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On Friday, May 8th, 1657, Oliver Cromwell walked the length of the Banqueting House in Whitehall to tell a committee of Parliament whether he would be King. The Commons had voted 123 to 62 to write that title into a new constitution, and for 5 weeks they had waited for his answer. About 100 army officers had come to Whitehall to say he should refuse it, and only 2 wanted him to accept. He had 2 choices. Take the crown, or send it back. He told the committee he could not take the government with the title of King, so within 3 weeks the Commons struck out the word and wrote in Lord Protector. He died in September of 1658, and his son lasted less than 9 months. The January after Charles Stuart came home, Parliament had Cromwell’s body dug up and hanged at Tyburn. His head spent more than 20 years on a pole over Westminster Hall. What if he’d taken the crown? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the morning in the Banqueting House, and follow the ripple to today: the Speaker of the Commons setting a crown on Cromwell’s head, Richard the Fourth riding out to face his own regiments with the pay chests on carts behind him, a Dutch governor handing New Amsterdam to an English admiral who lets the town keep its name, and 13 American colonies declaring their independence from a king called Oliver. In 2026 Oliver the Fifth reigns under a written constitution from 1657, Dunkirk is an English town on the coast of France, and Cromwell has lain undisturbed in Westminster Abbey for 367 years, because one Friday in May he told a committee of Parliament he would take the crown.

On Thursday, August 21st, 2008, Joe Biden sat in a dentist’s office while his wife had a root canal, and Barack Obama was choosing his running mate. For 2 months Obama had kept Hillary Clinton on his list, though his campaign manager and chief strategist wanted her off it. She had the smarts, discipline, and steadfastness he wanted, he told them, but Bill Clinton was a complication. If he picked her, he said, there would be more than 2 of us in the relationship. By December the former president had agreed to 9 rules on his foundation’s money so his wife could run the State Department. He had 2 choices. Call Biden at the dentist’s office, or offer the job to Clinton. He called Biden, who said yes. Clinton used a private email server as secretary of state, and the FBI director wrote Congress about it 11 days before she lost Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Biden took the oath as the 46th president in January of 2021. What if he’d offered it to Clinton? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the call to the dentist’s office, and follow the ripple to today: Bill Clinton holding the Bible while Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg swears in his wife as vice president, Secretary of State John Kerry receiving the coffins from Benghazi, a woman’s victory speech under the glass ceiling of the Javits Center, Donald Trump convicted by a Manhattan jury as his own TV channel covers the trial, and children taking class in tents on high school football fields in the fall of 2020. In 2026 Marco Rubio is the 46th president, Joe Biden is retired in Wilmington, and every public school built with federal money has a classroom outside, because one Thursday in August the call went to the Clintons’ house in Chappaqua.

On January 2nd, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella took the surrender of Granada, and a 40-year-old sailor from Genoa watched from the crowd. For 6 years Christopher Columbus had asked them to pay for a voyage west to Asia, and twice their experts had told them the ocean was too wide. Within days they turned him down again, this time over his price: admiral, viceroy, and a tenth of the profit. He packed his charts on a mule and rode for France. Back in the camp, the king’s finance officer told the queen the whole fleet needed only 2,500 crowns, about a quarter of 1 percent of what the war had cost, and offered to lend it himself. She had 2 choices. Let him go, or send someone after him. She sent a court officer, who caught Columbus on a stone bridge 4 miles down the road. The contract was signed April 17th, 3 ships left Palos in August, and on October 12th a lookout sighted land in the Bahamas. What if she’d let him go? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the bridge at Pinos, and follow the ripple to today: a Genoese chartmaker growing old in a room over the harbor at Honfleur with Japan drawn 2,400 miles west of the Canaries, a Portuguese clerk writing Lisbon a letter about parrots from a beach in Brazil, a Breton captain named Jacques Cartier anchoring off Hispaniola in 1534, a grandson of Moctezuma ruling a city that buys its matchlocks from Norman traders, and a Spanish army marching out of the Netherlands because the king can’t pay it. In 2026 the 2 continents are called Santa Cruz, Portuguese is spoken from the Amazon to the River Plate, and Tenochtitlan is still on its lake, because one January a queen let a sailor keep riding.

Unfortunately, I came down with an illness this week that took my voice completely. So, instead of nothing, I'm sharing one of my favorite episodes to research: Hannibal of Carthage conquers Rome. I'll be back next week with a new episode. Stay healthy out there.

On Easter Sunday, April 10th, 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte sat inside the palace of Saint-Cloud with 2 ministers who couldn't agree. One told him to sell the French colony of Louisiana before the Royal Navy took it for nothing. The other told him to keep it and send the 12 ships and 3,000 soldiers already waiting in a Dutch harbor. Britain was 38 days from declaring war, and an American named James Monroe was already riding for Paris with orders to buy one city, New Orleans, for 10 million dollars. He had 2 choices. Sign the order that sent the fleet, or sign the order that gave the whole territory away. At daybreak he told his treasury minister, "I renounce Louisiana." The United States paid 15 million dollars and nearly doubled in size. Britain declared war 18 days later. What if he'd listened to the other minister? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the palace at Saint-Cloud, and follow the ripple to today: a French garrison dying of yellow fever behind an earthen wall on the Chalmette plain, a British admiral landing troops through a Louisiana bayou 11 years before Andrew Jackson tries to take the same ground and fails, a Cherokee chief signing for land on the Arkansas river under the protection of the Crown, and a Canadian prime minister promising a railway from Montreal to New Orleans. In 2026 the Mississippi river is an international border for its entire length, and the customs post on the Memphis bridge flies a foreign flag, because one Easter Sunday a First Consul changed his mind by morning.

Just a quick update as to why there was no episode today and informing you that Episode 28 comes out tomorrow! Thank you all so much for listening!

On June 11th, 1971, Arthur Sulzberger sat in the publisher's office at the New York Times with 7,000 pages of a top secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War, copied without permission by a former analyst named Daniel Ellsberg. His reporters had been writing in secret in a hotel for 3 months. His lawyers had told him that printing the pages was a crime and that reading them was too. He had 2 choices. Put the government's own history of the war on the front page of Sunday's paper, or take the lawyers' advice and lock the boxes away. He printed it. Within days a federal judge shut the series down, and 19 days after the first story the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the government couldn't do that. What if he had taken the lawyers' advice? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the publisher's office at 43rd Street, and follow the ripple to today: a Washington Post editor in a Volkswagen under the Mayflower Hotel marquee at midnight, a freshman senator from Alaska reading 4,000 classified pages into the record of a subcommittee on public buildings, 2 men in hats running blank paper through the copiers at a church press on Beacon Hill, and a Times lawyer signing a receipt for 3 cardboard boxes. In 2026 the New York Times is suing the Pentagon with a 1931 case about a Minneapolis scandal sheet, because one Friday morning in 1971 a publisher listened to his lawyers.

On July 27th, 1433, the officers of the biggest navy on earth lined up in a palace courtyard in Beijing to receive robes and paper money from Emperor Xuande. They had been gone 2 and a half years, as far as the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Zheng He, the admiral who had led them for 28 years, was not in the line. He had died at Calicut, on the coast of India, that spring. Sending the fleet back out would have cost the emperor almost nothing. The ships were built, and 2,000 tons of pepper sat in the warehouses at Nanjing. The ministers who wanted the ships broken up had paid for every voyage and got none of the income. Xuande had 2 orders in front of him, one that made the fleet permanent and one that left it to the ministers. He signed the second. Eighteen months later he was dead at 35, and the men governing for his 8-year-old son banned the building of seagoing ships. What if he had signed the other one? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the courtyard where the fleet was paid off, and follow the ripple to today: a 78-year-old admiral taking 100 ships out of Fujian, Vasco da Gama carrying 4 cloaks and 6 hats up the beach at Calicut while an agent of the emperor counts his guns, a Spanish captain rounding a bend in the California coast and finding a walled harbor already there, and a Chumash chief on Santa Cruz Island with a Ming customs stamp in his house. The oldest building in Monterey is a Chinese customs house, because in January of 1434 an emperor gave his ministers half the pepper.

On January 1st, 1962, the Beatles drove 10 hours through snow to a Decca studio in West Hampstead, borrowed the company's amplifiers, and played 15 songs in an hour with Pete Best on drums. Five weeks later, on February 6th, Brian Epstein sat down to lunch at Decca's head office on the Thames and heard the answer. Dick Rowe, the man who chose what Decca recorded, had picked a group from Dagenham instead, 12 miles from the studio rather than 200. Signing would have cost Decca almost nothing. Rowe's own assistant, Mike Smith, wanted both groups and was told he could have one. Epstein had promised Decca's sales department that his family's shops would buy 3,000 copies of any single the group made, which in 1962 was enough to cover the record before it existed. Rowe said years later that the number would have forced him to sign them. Nobody on the sales floor carried it upstairs, and Epstein left with 2 reels of tape in his briefcase. What if somebody had said the number out loud? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the lunch where Decca said no, and follow the ripple to today: a hired drummer at the kit while Pete Best watches through the control room glass, Ringo Starr on a boat to Hamburg for £20 a week, a producer who quits the biggest band in the world over a van driver's wages, an orchestra on a riser in West Hampstead in 1967, and a tour bus outside a red brick building that isn't Abbey Road. The tapes end up in the same company's vault either way, because on the one afternoon it counted, a sales manager finished his coffee and repeated a figure.

On June 8th, 1528, Pope Clement VII signed a decretal commission — a document giving two cardinals the power to end Henry VIII's marriage on English soil, with no appeal to anyone — and then ordered it shown to the king once and burned. Fourteen months later, on July 23rd, 1529, one of those cardinals stood up in a converted monastery hall at Blackfriars and adjourned the court for the harvest. It never reconvened. Signing would have cost Clement almost nothing on paper. Popes had been dissolving royal marriages for 400 years, and Alexander VI granted Louis XII of France one in 1498 on a case so thin the queen produced witnesses to her husband's boasting. Clement himself offered to bless a wedding between Henry's daughter and Henry's illegitimate son to make the problem go away. What stopped him was a Spanish army that had sacked Rome in 1527 and held him in a fortress for 6 months, commanded by the queen's own nephew. What if he'd let that first document stand? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the annulment Rome refused, and follow the ripple to today: a prince born at Greenwich in 1531, an Englishman in white robes in Rome, a letter from Edinburgh that gets a polite refusal, and a bell tower in Yorkshire with the roof still on it. Nobody ever chisels the abbeys down, because on the one afternoon it counted, a frightened man in Orvieto signed his name.

On April 28th, 1967, Muhammad Ali stood in a line of 46 men on the third floor of a Houston induction center while Lieutenant Steven Dunkley read the rule: take one step forward when your name is called, and the step itself puts you in the Army. The heavyweight champion of the world had spent the morning taking the physical and turning down a ham sandwich. Officers called his name 3 times, warned him that refusing meant a felony, 5 years, and $10,000, and got a written statement instead. The step would have cost him almost nothing. The government had offered his lawyers "all kinds of deals," no combat and no rifle, just boxing exhibitions for the troops, the same arrangement Joe Louis had in World War II. Sugar Ray Robinson begged him to take it. Elijah Muhammad forbade it, and the last man who defied the Nation of Islam was Malcolm X. Ali's feet never moved. What if they had? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the step he refused, and follow the ripple to today: a quiet Sunday in Cleveland, a nickname that stays on a Harlem playground, a swimmer lighting the cauldron in Atlanta, and a roll call at the 2016 ESPYs that runs 1 name short. Nobody ever marches behind Muhammad Ali, because on the one afternoon it counted, Cassius Clay stepped forward.

SPOILER ALERT: This episode discusses the endings of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Lost, Parks and Recreation, Mad Men, The Leftovers, and Ozark. On June 10th, 2007, David Chase ended The Sopranos with a family eating onion rings in a New Jersey ice cream parlor, a bell over the door, and 10 seconds of black. Viewers across the country hit their cable boxes. The Boston Globe's television critic sat through those seconds certain his set had died and taken the review with it. Chase had spent years planning something else. Tony Soprano drives out of the Lincoln Tunnel at the top of all 86 hours of the show, and the last scene sent him back the other way, into Manhattan at night, to a meeting he wasn't walking out of. Then, driving down Ocean Park Boulevard in Los Angeles in 2005, Chase passed a little breakfast place, and a thought arrived: Tony should get it somewhere like that. The breakfast place won. What if it hadn't? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the last pages of the final script, and follow the ripple to today: a song that stays where it was in 1981, a corner booth in Bloomfield that stays furniture, a documentary that ends on an answer, and a decade of showrunners deciding what they owe an audience when the credits come. Nobody ever asks David Chase what happened to Tony Soprano, because 12 million people watched it happen.

On May 9th, 1933, guards climbed a scaffold in the lobby of the RCA Building and brought Diego Rivera down mid-brushstroke. His fresco for Rockefeller Center held a portrait of Lenin, and Rivera had refused Nelson Rockefeller's written request to paint it out. The wall got a canvas drape, and 9 months later, workmen chiseled 63 feet of plaster into powder near midnight. Buried in Rivera's refusal letter sat a counteroffer almost nobody remembers. He would trade the mural's nightclub scene for Abraham Lincoln, standing with John Brown, Nat Turner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Lenin on one side, Lincoln on the other. Nelson, 24 years old, said no. What if he'd said yes? This week we hit CTRL+Z on May 8th, 1933, and follow the ripple to today: a finished fresco drawing Depression crowds past a communist in a capitalist lobby, a congressman waving photographs of the wall on the House floor, a velvet curtain going up in the McCarthy years and coming down for a funeral, and delegates at the 1964 Republican convention booing the man who kept it. Rockefeller Center destroyed the painting, hired another artist, and put Lincoln on that wall anyway. The mural Rivera lost became the most famous artwork America ever destroyed, and the version that survives hangs in an office lobby where tourists walk past it on the way to the elevator.

On January 25th, 1993, Sears killed the most famous catalog in American history, and Wall Street applauded. The Big Book was losing up to 175 million dollars a year, and Arthur Martinez, 5 months into the job, chose to eliminate it rather than shrink it. 113 stores closed. 50,000 jobs vanished. The last telephone order came in on May 27th. Two weeks before the announcement, in White Plains, New York, a company called Prodigy passed 2 million subscribers and became the largest online service in America. It sold merchandise on a screen, years before the web. Sears owned half of it. What if Martinez had connected them? This week we hit CTRL+Z on January 25th, 1993, and follow the ripple to today: catalog buyers rebuilding an online store item by item, an electronic Wish Book selling Sega Genesis consoles at midnight, Jeff Bezos choosing books because a 100-year-old competitor already sells everything else, and a dot-com crash that kills every internet store except the ones sitting on real warehouses. Sears spent a century shipping goods to people who couldn't reach a store, built the screen that came next, and dismantled the machine 18 months before the future needed it.

In February of 1942, the ships carrying Australia's best soldiers were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and Winston Churchill turned them around without asking. Singapore had surrendered 7 days earlier. Darwin had been bombed 3 days earlier. Churchill cabled Prime Minister John Curtin that the 7th Division was going to Burma, that some ships lacked the fuel to come home, and that the President of the United States agreed. Curtin, 4 months into the job, said no. 4 times. Every Australian prime minister before him had given London what it asked for. The convoy turned south, the men came home, and they held the Kokoda Track and won at Milne Bay, the first clear defeat of the Japanese army on land in the entire war. What if he'd said yes? This week we hit CTRL+Z on February 22nd, 1942, and follow the ripple to today: 5,000 Australians walking 900 miles out of a lost Burma, teenage militia holding a mountain track alone, a division stranded in Ceylon while its country waits, and a nation that signs the same American treaty in 1951 but signs it as a follower instead of a partner. Australia came within one midnight cable of staying a colony in its own head, and the refusal is where the modern country began.