Slate Daily Feed28 Helmi 2024

Decoder Ring - The Gen X Soda That Was Just "OK"

Thirty years ago, a new kind of soda arrived in select stores. Instead of crowing about how spectacular it was, it offered up a liquid shrug, a fizzy irony. OK Soda was an inside joke for people who knew soda wasn’t cool. But what exactly was the punchline? In today’s episode, we’re going to ask how Coca-Cola, a company predicated on the idea that soda is more than "OK," ever bankrolled such a project. It was either a corporate attempt to market authenticity or a bold send-up of consumer capitalism; a project that either utterly, predictably failed or, perhaps more surprisingly, almost succeeded.

This episode was written by Willa Paskin. It was edited by Jenny Lawton. It was produced by Willa Paskin and Katie Shepherd, along with Evan Chung. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

You’ll hear from Sergio Zyman, Brian Lanahan, Robin Joannides Lanahan, Charlotte Moore, Peter Wegner, Todd Waterbury, Dustin Ness, and Matt Purrington.

Special thanks to David Cowles, Art Chantry, Seth Godin, Jeff Beer, Gabriel Roth, Mark Hensley for all the OK Soda commercials and Mark Pendergrast, whose book For God, Country, & Coca-Cola was indispensable.

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends.

If you’re a fan of the show, please sign up for Slate Plus. Members get to listen to Decoder Ring and all other Slate podcasts without any ads and have total access to Slate’s website. Your support is also crucial to our work. Go to Slate.com/decoderplus to join Slate Plus today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(4958)

What Next - Off the Record: We Don’t Talk About Natalie

Nobody objected to Jon Ossoff calling the president disinterested in doing his job. But an off-hand mention of Trump’s “human printer”? That, for some reason, took things way too far.This episode is m...

21 Elo 6min

Culture Gabfest - Announcing: Julia's New Show!

L.A. World is a new weekly podcast from L.A. Material, the local news outlet that Julia Turner helped launch earlier this year. The show helps you understand what's happening in Los Angeles. Every epi...

21 Elo 23min

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - The Harrisong Edition

In the 1960s, the Beatles were defined by the success of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership. But in the digital era, we discovered that the Fab Four’s most popular song wasn’t written by Joh...

21 Elo 38min

What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - Can the Midterms Withstand Prediction Markets?

Hundreds of millions of dollars, desperation for insider info, fury and accusations of conspiracy when it doesn’t go your way—is this gambling or elections? Through the magic of prediction markets, it...

21 Elo 33min

Political Gabfest - Listener Questions

This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz answer listeners' questions of all kinds: the political, the personal, and everything in-between. Many thanks to all question contributors: Da...

20 Elo 45min

What Next - How Islamophobia Got Even Worse

Islamophobia has never gone away. And while it has been wielded as an electoral strategy against Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed and even Barack Obama, the shameless nature of the Islamophobia coming f...

20 Elo 28min

ICYMI - Get In Loser, We’re Friction-Maxxing

Technology keeps trying to “fix” every small inconvenience in our lives, which has rendered us completely unable to endure basic hurdles such as sitting in silence, navigating unfamiliar social social...

19 Elo 51min

What Next - Is Tech Dismantling Democracy?

Our Silicon Valley overlords, as they’ll tell you, aren’t huge fans of liberal democracy—and their products that we’ve integrated into our lives reflect that. As we rely on them more and more, this te...

19 Elo 31min