Can the “Bookazine” Save Magazines?
Magazines have fallen on hard times – especially the weekly news, fashion, and celebrity mags that once dominated newsstands. The revenue from magazine racks has plummeted in recent years, and many ma...
10 Apr 202433min
Andrew Wyeth's Secret Nudes (Encore)
In 1986, Andrew Wyeth was the most famous painter in America. He was a household name, on the cover of magazines and tapped to paint presidents. And then he revealed a secret cache of 240 pieces of ar...
27 Mar 202450min
Why Stylists Rule the Red Carpet
Like a manager or an agent or a publicist, a stylist has become a kind of must-have accessory for well-dressed, A-list celebrities. It’s just expected that they will have hired someone to select the c...
13 Mar 202438min
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 k...
28 Feb 202439min
Why Do So Many Coffee Shops Look the Same?
The eerie similarity of coffee shops all over the world was so confounding to Kyle Chayka that it led him to write the new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Are Flattening Culture. In today’s episode, ...
14 Feb 202429min
2024 Teaser
We’re back with a new batch of cultural mysteries! This year, we’re putting out more new episodes—like many more of them. We’ll be diving down a new rabbit hole every two weeks all year long. Starting...
7 Feb 20241min
The Forgotten Video Game About Slavery
In 1992, a Minnesota-based software company known for its educational hit The Oregon Trail released another simulation-style game to school districts across the country. Freedom! took kids on a journe...
15 Nov 202343min
The Dating Manual Unlike Any Other
From the moment it was released in 1995, The Rules was controversial. Some people loved it—and swore that the dating manual’s throwback advice helped them land a husband. Others thought it was retrogr...
8 Nov 202333min
