Journos

From deadly space sprinkles to undersea Faberge eggs to the risks posed by flying tortoise shells, we're talking about unintended consequences in distant places. The recent lunar eclipse has us looking to the sky, where we see ... a ton of debris. A Russian anti-satellite test gifted Earth's orbit with a lot of shrapnel. Astronauts on the International Space Station had to hide out in "lifeboats"...

Apple just announced a huge change : The company is finally going to stop big-timing us and let us fix our own i-Things. This is a significant piece of business for the Right-to-Repair movement, which we talked about in our Nov. 12 episode, "An Inside Look at the Yogurt Cup Mafia and The McFlurry Racket." In this Audio Short, Brandon gives us an update on what Apple's move means for the Right to R...

Brandon reports in from a hotel in Toronto that hides an amazing mystery, which gets our heroes thinking about the nature of pilgrimage, memory, and why people apparently can't stop themselves from boning whenever a TV camera is around.   Plus, Stephen tells the story of searching for his father's childhood home in Honolulu and a wild story of the attack on Pearl Harbor.   So open your curtains wi...

We dive into some utopian city concepts. Brandon walks us through Saudi Arabia's NEOM , Marc Lore's Telosa , and a big ole boat for billionaires to escape pandemics and poverty, plus some failed utopian projects of yore. Meanwhile, Stephen obsesses over slime molds, finds out his dream home is actually an 18th-century prison, and frets over the duo's job prospects after the apocalypse.

Today, we're talking about stuff — the stuff we don't want that we can't get rid of, and the stuff we do want that we can't quite keep. Two big stories clutter our minds: one is about a new report on how organized crime controls the lucrative, and corrupt, recycling market; the other is about the "Right to Repair" movement, a struggle to give consumers the ability to fix our own damn smartphones,...

Brandon reads his latest for WhoWhatWhy : Throughout history, social stresses manifested as strange afflictions, from dancing plagues to fainting spells. But now we may be seeing one that goes from tremors to saber-rattling. Music by Nathan Readey!

 In this episode, we take a look at Facebook's algorithmic missteps and giant, exploratory leaps into the metaverse. But will Zuck's new plane of digital existence be an open-source nightmare or a high-def utopia? Probably neither. But maybe a bit of both.  Let's take a look.