In this throwback from the Endless Thread archives, hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson revisit an episode from 2024. In 2022, a TikTok creator who identifies herself as "Kala" began digging. What followed was an increasingly viral series of TikToks chronicling the effort ...Show more
Beautiful, Terrible Internet
Warning: This episode contains multitudes! Hosts Ben and Amory explore how viral clips of DOGE staffers' video depositions found a new life online after a judge temporarily ordered them removed. They also dabble in a Reddit thought exercise with a potentially dubious origin Show ...Show more
Sexy spines or literary red flags?
Maybe you can't judge books by their covers. But can you judge people by their books? Reddit's bookshelf detectives say yes. Producer Kalyani Saxena guides hosts Ben and Amory through the stacks and offers a picture of her own bookshelf to the Reddit detectives as tribute. r/Book ...Show more
Digging Up Lily's Garden
A woman sitting blissfully on a vibrating laundromat dryer. A faked pregnancy test to dump a bad boyfriend. In 2019, the internet was abuzz about bizarre ads for a mobile game called Lily's Garden. The ads were only about 15 seconds each, but they evoked a whole universe of drama ...Show more
What it's like to be undressed by Grok without your consent
Note: This episode describes sexual situations that are non-consensual. Sharing a photo of yourself online has always carried some risk. But things got a lot scarier this year when users began using Grok, X's generative AI chatbot to create sexualized deepfakes of women and child ...Show more