Aug 12, 2026 · 45 min · 8 segments
Nightlife gave us jazz, disco, techno, and entire cultural revolutions. From the courtesan districts of 17th-century Japan to the ruins of postwar Berlin, historian Imogen Willetts takes us through…
I'm a child of the 90s where, you know, I was born in the 80s, grew up in the 90s.
We would go to the record store in Manhattan and they would have these like glossy little like cards that would be like Philadelphia, even as far as Arizona or whatever.
And then we'd pack into a car and travel somewhere, usually to a warehouse where they would play techno music.
Why start there? Because like one could argue that, oh, like in Mesopotamia, you know, thousands of years before that, like in like pubs, like that's nightlife.
Well, I think for most of human history, the experiences that we think of as part of nightlife, hedonism, drinking, dancing, spectacle, all of those things, for most of human history, that was just simply part of religion.
So we didn't have nightlife until quite recently because we kind of didn't need it.
I'm a child of the 90s where, you know, I was born in the 80s, grew up in the 90s.
We would go to the record store in Manhattan and they would have these like glossy little like cards that would be like Philadelphia, even as far as Arizona or whatever.
And then we'd pack into a car and travel somewhere, usually to a warehouse where they would play techno music.
Why start there? Because like one could argue that, oh, like in Mesopotamia, you know, thousands of years before that, like in like pubs, like that's nightlife.
Well, I think for most of human history, the experiences that we think of as part of nightlife, hedonism, drinking, dancing, spectacle, all of those things, for most of human history, that was just simply part of religion.
So we didn't have nightlife until quite recently because we kind of didn't need it.
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