We can’t make this show without you, our listeners. Today, you can help support Decoder Ring – and get a really good deal. To join Slate Plus for just $59/year, visit slate.com/decoderplus on December 31st and type in the promo code DECODER50 at checkout. Slate Plus members get to listen to episodes of Decoder Ring (and all your favorite Slate podcasts!) with no ads, and get access to exclusive bonus episodes.

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Decoder Ring listeners write in with some excellent mysteries, and for our last episode of the year we’re solving three of them. Why do children play in boxes full of sand? Why do rock bands pretend like the show is over when everybody knows they’re coming back for an encore? And what was up with those school assemblies where you’d get to skip class to learn about…yo-yos?

The voices you’ll hear in this episode include yo-yo masters ”Dazzling Dave” Schulte and Dale Oliver, children’s book author Rob Peñas, Pulitzer Prize-winning design critic Alexandra Lange, and music journalists Brian Wise, Michael Walker, and Travis Andrews. 

You can find all the music from the segment about encores in this YouTube playlist.

This episode was produced by Max Freedman, Katie Shepherd, and Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. We had additional production from Joel Meyer.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281.

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In 1982, the Jane Fonda Workout became the best-selling home video of all time. Over decades, it and its 22 follow ups would spawn a fitness empire, sell more than 17 million copies, and transform Fonda into a leg-warmer-clad exercise guru. And 40 years after its initial release, when the COVID pandemic hit, the workout had a moment yet again. People began doing it alone and on Zoom, tweeting about it, writing about it. So when Jane Fonda agreed to talk to us, we set out to do an episode about it—but it did not go as planned.

On Part 1 of a special two-part Decoder Ring, originally released in 2020, we explore the decades-long relationship of Jane Fonda and Leni Cazden, a fraught friendship that birthed the VHS workout that changed the world. It’s a story of creation, fame, forgiveness, trauma, betrayal, survival, politics, and exercise. You’ll hear from Jane Fonda and Leni Cazden, the brain behind the workout, and Shelly McKenzie, author of Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America.

In two weeks we’ll return with Part 2: the nitty gritty story of the bestselling VHS tape of all time.

This episode was written by Willa Paskin. It was edited and produced by Benjamin Frisch. We had research assistance from Cleo Levin. Decoder Ring is produced by Katie Shepherd, Max Freedman, and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or leave a message on the Decoder RIng hotline at 347-460-7281. We love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show. 

Sources for This Episode

Burke, Carol. Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight, Beacon Press, 2005.

Fonda, Jane. My Life So Far, Random House, 2005.

Hershberger, Mary. Jane Fonda's War: A Political Biography of an Antiwar Icon, The New Press, 2005.

Lembcke, Jerry. Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010.

McKenzie, Shelly. Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America, University Press of Kansas, 2013.

Perlstein, Rick. Nixonland, Scribner, 2009.

Rafferty, James Michael. “Politicising Stardom: Jane Fonda, IPC Films and Hollywood, 1977-1982,” Queen Mary University of London Dissertation, 2010.

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Rats live wherever people live, with one exception: the Canadian province of Alberta. A rat sighting in Alberta is a major local event that mobilizes the local government to identify and eliminate any hint of infestation. Rat sightings makes the local news. Alberta prides itself on being the sole rat-free territory in the world, but in order to achieve this feat, it had to go to war with the rat. On this episode of Decoder Ring we recount the story of how Alberta won this war, through accidents of history and geography, advances in poison technology, interventionist government policy, mass education programs, rat patrols, killing zones and more. The explanation tells us a lot about rats and a lot about humans, two species that are more alike than we like to think.  

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In the summer of 1986, both Time Magazine and Newsweek ran blockbuster cover stories on the same subject: a secret cache of provocative, intimate paintings by Andrew Wyeth, one of America's most famous artists. These paintings were completed over fifteen years and all featured the same, often-nude model named Helga, and had been hidden from his wife and the public for 15 years. The implication was obvious: Wyeth had been having an affair with this woman. But just as the story was breaking in Time and Newsweek, it began to unravel, and something even stranger and more complex emerged.

On this episode we examine the story of these secret paintings, the backlash to that story, and question if, maybe, that backlash was itself overdrawn. This is the first episode of our winter season. If you love the show and want to support us, consider joining Slate Plus. With Slate Plus you can get ad free podcasts, bonus episodes, and much more.

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In 2001, Oprah Winfrey invited Jonathan Franzen to come on her show to discuss his new novel The Corrections. A month later she withdrew the invitation, kicking off a media firestorm. The Oprah-Franzen Book Club Dust-Up of 2001 was a moment when two ways of thinking about selling out smashed into each other, and one of them—the one that was on its way out already— crashed and burned in public, barely to be seen again. So today on Decoder Ring, what happened to selling out? This is the last episode of our current season. See you in a few months!

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For a behind-the-scenes look into some of the articles we read when we create the show, check out our Pocket collection at http://getpocket.com/slate .

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Time does funny thing to everything, but especially to tattoos. Today, four stories about tattoos whose meanings have shifted with the passage of years, decades, or centuries: first, a look into an archive of 300 preserved tattooed skins, then a personal investigation into into the Tasmanian Devil tattoo, the story of the Zune tattoo guy, and finally mistranslated Chinese character tattoos.

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You know the Tootsie Shot. It’s that shot from the movies: a really busy midtown street, protagonist smack in the middle of it all, everyone going somewhere. It’s one of the most recognizable shots in film. It can be found in Working Girl, Midnight Cowboy, Wall Street, Heartburn, Elf, Bridget Jones’s Diary, The Devil Wears Prada, The Wolf of Wall Street, and so many more. This is a short, transitional moment that often comes in the middle of a montage and takes up 30 seconds max, and sometimes just two or three. It’s just someone walking down a crowded street. So why is it so sticky?

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In the year 2000, Dan Kois was a junior book agent working on selling a secretive book proposal called IT, a codename for what would eventually be revealed as the Segway personal scooter. This is the story of the invention and development of a potentially revolutionary device, how Dan may or may not have doomed it, how the hype got out of control, and how that speculation helped birth the modern internet.

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Ilona Granet was a New York art-scene fixture who won the praise of the art world when she put up anti-harassment street signs in lower Manhattan in the mid- 1980s. Her career seemed like a sure thing, but three decades on, and so much more art later, it still hasn’t materialized, even as her contemporaries are now hanging in museums. This episode is not about the familiar myth of making it, but the mystery of not making it. What happens, to an artist—to anyone—when they’re good enough, but that’s not enough?

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If you love the show and want to support us, consider joining Slate Plus. With Slate Plus you can binge the whole season of Decoder Ring right now, plus ad free podcasts, bonus episodes, and much more.

On this episode, we explore the misunderstood history of Muzak, formerly the world’s foremost producers of elevator music. Out of the technological innovations of World War I, Muzak emerged as one of the most significant musical institutions of the 20th century, only to become a punching bag as the 1960’s began to turn public perceptions of popular music on its head. By the 80’s and 90’s, Muzak was still the butt of jokes, and was trying to figure out a new direction as they happened to employ many players in Seattle's burgeoning grunge scene. This is the story of how different ideas about pop music butted heads throughout the 20th century, including inside Muzak’s offices. 

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To say that hydration is an invention is only a slight exaggeration. Back in the 1970’s and ‘80s, no one carried bottled water with them, but by the ‘90s it was a genuine status object. How did bottled water transform itself from a small, European luxury item to the single largest beverage category in America? It took both technological innovation, but even more importantly it took savvy marketing from brands like Gatorade and Perrier to turn the concept of hydration, and dehydration into problem they could solve via their wares. Today, hydration has branched out from athletics to wellness to skincare, but the actual science behind all of it is pretty sketchy. If you love the show and want to support us, consider joining Slate Plus. With Slate Plus you can binge the whole season of Decoder Ring right now, plus ad free podcasts, bonus episodes, and much more.

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Welcome to a brand new season of Decoder Ring! On this episode, we investigate the wild world of soap operas through the lens of one legendary, decades-long, ripped-from-the-headlines storyline. The rape of Marty Seabrook dared to combine the melodrama of soaps with a serious examination of sexual assault, and over time morphed from an award-winning story about believing victims into a redemption arc for the rapist at its heart. This is the story of those who made it happen: the producers, actors, writers, and the soap opera machine itself: the perpetually moving, forever-churning, complex system that create the miracle that is the daily soap opera.  If you love the show and want to support us, consider joining Slate Plus. With Slate Plus you can binge the whole season of Decoder Ring right now, plus ad free podcasts, bonus episodes, and much more.

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Experimental archeology is, simply put, archeology that involves running experiments. Where traditional archaeologists may study, research, analyze, and theorize about how artifacts were made or used, experimental archaeologists actually try to recreate, test, and use them to see what they can learn. In doing so, they have given the field a whole new way to glean clues and get insights into the lives of our ancestors.

Sam Kean is the author of a new book all about experimental archaeology called Dinner with King Tut. With help from him and a few archaeologists, we dig into a number of puzzles that experimental archaeology has helped solve—conundrums involving ancient megafauna, bizarre cookware, and deep sea voyages.

In this episode, you’ll hear from archaeologists Susan Kaplan of Bowdoin College and Karen Harry of University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Native Hawaiian activist and storyteller Nāʻālehu Anthony.

To learn more about the story of Hokule’a and its first navigator, Mau Piailug, watch Nāʻālehu Anthony’s 2010 documentary, Papa Mau: The Wayfinder, as well as The Navigators: Pathfinders of the Pacific.

This episode was produced by Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman. Decoder Ring is also produced by Willa Paskin and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. We had mixing help from Kevin Bendis.

We’d also like to thank Metin Eren and Paul Benham.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281.

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Right now Decoder Ring is working on a full season of new episodes coming this June, but in the meantime we wanted to share this episode from our friends over at The Sporkful. Each week on The Sporkful Dan Pashman and his guests obsess about food to learn more about people.

This episode is the first in a five-part series called Mission: ImPASTAble. The series follows Dan as he embarks on an epic quest: to invent a new pasta shape, get it made, and actually sell it. It's great! To hear the rest of the series, go subscribe to The Sporkful on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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What took blue food so long to catch on? Today it’s all over the freezer aisle, in candies for kids, in tortilla chips, and novelty foods, but it wasn’t very long ago that food experts agreed: blue food was an impossible sell. Their best evidence was a study from the 1970’s in which subjects were served blue steaks to sickening effect. On this episode, we uncover the strange, misinformation-stuffed history of blue food, the rise of blue raspberry, and what to make of the blue food experiment that made those people sick. It may have something to do with Alfred Hitchcock. This episode was produced in collaboration with Proof, from America's Test Kitchen. Proof is a podcast that investigates the food we love. Subscribe to Proof on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Special programming note: Decoder Ring is going seasonal! That means you won’t hear from us for a while, but we’ll be back in 2021 with a bunch of new stories released week-by-week. Thanks for sticking with us, we’re excited to try something new, and we’ll see you soon. 

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In 1983, the Cabbage Patch Kids were released, causing widespread pandemonium in toy stores and in the media. How did a children'a toy inspire such bad adult behavior? On this episode of Decoder Ring we explore the strange world of the Cabbage Patch Kids to figure out why they hit it so big. The answer involves butt tattoos, slightly grotesque faces, industrial innovations, an origin story in a cabbage patch, and serious accusations of copyright theft.

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How did Hanoi Jane become Exercise Jane?

This is the second part of our two-parter on Jane Fonda's Workout. If you haven't yet, listen to the previous episode "Jane and Leni" first, it will give you the full context for this episode. This time around we explore how an academy award winning actor and controversial political activist managed to transform herself into a category defining fitness icon. It's a story involving a persistent VHS entrepreneur, dozens of bizarre celebrity workout tapes, and Tricky Dick, himself.

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When Jane Fonda granted us an interview to talk about her famous workout tape, things didn't go as planned.

On part one of a special two-part Decoder Ring, we explore the decades-long friendship of Jane Fonda and Leni Cazden, the relationship that birthed the workout that changed the world. It's a story of creation, regret, fame, forgiveness, trauma, survival, politics, and exercise. In two weeks, we return with part two: the story of the bestselling VHS tape of all time.

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The mullet, the love-to-hate-it hairstyle is as associated with the 1980's as Ronald Reagan, junk bonds, and break dancing. But in at least one major way, we are suffering from a collective case of false memory syndrome. In this episode we track the rise and fall of the mullet, and also the lexical quandary at its heart: who named the mullet?

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The Karen, a white woman who surveys, inconveniences, and terrorizes, service workers and people of color is a relatively new term in the culture, but her character type has been with us for centuries. In this episode of Decoder Ring we explore the history of this type, from the code-names used during enslavement, to the contemporary menace of the COVID age.

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In 2003, the word "metrosexual", meaning a well-groomed heterosexual man, exploded all over the English lexicon. It invaded the news, TV, and even American politics. On this episode of Decoder Ring we explore the origins of the metrosexual, and how trend forecasters, marketers, David Beckham, Sex and the City, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy helped make the metrosexual possible.

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Rebecca Black's music video for Friday was Youtube's most watched video of 2011, thrusting the thirteen-year-old Rebecca into a very harsh spotlight. Dubbed "The Worst Music Video Ever Made" Friday was an almost universal object of derision. This is the story of how Friday came to be, and how nearly a decade after it went viral, it sounds so different than it did back then.

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How did poop get cute? On this episode of Decoder Ring we trace the rise of cute poop from the original Japanese poop emoji to more modern poop toys which rely on the Youtube algorithm to get seen and sold.

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From The Simpsons’ Big Book of British Smiles to Austin Powers’ ochre-tinged grin, American culture can’t stop bad-mouthing English teeth. But why? Are they worse than any other nation’s? June Thomas drills down into the origins of the stereotype, and discovers that the different approaches to dentistry on each side of the Atlantic have a lot to say about our national values.

In this episode, you’ll hear from historians Mimi Goodall, Mathew Thomson, and Alyssa Picard, author of Making the American Mouth; and from professor of dental public health Richard Watt.

This episode was written by June Thomas and edited and produced by Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. Our show is also produced by Willa Paskin, Katie Shepherd, and Max Freedman. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281.

Sources for This Episode

Goodall, Mimi. “Sugar in the British Atlantic World, 1650-1720,” DPhil dissertation, Oxford University, 2022.

Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Penguin Books, 1986.

Picard, Alyssa. Making the American Mouth: Dentists and Public Health in the Twentieth Century, Rutgers University Press, 2009. 

Thomson, Mathew. “Teeth and National Identity,” People’s History of the NHS.

Trumble, Angus. A Brief History of the Smile, Basic Books, 2004.

Wynbrandt, James. The Excruciating History of Dentistry: Toothsome Tales & Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000.

Watt, Richard, et al. “Austin Powers bites back: a cross sectional comparison of US and English national oral health surveys,” BMJ, Dec. 16, 2015.

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How did the humble rubber duck become an icon of bath time? On this episode of Decoder Ring we talk to rubber duck experts, enthusiasts, and manufacturers to find out how the rubber duck evolved, why it's so appealing, and why there are thousands of them lost at sea.

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The 1998 romantic comedy You've Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan is about the brutal fight between an independent bookstore, The Shop Around the Corner, and Fox Books, an obvious Barnes & Noble stand-in. On this episode of Decoder Ring we explore the real life conflict that inspired the movie and displaced independent booksellers on the upper west side of Manhattan. This conflict illustrates how, for a brief time, Barnes & Noble was a symbol of predatory capitalism, only to be usurped by the uniting force at the heart of the film: the internet.

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When Peter Mac was young, he found solace from his troubles in the voice of Judy Garland. He's now been a Judy Garland impersonator for 17 years. On this episode of Decoder Ring we explore the special valence that Judy Garland has for queer people, the history of female impersonation on stage, and what the future might hold for Judy as an icon.

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When Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an exposé of Lord Byron's incestuous affair in 1869, it nearly destroyed The Atlantic Monthly, and threw the reputations of two literary icons into chaos. This is a story about 18th century scandal, cancel culture, and Bad Literary Men, that isn't so different from how these stories play out in our own time.

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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 to find out how Murphy’s Law was [maybe] born out of the rocket sled experiments of the dawning jet age. We talk to Nick, hear some of the recordings he collected during his own research, plus talk to researchers who are skeptical of Nick’s hypothesis, all to try and find out how an obscure engineering aphorism spread to world-conquering philosophical observation. 

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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's gotten way out of control. We talk to psychologists, historians, critics, and business owners, to figure out why the gender reveal is having such a big, bizarre moment right now, and how we can best understand the strange power they hold over social media.

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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 try and figure out why the H-E double hockey sticks people were so worked up about Bart Simpson by examining the great underachiever t-shirt controversy, bootleg Bart merchandise, the rise of the religious right, and more. 

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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, and the life of an ice cream family in Brooklyn.

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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 overconsumption. Today on Decoder Ring we explore the world of the decorative pillow to try and figure out why they've become so ubiquitous and what they tell us about our homes, interior design, and the way we develop our tastes. 

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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, Showbiz Pizza for pizza arcade supremacy. The foot soldiers in the pizza war were the animatronic bands that staffed each location—including The King. This episode is a chronicle of the pizza war, with the founder of Chuck E. Cheese, Nolan Bushnell, it's rival, Showbiz Pizza's Aaron Fechter, the people who designed the characters and animatronics, and the people who continue loving these characters, like Jared Sanchez, who continue to create work with these once discarded creatures.

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In this episode we’re opening our mailbag to answer three fascinating questions from our listeners. How did “ass,” a word for donkeys and butts, become what linguists call an “intensifier” for just about everything? How do pharmaceuticals get their wacky names? And why do we all seem to think that aliens from outer space would travel to Earth just to kidnap our cows?

In this episode, you’ll hear from linguistics professor Nicole Holliday, historians Greg Eghigian and Mike Goleman, and professional “namer” Laurel Sutton.

This episode of Decoder Ring was produced by Willa Paskin, Max Freedman, and Katie Shepherd. Our supervising producer is Evan Chung. Merritt Jacob is Slate’s Technical Director. 

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or leave a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.

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Sources for This Episode

Bengston, Jonas. “Post-Intensifying: The Case of the Ass-Intensifier and Its Similar but Dissimilar Danish Counterpart,” Leviathan, 2021.

Collier, Roger. “The art and science of naming drugs,” Canadian Medical Association Journal, Oct. 2014.

Eghigian, Greg. After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon, Oxford University Press, 2024.

Goleman, Michael J. “Wave of Mutilation: The Cattle Mutilation Phenomenon of the 1970s,” Agricultural History, 2011.

Karet, Gail B. “How Do Drugs Get Named?” AMA Journal of Ethics, Aug. 2019.

Miller, Wilson J. “Grammaticalizaton in English: A Diachronic and Synchronic Analysis of the "ass" Intensifier,” Master’s Thesis, San Francisco State University, 2017.

Monroe, Rachel. “The Enduring Panic About Cow Mutilations,” The New Yorker, May 8, 2023.

A Strange Harvest, dir. Linda Moulton Howe, KMGH-TV, 1980.

“United States Adopted Names naming guidelines,” AMA.

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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 is bizarre and hilarious, but at the time it was one of many manifestations of what was known as video dating. To find out how anyone thought this was a good idea, Decoder Ring examines the weird and forgotten world of video dating in the 1970's, 80's, and 90's to find out why video dating once seemed like the future, and if that future is still yet to come. 

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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 often associated with a crass, macho, red state audience. But Truck Nutz are a surprisingly complicated signifier, one whose symbolic power is increasingly divorced from their real-world usage.

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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 conflicted future of the song, what makes it so catchy, and how it came to be. 

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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 Can, it involves wild scams, narrow escapes, redemption, and even a trip to Disney World. Throughout his criminal career he defrauded people on the street, on eBay, on criminal web forums, within the justice system, and even inside the United States Secret Service. There’s great entertainment value in Brett’s story, but there’s also a great deal of complication to it, too. Real life isn’t as neat and tidy as a movie, and the ending is yet to be written. 

Today we explore Brett’s story, first by letting you enjoy it, and then we deconstruct it, to decide if we should. 

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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 matter when it happened, but it became an even bigger one because it was turbocharged by these tabloids. Almost 15 years later, the tabloid In Touch ran an issue with the headline “Brad Stuns Jen! Marry Me again!” What is going on? How is it still going on? Why is it still going on? 

This is the last episode of Decoder Ring for 2018. See you in the new year. 

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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 secrets of Ong's Hat, the man behind it, and the new art form it inadvertently birthed. Check out our showpage at slate.com/culture/decoder-ring

This episode is brought to you by the following advertisers:

Aleph Mattresses, a handmade mattress experience: TrustAleph.com

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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 an entire industry designed to help place art into hotels. Hotel art is now almost universally pleasant, if anodyne. How did this happen?

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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 in Ohio. He’d go on to a career in fashion, guided by his paper dolls, just as paper dolls were falling out of fashion themselves, replaced by Barbies and other plastic dolls. This episode is about paper dolls, and their surprising connections to fashion, nostalgia, queerness, and David’s extraordinary career. Producer Benjamin Frisch co-hosts the show to explore the story. 

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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 parent’s basement. How did one performance artist and one accidental performance artist make it onto the show? And how did they behave once they made it there? Their story highlights the ways that reality television distorts narratives, obscures intentions and stereotypes women, yet is still irresistible to audiences and performers alike. 

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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 from, what it means and why it Matters.

Today: The clown has existed in various forms for thousands of years, what changed and made us suspect and fear them? The modern birthday clown is a very recent invention, by going back into the history of clowns and clowning we see that clowns are far more complex and capable of far more expression than the kids entertainment of Bozo and Ronald McDonald. How those complex figures transformed into obligatorily sunny commercial mascots may also explain why they are increasingly seen as sinister today. 

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If you look at any list of best-selling cookbooks, certain words come up over and over again: quick, easy, fast, effortless. But is it actually possible to deliver deliciousness in no time? Or are these recipes too good to be true? This week, The Sporkful talks with intrepid journalist Tom Scocca, who exposed the dirty secret about caramelized onions; recipe-writing legend Christopher Kimball; and food writer (and mom) Elizabeth Dunn, who’s sick of feeling bad when a recipe turns out to be harder than she expected. And we ask: Why do recipes that look simple on paper turn out to be very different once you get into the kitchen?

Tom Scocca is the editor of Indiginity, and you can read his Slate story about caramelizing onions here. Christopher Kimball is the founder of Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. Elizabeth Dunn co-writes the newsletter Consumed.

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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 BBC TV show Sherlock, positing the inevitability of a gay romance between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. With interviews from historians, journalists, and fans at the heart of this controversial idea, this episode explores this theory, how it played out in the real world, and whether this kind of fandom is a meaningful way of interacting with fiction.

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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 it means and why it matters. Why do we get so invested in fictional romances? What does it mean to wear a baseball hat backwards? Why do we clap? What do people think about all day? Decoder Ring explores questions and topics you didn't know you were curious about.

In our first episode, we ask: What happened to the laugh track? For nearly five decades, it was ubiquitous, but beginning in the early 2000s, it fell out of sitcom fashion. What happened? How did we get from Beverly Hillbillies to 30 Rock? We meet the man who created the laugh track, which originated as a homemade piece of technology, and trace that technology’s fall and the rise of a more modern idea about humor. With the help of historians, laugh track obsessives, the showrunners of One Day at a Time and the director of Sports Night, we wonder if the laugh track was about something bigger than laughter.

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White noise has a very precise technical definition, but people use the term loosely, to describe all sorts of washes of sound—synthetic hums, or natural sounds like a rainstorm or crashing waves—that can be used to mask other sounds. Twenty years ago, if you’d told someone white noise was a regular part of your life, they would have found that unusual. Nowadays, it’s likely they use it themselves or know someone who does. The global white noise business is valued at $1.3 billion; TikTok is full of people trumpeting its powers; and Spotify users alone listen to three million hours of it daily. Far more of these sounds already exist than any one person could need—or use. And yet, more keep coming. 

Looking out at this uncanny ocean of seemingly indistinguishable noises, we wanted to see if it was possible to put a human face on it; to understand why there is so much of it, and what motivates the people trying to soothe our desperate ears with sounds you're not really supposed to hear.

In this episode, you’ll hear from Elan Ullendorff, who writes the illuminating Substack Escape the Algorithm; Stéphane Pigeon, founder of myNoise; Brandon Reed, who runs Dwellspring; and Mack Hagood, author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control and host of the podcast Phantom Power.

We’d also like to thank Dan Berlau, Sarah Anderson, and Ashley Carman. 

This episode was written by Katie Shepherd, Evan Chung, and Willa Paskin. It was produced by Katie Shepherd. We produce Decoder Ring with Max Freedman, and Evan is also our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or leave a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.

Sources for This Episode

Anderson, Sarah. The Lost Art of Silence: Reconnecting to the Power and Beauty of Quiet, Shambhala Publications, 2023.

Blum, Dani. “Can Brown Noise Turn Off Your Brain?” New York Times, Sep. 23, 2022.

Carman, Ashley. “Spotify Looked to Ban White Noise Podcasts to Become More Profitable,” Bloomberg, Aug. 17, 2023. 

Carman, Ashley. “Spotify to Cut Back Promotional Spending on White Noise Podcasts,” Bloomberg, Sep. 1, 2023.

Hagood, Mack. Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control, Duke University Press, 2019.

Pickens, Thomas A., Sara P. Khan, and Daniel J. Berlau. “White noise as a possible therapeutic option for children with ADHD,” Complementary Therapies in Medicine, Feb. 2019.

Riva, Michele Augusto, Vincenzo Cimino, and Stefano Sanchirico. “Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 17th century white noise machine,” The Lancet Neurology, Oct. 2017.

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