Decoder Ring

This episode is a first for Decoder Ring: a live show, recorded at the WBUR Festival in Boston, Massachusetts. Given the setting, we decided to take on a Boston-based cultural mystery: namely, the “Bo...

18 Kesä 202543min

Decoder Ring is marking its 100th episode this year. To celebrate, we’re revisiting our very first episode from 2018, which asks: What happened to the laugh track? For nearly five decades, the laugh t...

4 Kesä 202531min

Something seems to have happened to car headlights. In the last few years, many people have become convinced that they are much brighter than they used to be—and it’s driving them to the point of rage...

21 Touko 202539min

Products often tell you exactly how they’re intended to be used. But why leave it at that? As a culture, we have long had a knack for finding ingenious, off-label uses for things. In this episode, we ...

7 Touko 202547min

Chicken Soup for the Soul was the brainchild of two motivational speakers who preach the New Thought belief system known as the Law of Attraction. For more than 30 years, the self-help series has comp...

23 Huhti 202544min

The infamous annual ritual of spring break—where thousands of college students head to the same warm location and go crazy—can seem like it’s always been here. But it hasn’t. The spring break phenomen...

9 Huhti 202543min

Look in the nonfiction section of any bookstore and you’ll find dozens of history books making the same bold claim: that their narrow, unexpected subject somehow changed the world. Potatoes, kudzu, so...

26 Maalis 202551min

Truck Nutz is a brand name for the dangling plastic testicles some people affix to the bumpers or hitches of their vehicles. Also sold as Bulls Balls, Your Nutz, and other brand names, these plastic n...

12 Maalis 202534min