Message In A Laptop
Endless Thread12 Sep 2025

Message In A Laptop

What is your relationship with the trash heap of digital history? Can you still connect your old hard drives? Still sifting through your old photos in the cloud? Do you ever low key snoop in the old electronics of other people, searching for treasure?

That's what Noah Simmons was doing a while back when he discovered something compelling in its simplicity: a homework assignment document, on an old laptop picked up at an estate sale. The title of the essay? "My Secret Place."

From there, the mystery of the author, and the meaning it had for so many people who got hit right in the feels by a nostalgic description of childhood, played out on TikTok. Like hundreds of thousands of people online, Team Endless Thread had to know more.

Credits: Co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, produced by Frannie Monahan, Edited by Meg Cramer, and sound designed by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Managing Producer Paul Vaitkus, Dean Russell, and Grace Tatter.

Episoder(441)

Digging Up Lily's Garden

Digging Up Lily's Garden

A woman sitting blissfully on a vibrating laundromat dryer. A faked pregnancy test to dump a bad boyfriend. In 2019, the internet was abuzz about bizarre ads for a mobile game called Lily's Garden. Th...

13 Mar 31min

What it's like to be undressed by Grok without your consent

What it's like to be undressed by Grok without your consent

Note: This episode describes sexual situations that are non-consensual. Sharing a photo of yourself online has always carried some risk. But things got a lot scarier this year when users began using ...

6 Mar 30min

Obscure music is good and nice!

Obscure music is good and nice!

Some rare folks are born with the perfect music taste. But most of us have to look elsewhere for a tune that sparks a shoulder shimmy or two. Hosts Ben and Amory spend some time jamming to obscure mus...

27 Feb 24min

Fresh, stale, or politics? The Melania doc's Rotten Tomatoes score, explained

Fresh, stale, or politics? The Melania doc's Rotten Tomatoes score, explained

Melania, a documentary about the first lady, has a 10 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, but a 90 percent score from audience members, an unusual discrepancy that raises the question, how ...

20 Feb 24min

Rewind: Love In Transition

Rewind: Love In Transition

In this OG throwback from the Endless Thread archives, hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson revisit a classic episode from their first year of production in 2018. Originally produced during th...

13 Feb 33min

You're Wrong About the Satanic Panic

You're Wrong About the Satanic Panic

In the 1980s, a moral panic swept across America. Parents, prosecutors, and talk show hosts became convinced that devil worshippers were hiding in plain sight, abusing children at daycares, performing...

6 Feb 23min

Hot (and not) fruit takes

Hot (and not) fruit takes

What temperature do you like your fruit? What is the correct way to peel a banana? This week on Endless Thread, Ben and Amory cherry pick a couple of the hottest fruit debates taking place on Reddit. ...

30 Jan 20min

The Alpha Male Myth

The Alpha Male Myth

In 1970, a young biologist named David Mech published what could be the most consequential book on wolves ever written. At the time, The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, was th...

23 Jan 26min

Populært innen Teknologi

lydartikler-fra-aftenposten
romkapsel
tomprat-med-gunnar-tjomlid
smart-forklart
teknisk-sett
rss-impressions-2
energi-og-klima
elektropodden
shifter
nasjonal-sikkerhetsmyndighet-nsm
rss-ki-praten
pedagogisk-intelligens
rss-praktisk-proptech
kunstig-intelligens-med-morten-goodwin
rss-heis
fornybaren
i-loopen
rss-ki-til-kaffen
kortslutning
rss-alt-som-gar-pa-strom