Is it possible that one of the biggest threats to your family’s health isn’t in the pantry or the medicine cabinet, but in the way dinner gets served? During my lifetime, a shift has been happening in millions of kitchens, one that researchers have been tracking for decades, and the numbers are more dramatic than I thought.

What happens when you try to be polite to an angry ghost? Join hosts Darrell and Addi as we break down “The Séance,” the Valentine’s Day episode where the H.I.C. decides the best way to celebrate the holiday of love is to summon Bloodaxe Bill’s vengeful spirit.

There’s a tiny hidden house tucked at the base of a tree in Disneyland, built for a leprechaun who was never real. There’s an empty enemy camp outside a starving city, packed with food nobody touched until four outcasts broke their silence. Today I’m talking about the danger of keeping good news to yourself, and why the best thing you can do with something good, is give it away.

A ghostly figure, a skeleton buried in the mine, and a century-old legend of a silver-mad monster collide as the H.I.C. digs into Hawkins’ darkest piece of town history. Join hosts Darrell and Addi as we break down the third episode of the season, “The Curse of Bloodaxe Bill.”

Is the line between one era and the next as thin as a single step, a single flash of light, and just as impossible to uncross? This month we cross that threshold with two travelers flung into unfamiliar futures, neither one prepared for what waits on the other side. Both stories ask whether escaping your own time can ever mean escaping your own fate, and whether justice or love holds more power.

Years ago when I first started podcasting, I would constantly look at the download numbers and as I was pulling them up, I’d get butterflies in my stomach. Downloads up, good day. Downloads down, bad day. I’d refresh the analytics page like it was going to tell me something about my worth as a human being. I eventually saw past that trap and rarely gave my podcasts stats much thought or weight. But last year, I fell back into that trap again.