.
"There was love here" becomes Kia LaBeija’s way of remembering Harlem Hospital and her mother.
This episode explores the hypothetical question of what if the HIV epidemic had been stopped, featuring Joyce Rivera's work in harm reduction in the South Bronx.
Craig Harris tells the American Public Health Association that "almost 40%" of AIDS diagnoses are Black or Latino.
Blindspot’s “Women Don’t Get AIDS, They Just Die From It” follows Maxine Wolfe, Katrina Haslip, and Terry McGovern as they push the CDC in Atlanta, NIH, and Washington, D.C.
Blindspot’s “If I Didn’t Have HIV, I Wouldn’t Have Met You” follows Harlem Hospital’s 17th floor, where Dr.
This episode recounts the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as a framing device for the series about the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
This episode of Blindspot explores the early 1990s through the story of Imad Salem, an Egyptian immigrant and former colonel who becomes an FBI informant, set against the backdrop of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
A journalist recounts his personal experience witnessing the 9/11 attacks from Staten Island and his subsequent reporting on the aftermath.