Slow Burn
የቻናል ዝርዝሮች
Slow Burn
Slow Burn illuminates America’s most consequential moments, making sense of the past to better understand the present. Through archival tape and first-person interviews, the series uncovers the surprising events and little-known characters lurking within the biggest stories of our time. Want more S...
የቅርብ ጊዜ ክፍሎች
200 ክፍሎች
Decoder Ring | What the Cuck?!
Earlier this year, a tweet went out from the official account of the Democratic Party, tagging the Trump advisor Stephen Miller. It was an image of wh...
Decoder Ring | Jane Fonda’s Workout, Part 2: Hanoi Jane’s VHS Revolution (Encore)
In part two of our special two-part episode, we return to the 1982 VHS tape that created the at-home video industry: Jane Fonda’s Workout. On this epi...
Decoder Ring | Jane Fonda’s Workout, Part 1: Jane and Leni (Encore)
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, s...
Decoder Ring | How to Hunt a Mammoth, and Other Experiments in Archaeology
Experimental archeology is, simply put, archeology that involves running experiments. Where traditional archaeologists may study, research, analyze, a...
Decoder Ring | Mailbag: Drug Names, Cow Abductions, and the “Ass-Intensifier”
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, becom...
Decoder Ring | The White Noise Boom
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 natu...
Decoder Ring | The Boston Cinematic Universe
This episode is a first for Decoder Ring: a live show, recorded at the WBUR Festival in Boston, Massachusetts. Given the setting, we decided to take o...
Decoder Ring | The Laff Box (Encore)
Decoder Ring is marking its 100th episode this year. To celebrate, we’re revisiting our very first episode from 2018, which asks: What happened to the...
Decoder Ring | The Glaring Problem with Headlights
Something seems to have happened to car headlights. In the last few years, many people have become convinced that they are much brighter than they use...
Decoder Ring | Off-the-Wall Stories of Off-Label Use
Products often tell you exactly how they’re intended to be used. But why leave it at that? As a culture, we have long had a knack for finding ingeniou...
Decoder Ring | How “Chicken Soup” Sold Its Soul
Chicken Soup for the Soul was the brainchild of two motivational speakers who preach the New Thought belief system known as the Law of Attraction. For...
Decoder Ring | Spring Break Forever
The infamous annual ritual of spring break—where thousands of college students head to the same warm location and go crazy—can seem like it’s always b...
Decoder Ring | How Books About Things That Changed the World… Changed the World
Look in the nonfiction section of any bookstore and you’ll find dozens of history books making the same bold claim: that their narrow, unexpected subj...
Supercommunicators | 3. How to Have the Hardest Conversations
The final installment of our series explores the conversations that most of us dread, like frank discussions of our differences or a negative performa...
Decoder Ring | Truck Nutz (Encore)
Truck Nutz is a brand name for the dangling plastic testicles some people affix to the bumpers or hitches of their vehicles. Also sold as Bulls Balls,...
Supercommunicators | 2. How to Communicate Without Words
Why is it that we can tell someone “I’m totally fine!” and they instantly know we’re not? Gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other subtl...
Decoder Ring | Jerry Lewis’ Lost Holocaust Clown Movie
In 1972, Jerry Lewis—the actor and filmmaker known for slapstick comedies like The Nutty Professor—took the biggest risk of his career when he decided...
Supercommunicators | 1. How to Talk to Anyone
Why are some people able to talk with just about anyone—about almost anything? One answer may lie in the questions we ask—and how deeply we ask them....
Introducing Supercommunicators
In a new miniseries inspired by Charles Duhigg’s bestseller, the former host of Slate’s How To! podcast sits down with psychologists, social scientist...
Decoder Ring | The Scratch-Off Ticket’s Instant Win
You may never have thought very hard about scratch-off tickets, but that’s part of their power. They’re a form of gambling that’s simply a pedestrian...
Decoder Ring | Jump, Jive and Fail: The ’90s Swing Craze
When we recently got a couple of listener emails asking about the swing revival of the late 1990s, host Willa Paskin’s first, knee jerk reaction was j...
Decoder Ring | I am Tupperware, I Contain Multitudes
The storage container is a stealthy star of the modern home. It’s something we use to organize more of our stuff than ever before, and also something...
Introducing Planet Money: Can Money Buy Happiness?
People often say that money can't buy you happiness. Sometimes, if you ask them to tell you more about it, they'll mention a famous 2010 study by Nobe...
Decoder Ring | Mailbag: Fruit Snacks, Waterbeds, and Lobster Tanks
It’s our annual mailbag episode! We get a lot of wonderful reader emails suggesting topics for the show — and at the end of the year we try to answer...
Introducing SNAFU with Ed Helms
While the Slow Burn team is hard at work on our next season, we are excited to share the first episode of the second season from our friends at SNAFU...
Decoder Ring | Mystery of the Mullet (Encore)
The mullet, the love-to-hate-it hairstyle, is as associated with the 1980’s as Ronald Reagan, junk bonds, and breakdancing. But in at least one major...
Decoder Ring: Reconsidering One of the “Worst” TV Shows of All Time
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 nu...
Decoder Ring: A Feel-Good Story About the End of the World
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 funnil...
Decoder Ring: Selling Out (Encore)
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 o...
Decoder Ring: The Wrongest Bird in Movie History
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 i...
The Rise of Fox News | 6. What Hath We Wrought?
The 2004 presidential race would be the first fully Fox News election—a contest that was framed by Fox, and fought on its terms. But the fight over Fo...
The Rise of Fox News | 5. Ludacris Has Been Fired
As Fox News gathered strength, progressive activists turned to comedian Al Franken and fledgling online communities to punch back. But could the left...
The Rise of Fox News | 4. Beacon of Truth
After 9/11, the Fox News Channel rallied a huge portion of the country around the Bush administration’s vision of the world. But as the U.S. marched t...
The Rise of Fox News | 3. The Other Guy’s Hamburger
For a decade and a half, CNN was peerless and ambitious, and it understood its place in the world. At least, it thought it did—until Fox News burst on...
The Rise of Fox News | 2. A Network for Normal People
Before he ran Fox News, Roger Ailes launched a very different kind of channel. America’s Talking was his vision of the future of television: a strange...
Decoder Ring: Calling Dick Tracy! It’s Warren Beatty Again
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,...
The Rise of Fox News | 1. We Report. You Can Suck It.
When the Fox News Channel launched in 1996, critics called it disorganized, incompetent, and laughably inept. But it wouldn’t be a joke for long. Duri...
Decoder Ring: 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...
Season 10 Trailer: The Rise of Fox News
In Slow Burn’s 10th season, host Josh Levin takes you back to a crucial inflection point in American history: the moment between 2000 and 2004 when Fo...
Decoder Ring: Chuck E. Cheese Pizza War (Encore)
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...