Decoder Ring

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Nick Spark fell down a rabbit hole tracking down the origins of Murphy’s Law, the ubiquitous phrase that says “If it can go wrong, it will go wrong”. On this episode of Decoder Ring, we follow Nick on his journey while taking a few detours of our own t...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Jenna Karvunidis invented the gender reveal party, but now she has regrets. On this episode of Decoder Ring, we explore the pink and blue world of the gender reveal party, and how Jenna's small barbecue celebration turned into a global phenomenon that'...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. In the early 1990's Bart Simpson became a breakout star while also becoming a target in the culture war, culminating in president George HW Bush speaking out against The Simpsons as an example of a degenerate American family. Today on Decoder Ring we t...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Why is the ice cream truck business so bananas? On this episode of Decoder Ring we find out via three seperate stories about the strange world of ice cream trucks—about the first ever ice cream trucks in China, the ongoing ice cream wars of Manhattan,...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Over the last half century the decorative pillow has been crowding out our sitting and sleeping spaces, multiplying across our beds and couches decade by decade. For some, decorative pillows are a fun design accent, for others a symbol of useless overc...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. The King was an animatronic lounge singer who performed in Chuck E. Cheese locations in the 1980's and early 90's, but then he disappeared. The King was a victim of a conflict known as the pizza wars, when Chuck E. Cheese faced off against its rival, S...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Videomate: Men is a VHS tape released in 1987 featuring 60 single men pitching themselves as dates to women on the other side of the TV screen, who could connect to these eligible bachelors from the comfort of their homes. In retrospect, Videomate: Men...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Truck Nutz are a brand name for the dangling plastic testicles some people affix to the bumper or hitch of their vehicle. Also known as Bull’s Balls, Your Nutz, and other brand names, these plastic novelties have a powerful symbolic charge and are ofte...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Baby Shark is an megaviral YouTube video, an unstoppable earworm, a top 40 hit, a Eurodance smash, a decades old campfire song, and the center of an international copyright dispute. This month on Decoder Ring we explore the strange history and conflict...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Brett Johnson was a career criminal: a fraudster, a con man, a cyber criminal, but now he’s a legal person operating on the right side of the law, helping companies stop people like he used to be. His story is the stuff of a movie like Catch Me iI You...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Jennifer Aniston’s story had it all: Heartbreak, secrecy, sex, betrayal. But what it also had was a new kind of tabloid: Us Weekly and its copycats. Brad Pitt leaving Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie would have been a huge Hollywood scandal no matte...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Ong's Hat, or The Incunabula Papers, is a conspiracy theory that arose on the early internet. Combining cutting edge science, mysticism, and obvious hokum, it intrigued thousands of people who tried to find out what it all meant. Today we uncover the s...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Hotel Art used to be one of the ultimate symbols of bad taste, it was often ugly, kitschy, and strange. Today, the art you find in a hotel is far less likely to be the result of one individual's poor taste, and much more likely to have passed through a...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Paper dolls were a ubiquitous part of children’s lives for decades, and then mostly disappeared. David Wolfe was a boy growing up in the 1950’s, with paper dolls as his primary means of accessing a world of glamour and beauty that he didn’t see at home...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. What are the real reasons people go on reality TV? This episode follows the story of Ann Hirsch and Cathy Nardone, two women cast on VH1’s “Frank the Entertainer...In a Basement Affair”, a show about an adult man looking for love—while living in his pa...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Decoder Ring is a podcast about cracking cultural mysteries. Every month host Willa Paskin,Slate’s TV critic, takes on a cultural question, object, idea, or habit and speak with experts,historians and obsessives to try and figure out where it comes fro...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Who gets to decide if Sherlock Holmes is gay? For over a century, fans of Sherlock Holmes have been analyzing, debating, and creating new texts with Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters. Decoder Ring explores the Johnlock Conspiracy, a fan theory about the...

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn.  Sign up now  to listen and support our work. Welcome to Decoder Ring! Decoder Ring is a monthly podcast about cracking cultural mysteries. Every episode we’ll take on a cultural object, idea, or habit and speak with experts, historians and obsessives to try to figure out where it comes from, what...