Neckties are Utterly Ridiculous

In this week's Classic episode: Were it not for the coal mine, the town of Vulcan, West Virginia may well have never existed. As a rural and geographically isolated community, Vulcan relied on a single, small bridge for its connection to the larger world. When the bridge failed, ...  Show more

Espionage takes many forms. As Ben, Noel and Max learned in the first part of this two-part series, one of those forms was knitting. In today's episode, the guys explore the stories of phenomenal spies who used knitting as a form of top-secret communication.See omnystudio.com/lis ...  Show more

It's hard to remember a time when internet searches were not synonymous with Google. That very company was actually founded on this day 25 years ago. But how did it innovate and make itself stand out in what was a crowded market of search engines in the late 1990s? Elaine Burke, ...  Show more

Safety pins are so ubiquitous, we take them for granted. But that’s the genius of their design – they work so intuitively they might as well have come from nature. Instead, they were invented by a man who never went to the trouble of patenting them. Learn more about your ad-choic ...  Show more

For today’s episode in the history of bad ideas David talks to cultural historian Tom Wright about charisma, a term that often feels essential for understanding modern politics but which ends up obscuring far more than it explains. How did an old idea from Christian theology get ...  Show more

There seems to be a new trend every single day that never fails to shock people. Pee-stained jeans are the latest fashion trend...or disaster. Are these crazy pieces created just to get publicity, or are we just not fashionable enough?Laura Mullett is a journalist and fashion exp ...  Show more