Welcome to The Soak, stories about how we get clean! 

Each episode, we’ll be covering a different topic related to the world of baths, from cultural bathing traditions, to bathing as recreation, to bizarre bathing fads. Our goals is to bring you, dear bathers, the most obscure and opulent bath-time insights from across time and space.

This episode, we explore the history of public pools as spaces of socialization and social change in the U.S. We also visit the The Plunge in Richmond, CA and talk about the grimier side of public swimming.