Tickle Me Elmo, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch Kids, Pokemon cards. These trendy toys all inspired parental parking lot brawls and suburban shadow economies. For our Christmas hangover, we revisit the outrageous toy riots that marked the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, many of which flared up around the holiday season. Includes a little interview with my Grannie about her experience securing a Tickle Me Elmo AT ALL COSTS.
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Toy Riots (Rerun)

American Hysteria explores how fantastical thinking has shaped our culture – moral panics, urban legends, hoaxes, crazes, fringe beliefs, and national misunderstandings. Poet-turned-podcaster Chelsey Weber-Smith tells the strangest stories from American history and examines the forces that create the reality we share, and sometimes, the reality we don't.

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Personal Journals

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Places & Travel

Reporter and Radiolab producer Matthew Kielty and musician Chad Matheny (AKA Emperor X) were both part of a 2014 episode of the 99% Invisible podcast called Ten Thousand Years that asked the same question we did in our Talking to the Future episode: how do we communicate warnings about nuclear waste to humans ten thousand years in the future when language, symbols, and familiar technologies have all fallen away? Matt was a contributor to the episode, helping bring the strange story to a much larger audience while Emperor X created a folk song containing lore about the Ray Cat (that biologically edited feline who would turn colors when getting too close to radiation). Could a catchy earworm stay stuck in the collective American head for ten thousand years to help warn future generations? We’ll discuss their experiences with nuclear semiotics, the rise of the Ray Cat and the associated public response, as well as how these thought experiments can be vital to imagining and creating a more hopeful future.

Follow @EmperorX on Instagram or check out his website
Follow Matthew Kielty on Twitter @Matt_Kielty
Check out Ten Thousand Years from 99% Invisible

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Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
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Long Live the Ray Cat with Emperor X and Matt Kielty

How do we warn people 10,000 years in the future about nuclear waste sites that will remain extremely dangerous for longer than human civilization has existed? When language, symbols, and technologies are lost to time, how can we get our message across? Atomic Priesthoods, Radiation Cats, Forests of Thorns, manufactured folklore, these are just a few of the unorthodox ideas of government-sponsored academics trying to answer this baffling puzzle.

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Sound Designer and Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Voice Actor: Will Rogers and his daughter Zoe
Written, Produced, and Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
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Talking to the Future: Nuclear Semiotics

For some context for our upcoming series that we have not yet revealed, we will revisit excerpts from our past episodes: Horror Movies pt. 1, The End of the World, and Alien Abductions pt. 1 and 2. We encourage you to listen to the full episodes!

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Sound design and Production by Riley Swedelius-Smith
Edited by Miranda Zickler
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith

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Leave us a message on our Urban Legends Hotline

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Context Clues: Going Nuclear

Amanda Montell is the host of the podcast Sounds Like A Cult as well as the author of the new book The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, a collection of personal essays on various cognitive biases, those flawed ways of thinking that were very important for early humans but now cause all kinds of problems in our technologically advanced world. Amanda explains why these cognitive biases originally existed, how they manifest in the personal and political, and what we can do to understand, combat, and maybe even harness them to our advantage.

Get a copy of The Age of Magical Overthinking
Follow Amanda Montell and her new podcast Magical Overthinkers on Instagram

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Or subscribe to American Hysteria on Apple Podcasts
Head to americanhysteria.com to get merch and leave us a message on our Urban Legends Hotline

Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
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Magical Overthinking with Amanda Montell

Sarah Marshall joins me to chat about how, in 1968, one unsuspecting young woman’s bustline almost caused a stock market bust when thousands of Wall Street employees became obsessed with watching her walk to work. I also tell Sarah about an absurd 20-year-long craze called Girl-Watching that taught "genteel" men the "refined art" of covertly checking out women, as well as the avant-garde artist and feminist responses to the treatment of Francine Gottfried who would come to be known as the Wall Street Sweater Girl.

Become a Patron to support our show and get early ad-free episodes and bonus content
Or subscribe to American Hysteria on Apple Podcasts
Head to americanhysteria.com to get merch and leave us a message on our Urban Legends Hotline

Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Toy Riots (Rerun)

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