Decoder Ring: Chuck E. Cheese Pizza War (Enco...

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 Fox News first surged to power and a whole bunch of people rose up to try and stop it. You’ll hear from the hosts, reporters, and pr ...  Show more

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 If You Give a Mouse a Cookie ...  Show more

Humans are noisy. The National Park Service estimates that all of our whirring, grinding, and revving machines are doubling or even tripling global noise pollution every 30 years. 

A lot of that noise is negatively affecting wildlife and human health. Maybe that’s why we ...

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 ...  Show more

The steady dings of notifications. The 40 tabs that greet you when you open your computer in the morning. The hundreds of unread emails, most of them spam, with subject lines pleading or screaming for you to click. Our attention is under assault these days, and most of us are ...

When Donald Trump declared victory in the US presidential election, he told an adoring crowd that "a star is born". He was referring to Elon Musk.After months of reporting on the billionaire's use of private investigators, Alexi asks whether the insights he gained from that inves ...  Show more