You Know Too Much

The US measures blood quantum for three things: horses, dogs, and Native people. Joey Clift is a citizen of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a comedy writer for shows like Paw Patrol, Spirit Rangers, and Molly of Denali. He’s spent the past few years turning that day job into a mission: a satire book making Native American history funny enough that people actually stick around to learn it.

The venom rarely kills you. Panicking does. Jelena Woehr spends her weekends on horseback ultra-marathons through Southern California rattlesnake country. She knows way too much about how to actually coexist with them, and what really happens if you get bitten.

Anne Rice sent cease-and-desist letters and killed her own fandom overnight. V. Arrow knows way too much about fandom and fanfiction: Dante’s Inferno counts (he wrote himself in to go fight God), the word “fandom” itself was coined in 1938 by rival fan clubs in New York and Los Angeles who feuded for decades over things like how to staple a zine, and one of its founding members was a trans woman a...

Her dog refused to let a customer leave the store, and the owner admitted she was right to. Nicole V. Cramer is a certified dog trainer with over 200 pounds of dog living in her house: Liesel, a giant schnauzer mix, and Ruthie, a Great Pyrenees mix, both livestock guardian breeds bred to think for themselves rather than take orders. She knows way too much about reading a dog’s instincts, including...

An all-female civilization that votes, dances, and grieves its dead. The men mate once, then die. Dina Graham fell into this rabbit hole trying to cure her insomnia: pull up something boring enough to put herself to sleep. Bees did the opposite. She knows way too much about how a colony runs entirely on haplodiploidy, where unfertilized eggs become males and fertilized eggs become females, and how...

You’ve never heard of the company behind one in four American salads. Wen-Jay Ying runs Local Roots NYC, a farm subscription service she started after Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips told her, backstage in a pink Power Ranger costume, to stop chasing the next disaster and think about what her own city actually needed. She knows way too much about the industrial food system that came after: Taylor...

A rifle carried into the Civil War had a coffee grinder built into the stock. Steven Sadoff knows way too much about coffee, the five waves of it, from Maxwell House and instant coffee to the hand-brew obsessives to venture-backed chains like Blank Street. He opened his own shop in August 2009, right as the third wave’s locally owned era gave way to Blue Bottle and Stumptown’s investment money, an...

He emerged from a giant egg wearing a Windows 95 crop top. Jordana Freydberg knows way too much about Eurovision scoring, the fifty-fifty split between expert juries and a public vote you can buy your way into, the “Big Five” who are grandfathered into the final by how much they pay the European Broadcasting Union, and the 1974 UK jury that famously gave ABBA’s “Waterloo” zero points.

Smash that rate button like a hungry trout smashing a stonefly. Nick Parish knows way too much about fly fishing and fly tying — the Michigan Fly Fishing Club that radicalized him as the youngest member by three decades, why salmon flies aren’t eaten by salmon, the black market for polar bear fur, and the boring truth that you can catch a fish 20 minutes from your house. It doesn’t need to be hard...

There is no control group. Lindsay McCormick started noticing more plastic on her surfboard every summer, and by the time she founded Bite she knew way too much about microplastics — the ones in your water, your air, your food, and the credit card’s worth we’re each supposedly carrying around. Her message is stubbornly hopeful: there’s no clean control group anymore, but there are small swaps that...

Your willpower isn’t the problem. The system is. Anthony Barrows is an applied behavioral scientist who knows way too much about the gap between what you mean to do and what you actually do. He calls it the intention–action gap, and he says almost every social program in the US widens it by design — hidden hoops, forms, stigma, and the psychological cost of walking into the office. Fix the system,...

You will never pay utility bills again. That’s Mark Rukman’s pitch for the town that says yes to the data center. Between 1870 and 1970 humanity built the entire nervous system of the modern world — electricity, plumbing, telephones, planes, everything. Then it stopped. Mark argues the next special century has just started, and if the towns getting the compute don’t get a share of the bounty, the...

How to poop in the woods, professionally. How do you poop in the woods — professionally? Shawnté Salabert knows. Host of the Gear Abby outdoor podcast, and living proof you can bury the lede — literally. She walks us through the whole business: bidets, Kula cloths, WAG bags, and the Cadillac of backcountry hygiene.

It all started when I found a Gucci sweatshirt at Goodwill. Amanda Samuel started collecting vintage at 16, doing community service at a Long Island Goodwill — where she found a Gucci sweatshirt in a garbage bag for $5. Twenty-four years later, she can date a garment by touching the zipper. This week: side seams, invisible zippers, pinking shears, and how to read a piece of clothing like a book.

I went to a hypnotherapist to get past my gag reflex. What’s the Venn diagram between endurance sports and competitive eating? Yasir Salem and the Tour de Donut. Yes, this exists — and Yasir tells us about ultramarathons, the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest qualifier, and the gag-reflex hypnotherapy that made it all possible.

My glute rep precedes me. Suzy Hotrod on 20 years with Gotham Girls Roller Derby — the strategy, the bruises, the early-aughts bar-worker resurgence, and the community that made her give it everything.

I make beer to get people off their phones. Nick Bonadies on what actually goes into a great beer at Belleflower Brewing in Portland, Maine — the water chemistry that can make or break a recipe, the Maine farmers growing his barley, the lambic process that takes years, and why beer’s real job is bringing people together.

The croissant is my Moby Dick. Erica Fair on twenty years of chasing gluten-free baked goods that don’t taste like sad cardboard — the flours that work, the croissant she can’t crack, and why she’ll occasionally gluten herself just to remember what a cinnamon roll is supposed to taste like.

I don’t know who I am when I start talking about Tetris. D’LOURDES on Tetris — the iconic game she fell into at a Barcade, the ridiculous international licensing saga that played out behind it (three men, one Soviet government office, no signed contracts), and why fitting blocks into place is the closest she gets to peace.

A subculture that will kick your ass and melt your cold heart. Joshua “Tex” Teixeira on emocore — how a 1985 DC hardcore offshoot nobody meant to name became a lifelong treasure hunt for impossibly rare 7-inches, hand-made packaging, and a scene built on belonging.

A bowl of ramen changed my life. Sarah Gavigan on ramen — the umami science, the post-war history, why it's a cuisine and not a recipe, and how chasing one bowl turned into an obsession (and a Nashville ramen shop).

The best television show ever made. Danny Robinson on The Dick Van Dyke Show — why it set the template for everything that came after, and what TV lost when it stopped being made like this.

Three Olympic gymnasts did absolutely nothing wrong, and they all ended up losers. Wendy Jo Martling on the 2024 Paris Olympics floor final — the gogi, the inquiry, the four-second timestamp, and the moment on March 7th that turned heartbreak into something else entirely.

A show celebrating the deeply specific, oddly delightful, occasionally unhinged things people know way too much about. Join Pamala Buzick Kim and Eva McCloskey to learn everything you’ve ever wanted to know about that thing you didn’t know about.