How exactly did a young radical from rural Georgia become, arguably, America’s predominant conservative mind? As the longest serving member of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has ruled on everything from gun and abortion cases to affirmative action. In the podcast “Slow Burn,” Joel Anderson traces Thomas’s origin story, which includes a discussion of why Thomas came to hate the race-based admissions policies that once helped him get into Yale Law School, Thomas’s thoughts on Malcom X, and what you didn’t hear during the 1991 confirmation hearing that Thomas famously called a “high-tech lynching.” —Clara Molot