How storytelling became a product.

How a fake country star gave voice to frustrated truckers across America.

How one movie changed Americans’ wine drinking habits.

Isaac Butler on how method acting became so widely misunderstood.

The story of how razors came to have so many blades.

Decoder Ring's upcoming season

Custer's Revenge is widely considered one of the worst video games ever made.

Today on Decoder Ring: Three stories about fame, and one about monkeys.

What's the difference between garbage and a girl from New Jersey?

In literature, the choice to become a vampire is a metaphor for transformative experiences.

When you think about the game, you lose the game.

Rats live wherever people live, with one exception: the Canadian province of Alberta.

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.

What happened to selling out?

Today, four stories about tattoos whose meanings have shifted with the passage of years, decades, or centuries.

You know the Tootsie Shot. Why is it so sticky?

This is the story of the invention and development of a potentially revolutionary device, how the hype got out of control, and how that speculation helped birth the modern internet.

What happens, to an artist—to anyone—when they’re good enough, but that’s not enough?

Muzak, the purveyors of elevator music, had become a complete joke by the 1990’s when it found many of the players in the Seattle grunge scene working in its offices.

How did bottled water transform itself from a small, European luxury item to the single largest beverage category in America?

We investigate the wild world of soap operas through the lens of one legendary, decades-long, ripped-from-the-headlines storyline.

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

What took blue food so long to catch on?

How did a children'a toy inspire such bad adult behavior?

How did Hanoi Jane become Exercise Jane?

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

We track the rise and fall of the mullet, and the lexical quandary at its heart: who named the mullet?

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 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.

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.

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.

How did the humble rubber duck become an icon of bath time?

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.

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.

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.

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”.

Jenna Karvunidis invented the gender reveal party, but now she has regrets.

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.

Why is the ice cream truck business so bananas?

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.

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.

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. Who thought this was a good idea?

Truck Nutz are a brand name for the dangling plastic testicles some people affix to the bumper or hitch of their vehicle.

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.

For over a decade, Brett Johnson was a cyber criminal, a scammer, and a con man, but now he's a good guy, helping companies stop people like who he used to be. His story is the stuff of a prestige TV anti-hero drama, but real life is more complicated than a story.

Is Jennifer Aniston Having Brad Pitt's Baby!??

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.

What Happened to Hotel Art?

Paper dolls were a ubiquitous part of children’s lives for decades, and then they mostly disappeared.

What are the real reasons people go on reality TV?

The clown has existed in various forms for thousands of years, what changed and made us suspect and fear them?

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.

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?