Decoder Ring
Decoder Ring is the show about cracking cultural mysteries. In each episode, host Willa Paskin takes a cultural question, object, or habit; examines its history; and tries to figure out what it means and why it matters.
- Website
- http://www.slate.com/decoderring
- Description
- Decoder Ring is the show about cracking cultural mysteries. In each episode, host Willa Paskin takes a cultural question, object, or habit; examines its history; and tries to figure out what it means and why it matters.
- Language
- 🇬🇧 English
- last modified
- 2024-11-20 09:21
- last episode published
- 2024-11-20 08:00
- publication frequency
- 21.78 days
- Contributors
- Slate Podcasts
- Author
- Slate Podcasts
- Owner
- Explicit
- false
- Number of Episodes
- 111
- Rss-Feeds
- Detail page
- Categories
- Society & Culture Documentary History
Recommendations
Episodes
| Date | Title & Description | Contributors |
|---|---|---|
| 2024-11-20 | In 1980, a variety show debuted on NBC called Pink Lady and Jeff. Its stars were a pair of Japanese pop idols known for catchy, choreographed dance numbers. Pink Lady was inescapable in Japan: selling millions of records, appearing on TV daily, and fil... |
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| 2024-11-06 | The fear that the Earth could be destroyed by a killer asteroid is an anxiety that pops up all the time in fiction and is grounded in fact. But funnily enough—actually being pancaked by a giant space rock? Not something you need to spend a whole lot of... |
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| 2024-10-23 | There is a prominent bird in the 2000 film Charlie’s Angels that makes absolutely no sense. This so-called Pygmy Nuthatch doesn’t look or sound like it should, or live where the characters say it does. The bird is so elaborately wrong that it has haunt... |
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| 2024-10-09 | Whatever happened to selling out? The defining concern of Generation X has become a relic from another era. How that happened is best illustrated by one of the idea’s last gasps, when in 2001, Oprah Winfrey invited author Jonathan Franzen to come on he... |
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| 2024-09-25 | 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 e... |
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| 2024-09-11 |
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie… Will He Want a Welfare Check? 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 I... |
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| 2024-08-28 | 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 mas... |
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| 2024-08-14 | “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 wr... |
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| 2024-07-31 | 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, Slat... |
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| 2024-07-17 | 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 co... |
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