Decoder Ring

Oscar-winner Warren Beatty first secured the rights to the comic book character Dick Tracy in the lead up to his 1990 movie adaptation. Decades later, Beatty kept playing Tracy in bizarre late-night specials airing on cable TV, that confounded nearly everyone. Why is one of the most famous movie stars of the 20th century, spending the twilight of his career playing a comic strip detective of dwind...

Adults have a long history of trying to find morals and lessons in children’s literature. But what happens when a seemingly innocent book about a boy and a hungry mouse becomes fodder for the culture wars? Over the last decade, Laura Joffe Numeroff’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie has been adopted by some on the right as a cautionary tale about government welfare. In this episode, we explore the ori...

In the late 1970s, a new and unusual concept for a restaurant chain emerged in California—video games plus bad pizza plus animatronic characters. The result was Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre, an immensely popular chain with a pizza rat for a mascot. But the strangeness only starts there. Decoder Ring dives into the formation of Chuck E. Cheese’s and its rival, ShowBiz Pizza Place; the confl...

“Hysteria” is an ancient word carrying thousands of years of baggage. Though the terminology has changed, hysteria has not gone away, and in its most baffling instances it can even be contagious. The idea of a mass psychogenic illness can be hard to wrap your head around. A group of people begins experiencing physical symptoms, because of something that started in one of their minds? In today’s ep...

If you’re lucky, it’s possible you’ve never thought much about sitting. It’s just something your body does, like breathing or sleeping. But in the last decade or so, sitting has stepped into the spotlight, as a kind of villain. In today’s episode, Slate’s Dan Kois tells us about his radical experiment to go without sitting for an entire month. Then to understand why sitting is under attack we look...

Lawn ornaments are everywhere—but for something so ubiquitous, they’re also mysterious. What’s the person with the flamingo or the gargoyle in their yard trying to say—and why do they want to say it so publicly? From the garden-variety to the not so common, the adorable to the odious—lawn ornaments speak volumes, without saying a word. In this episode, we travel from Germany to England and back ho...

Axolotls. Narwhals. Llamas. Sloths. Every few years, it seems like American kids and parents collectively decide they cannot get enough of a creature that makes teddy bears seem impossibly quaint. In today’s episode we’re going to swim after the axolotl, as it takes us to some far-flung and unexpected places, to understand how it came to rule the stuffed animal kingdom. Though the answer absolutel...

30 years ago, the Stanley Cup playoffs ignited a rumor that has been messing with Jane Macdougall ’s life ever since.  In 1994, the Vancouver Canucks had made it all the way to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals against the New York Rangers. When they barely lost, fans expected the team to come back blazing the next year. Instead, 1995 was a total letdown. Team chemistry disappeared and fans started...

In 1990, the cartoon superhero Captain Planet swooped onto TV screens all over the world. He was the brainchild of media mogul Ted Turner, and in the face of impending ecological catastrophe, he had the lofty goal of turning kids into environmental warriors.  In this episode, we’re going to look at how Captain Planet came to be, what he aspired to do, and how much he really got done. Captain Plane...

A fat suit is a custom-made costume with one goal: to make an actor appear fat without them actually having to be fat. It’s typically a unitard filled with mattress foam and other wiggly, jiggly bits—but it’s also so much more than that, an embodiment of all our cultural hang-ups about fatness. In today’s episode we’re going to consider the fat suit from all angles: how it’s made, how it’s changed...

The jalapeño is the workhorse of hot peppers. They’re sold fresh, canned, pickled, in hot sauces, salsas, smoked into chipotles, and they outsell all other hot peppers in the United States. These everyday chilies are a scientific and sociological marvel, and tell a complicated story about Mexican food and American palates. In today’s episode, we meet Dallas-based food critic Brian Reinhart , who f...

We’re bringing you an episode of The Last Archive from our friends at Pushkin Industries. In this episode: an exploration of early artificial intelligence, the story of the composer Raymond Scott’s lifelong quest to build an automatic songwriting machine, and what it means for our own AI-addled, ChatGPT. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at...

Pop culture is full of fictional bands singing songs purpose-made to capture a moment, a sound. This music doesn’t organically emerge from a scene or genre, hoping to find an audience. Instead it fulfills an assignment: it needs to be 1960s folk music, 1970s guitar rock, 80s hair metal, 90s gangsta rap, and on and on. In this episode, we’re going to use ‘ Stereophonic ,’ which just opened on Broad...

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 magazines have stopped appearing in print or shut down altogether. And yet, there is something growing in the checkout aisle: one-off publications, each devoted to a single topic, known as “bookazines.”...

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 artwork, many provocative, all featuring the same nude female model. This collection, called The Helga Pictures, had been completed over 15 years and hidden from his wife, until they were revealed and w...

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 clothes they’ll wear at public appearances. But this was not always the case.  In today’s episode, Avery Trufelman, host of Articles of Interest , will guide us through the collapse of a certain kind o...

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 knew soda wasn’t cool. But what exactly was the punchline? In today’s episode, we’re going to ask how Coca-Cola, a company predicated on the idea that soda is more than "OK," ever bankrolled such a pro...

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, Kyle’s going to walk us through the recent history of the cafe, to help us see how digital behavior is altering a physical space hundreds of years older than the internet itself, and how those change...

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 with a question hiding in plain sight: why do so many coffee shops look the same? We’re also heading back to the early 1990s to ask if you can successfully sell a soda by celebrating that it’s just…...

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 journey along the Underground Railroad, becoming the first American software program to use slavery as its subject matter. Less than four months later, it was pulled from the market. In this episode, we rev...

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 retrograde hogwash that flew in the face of decades of feminist progress. The resulting brouhaha turned the book into a cultural phenomenon. In this episode, Slate’s Heather Schwedel explores where The Rules...

We receive a lot of fantastic show ideas from our listeners—and we’re grateful for each and every one. For our latest mailbag episode, we’re tackling five of your questions, including “Why the hell do we teach kids to play the recorder?” (We’re paraphrasing a bit.) Also: We’ll explore the rise and fall of the stretch limo, the incredible versatility of the word “like,” the meaning of the “Baby on...

In the mid-1990s, the prime time drama Melrose Place became a home to hundreds of pieces of contemporary art—and no one noticed. In this episode, Isaac Butler tells the story of the artist collective that smuggled subversive quilts, sperm-shaped pool floats, and dozens of other provocative works onto the set of the hit TV show. The project, In the Name of the Place , inspired a real-life exhibitio...

Judging from teen dramas on Netflix, the slow dance seems to be alive and well. But when you talk to actual teens, it’s clear this time-honored tradition is on life support. In this episode, we trace the history of slow dancing from its origins in partner dances like the waltz to the modern “zombie sway” seen at middle-school dances and high-school proms. Plus, former slow dancers offer up stiff-a...

We’re back with a new batch of cultural mysteries! This season, Decoder Ring explores the decline of an awkward yet unforgettable rite of passage: slow dancing. And, how did millions of TV viewers miss the experimental art installation that was embedded in the 1990s primetime drama Melrose Place? Plus, stories about stretch limos, an ill-fated video game from the makers of Oregon Trail, and the en...