Decoder Ring: A Brief History of Making Out

Money is everywhere. Money influences just about everything. We think about money all the time. But how much do we really know about it? In this episode of Decoder Ring, we explore the obscure histori...

22 Apr 34min

In the summer of 2006, a teenage girl began posting video diaries to a then-new site called YouTube under the handle lonelygirl15. Within weeks she was a phenomenon—even though no one knew the truth o...

8 Apr 58min

For over a century, fans of Sherlock Holmes have been analyzing, debating, and creating new texts with Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters. But when a fan theory emerged about the BBC TV show Sherlock tha...

25 Mar 53min

When Eyes Wide Shut opened in the summer of 1999, it was widely considered a disappointment. This final film from legendary director Stanley Kubrick had been sold as an erotic thriller, and potentiall...

11 Mar 47min

The delicious, healthful prune has long had a cross to bear: It’s best known for making people poop. In the late 1990s, the California Prune Board set out on a quixotic mission to amend this sales-fla...

25 Feb 44min

Three weeks ago, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum shared an unusual tweet: a cartoon image of himself with his arm draped around a giant, anthropomorphized lump of coal. This piece of coal h...

11 Feb 45min

It’s a weird time for culture. There is more of it than ever before, it’s more accessible than ever before, but so little of it feels original. New movies are based on old stories, new songs are recyc...

28 Jan 37min

We are really lucky to get lots of listener suggestions for the show, more good questions than we can possibly answer in a mailbag episode once or twice a year. So we’re starting a new segment we call...

14 Jan 25min