Paul G's Corner

This week in Paul G’s Corner, we sit down with Eugene Mandelcorn — a man who’s heard more bad film pitches than a Little League coach on a losing streak.Eugene ran an international filmmakers’ group for twenty years, spent another decade selling films around the globe, and now runs a studio without borders, walls, or patience for Hollywood clichés. We dig into his start in the industry, his unusual path from tents to Cannes, his philosophy of “solution films,” and some of the wild scripts he’s got cooking.It’s part filmmaking masterclass, part war story, and all in the unpredictable spirit of Paul G’s Corner. Get full access to Paul G's Corner at paulgnewton.substack.com/subscribe

In 1962, the Pentagon’s highest brass drafted a plan that reads today like madness on paper. They called it Operation Northwoods. The logic was simple, the methods monstrous: stage terrorist attacks on American soil, blame Cuba, and unleash the cry for war.The proposals were not scribbles from a shadowy fringe. They were signed at the top. Blow up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay. Hijack airliners, switch them for drones, then script fiery crashes on live television. Plant bombs in Miami. Even sink a boatload of refugees. Each idea cold, clinical, typed in black and white.The plan climbed to the Oval Office. And there, President John F. Kennedy said no. His refusal buried Northwoods—but not forever. Decades later, the files surfaced, signatures intact, proof that the unthinkable had once sat on America’s desk.This episode of Things I Want to Know: Voices drags that ghost back into the light. We move from the ashes of the Bay of Pigs to the thunder of the Cuban Missile Crisis, tracing how close the republic came to devouring itself in the name of war.Because history’s darkest truths are rarely foreign inventions. Sometimes, they are born at home. Get full access to Paul G's Corner at paulgnewton.substack.com/subscribe

They call it Project Broken Arrow. A phrase meant to sound clean, contained, under control. But the truth is anything but. Since the 1950s, American bombers have dropped nuclear weapons into oceans, onto farmland, even across foreign soil. Some were recovered. Others… vanished.The official line has always been the same: “no danger.” Yet behind those words lies a record of near-disasters, of one switch away from thermonuclear fire. At Tybee Island, Goldsboro, Palomares, and Thule, the United States came closer to catastrophe than it ever admitted.And in the shadows, it wasn’t presidents or generals who saved the world, but mid-level officers whose decisions in seconds kept us all alive.This is the story of the bombs America lost — and the terrifying truth that they’re still out there. Get full access to Paul G's Corner at paulgnewton.substack.com/subscribe

Karen Silkwood knew too much. What happened to her on that empty Oklahoma highway still echoes in Congress, in courtrooms—and in the dark.This is The Woman Who Glowed in the Dark.A true story. A corporate betrayal. A radioactive legacy. Get full access to Paul G's Corner at paulgnewton.substack.com/subscribe

In the trenches of World War I, death didn’t always come from bullets.Soldiers who survived the battlefield often fell to something worse—a silent, unseen force that slipped into their wounds, turning scratches into death sentences.One of those men was Private James Calloway.He didn’t die in the heat of battle. He didn’t go out in a blaze of glory. Instead, he lay in a field hospital, watching the light fade as something crawled through his body, unstoppable, inevitable.A doctor named Alex saw it happen.He had seen it before. He would see it again.Ten years later, that same doctor returned from a much-needed vacation to find his lab in ruins—stacks of petri dishes overgrown with things he didn’t care to examine. He almost threw them away.But then he saw it.A gap in the chaos. A hole in the devastation.Something had crept into his failed experiment—not to kill, but to fight back.He scraped it away. He studied it. He tested it.And still, he didn’t understand what he had found.Not yet.Years later, a policeman named Albert Alexander cut himself on a rose bush. Nothing serious. Nothing that should have mattered. But the thing that took James found Albert, too.It clawed into his body, hollowed him out, made his doctors whisper words his wife wasn’t ready to hear.Except this time, Alex was ready.He pulled a vial from his pocket. A golden liquid. A last chance.And it worked.For the first time in history, the thing that had taken so many men finally lost.Only then did the world learn his full name: Dr. Alexander Fleming.And only then did the world know the name of what he had found:Penicillin. Get full access to Paul G's Corner at paulgnewton.substack.com/subscribe