Decoder Ring

By Slate Podcasts

Society & Culture History

What's Decoder Ring about?

Decoder Ring is the show about cracking cultural mysteries. In each episode, host Willa Paskin takes a cultural question, object, or habit; examines its history; and tries to figure out what it means and why it matters.

4.6

1,165 ratings

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Slate Plus Exclusive: The M...

01.09.2023

Host Willa Paskin and producer Katie Shepherd discuss how this season of Decoder Ring came together. Slate Plus members have access to this whole interview. Sign up for Slate Plus to access this exclusive episode and support the show. Learn ...

Decoder Ring episodes:

01.09.2023 Slate Plus Exclusive: The Making of This Season Host Willa Paskin and producer Katie Shepherd discuss how this season of Decoder Ring came together. Slate Plus members have access to this whole interview. Sign up for Slate Plus to access this exclusive episode and support the show. Learn ...
12.27.2022 The Mailbag Episode We’re really lucky to get a lot of listener emails, suggesting topics for the show. In this episode, we’re going to dig into a handful of the most fascinating ones that we’ve yet to tackle on the show. We’re taking ...
12.20.2022 Encore: ‘You’ve Got Mail’ Got It Wrong (This episode originally aired in March 2020.) The 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, is about the brutal fight between a beloved indie bookstore, the Shop Around the Corner, and Fox Books, an obvious ...
12.13.2022 Cellino & Barnes, Injury Attorneys, 800-888-8888 Ross Cellino and Steve Barnes were two Buffalo-based lawyers who became the literal poster-men for personal injury advertising. They poured millions of dollars into ads that did more than just bring in clients: it turned the duo into household names ...
12.06.2022 How Preppy Became Streetwear We bring you a special episode from the Articles of Interest podcast hosted by Avery Trufelman about the incredible reach and adaptability of preppy clothes. It’s a story about the great modernizer of Ivy style, Ralph Lauren, and how he ...
11.29.2022 The New Age Hit Machine For this episode, a story from Slate senior producer Evan Chung about how Yanni, John Tesh and a number of other surprising acts made it big in the 1990s. It’s a throwback to a simpler time—when musicians struggled to find ...
11.22.2022 The Butt and the Bustle For about two decades towards the end of the Victorian era, in the 1870s and 1880s, a large bustle-enhanced bottom was the height of fashion. In this episode we explore how it’s connected to today’s big booty craze. We look ...
11.15.2022 The Truth About #TheDress In the history of viral images, #TheDress has got to be in the top 10. This unassuming photo of a party dress kicked off a global debate when people realized they were seeing it completely differently. Is it black and ...
11.10.2022 Fall 2022 Teaser Decoder Ring is back with a new season of juicy topics, like.... Remember the viral phenomenon and optical mind-blower known as “The Dress”? What does another peculiar piece of clothing from the past—the bustle—tell us about fashion trends today? And, ...
10.12.2022 McGruff Takes a Bite Out of Crime Pt. 2 McGruff the Crime Dog arrived on the scene at the dawn of the 1980s, just as a firehose of anti-drug PSAs was inundating the youth of America. These messages didn’t always work as intended—but they did work their way into ...
10.04.2022 McGruff Takes a Bite Out of Crime Pt. 1 McGruff the Crime Dog arrived on the scene at the dawn of the 1980s, just as a firehose of anti-drug PSAs was inundating the youth of America. These messages didn’t always work as intended—but they did work their way into ...
08.23.2022 Slate Plus Exclusive: The Making of This Season Host Willa Paskin talks about topics versus narratives, translating fabulists, and creating a sound landscape for the world of Mae West. Slate Plus members have access to this whole interview. Sign up for Slate Plus to access this exclusive episode ...
08.16.2022 The “Sex” Scandal That Made Mae West In the early 1930s, Mae West’s dirty talk and hip swiveling walk made her one of the biggest movie stars in America. But before West hit the big-screen, she was prosecuted for staging not one, but two scandalous plays. In ...
08.09.2022 The First Alien Abductees When you think of an alien abduction, what do you picture? Humanoid creatures, medical experiments, lost memories retrieved through hypnosis? That narrative was largely unknown until Betty and Barney Hill went public about their own alien abduction in the 1960s. ...
08.02.2022 The Most Famous Poet No One Remembers Rod McKuen sold multiple millions of poetry books in the 60s and 70s. He released dozens of albums, was a regular on late night, and was even nominated for an Oscar. So, how did the most salable poet in American ...
07.26.2022 The Mall is Dead (Long Live the Mall) What do we lose if we lose the mall? 70 years into their existence, these hulking temples to commerce are surprisingly resilient and filled with contradictions. In this episode, Alexandra Lange, the author of the new book Meet Me at ...
07.19.2022 Summer 2022 Teaser Decoder Ring is coming back with a new season featuring a whole new set of questions.... Like, is the shopping mall really dying? How did a poet who sold millions of books and records 50 years ago, come to be ...
05.17.2022 The Storytelling Craze When did everyone become a storyteller? Decades after George Lucas and Steve Jobs made storytelling a big business, every company now wants to tell “Our Story.” Instagram and TikTok let everyone else tell their “stories,” and the number of people ...
05.10.2022 “We Got Ourselves a Convoy” In the 1970s, a song about protesting truckers topped the music charts in multiple countries, and kicked off a pop culture craze for CB radios. In early 2022, that same song became an anthem for a new trucker-led protest movement ...
05.03.2022 The Sideways Effect In 2004, the indie flick Sideways was released in just four theaters, but it had a big impact, earning five Oscar nominations and $110 million worldwide. “I thought it was just going to be a nice little comedy,” filmmaker Alexander ...
04.26.2022 The Madness Behind ‘The Method’ When we think of method acting, we tend to think of actors going a little over the top for a role – like Jared Leto, who allegedly sent his colleagues dead rats when he was preparing to be The Joker, ...
04.19.2022 “F--k Everything, We're Doing Five Blades” In the early 2000s, an arms race broke out in the world of men’s shaving. After decades with razors that had only one blade and then decades with razors that had only two, the number of blades rapidly spiraled up ...
04.12.2022 Spring 2022 Teaser Decoder Ring is coming back with a new season featuring a whole new set of questions…and some good surprising answers. Like, how did razors come to have such a ridiculous amount of blades on them? Did one line from Paul ...
02.10.2022 Decoder Ring Presents Endless Thread: The Rickroll Hi Decoder Ring listeners! Right now we’re in-between seasons and starting to work on some new stories, but in the meantime we wanted to share something from another podcast we think you’d love: Endless Thread from WBUR, where hosts Ben ...
12.23.2021 Custer's Revenge Custer's Revenge is widely considered one of the worst video games ever made. Originally released as part of a series of Swedish Erotica-branded adult games for the Atari 2600, Custer's Revenge involves moving a pixelated General Custer across the screen ...
12.14.2021 The Fame That Got Away Today on Decoder Ring: Three stories about fame, and one about monkeys. Are primates susceptible to celebrity endorsements? What does fame do to the mind of a famous person? Who were the famous tattooed ladies of the 1880s? And what's ...
12.07.2021 Truly Tasteless Jokes Note: This episode is about offensive material, and so contains explicit and offensive language. Truly Tasteless Jokes were a series of joke books that dominated the bestsellers list during the 1980s. An equal opportunity joke book: Truly Tasteless Jokes were ...
11.30.2021 The Philosophy of Vampires In literature, the choice to become a vampire is a metaphor for transformative experiences. On this episode, we bring you a story from Slate's Hi-Phi Nation podcast, which explores problems in contemporary philosophy through story. From real-life blood suckers, to ...
11.23.2021 You Just Lost The Game When you think about the game, you lose the game. When you lose the game you must declare that you have lost the game, causing all others in your vicinity to also lose the game. That’s it, that’s the game. ...
11.16.2021 The Alberta Rat War Rats live wherever people live, with one exception: the Canadian province of Alberta. A rat sighting in Alberta is a major local event that mobilizes the local government to identify and eliminate any hint of infestation. Rat sightings makes the ...
11.09.2021 The Great Helga Hype 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. These paintings were completed over fifteen ...
08.06.2021 Selling Out In 2001, Oprah Winfrey invited Jonathan Franzen to come on her show to discuss his new novel The Corrections. A month later she withdrew the invitation, kicking off a media firestorm. The Oprah-Franzen Book Club Dust-Up of 2001 was a ...
07.27.2021 Tattoo Flash Time does funny thing to everything, but especially to tattoos. Today, four stories about tattoos whose meanings have shifted with the passage of years, decades, or centuries: first, a look into an archive of 300 preserved tattooed skins, then a ...
07.20.2021 The Tootsie Shot You know the Tootsie Shot. It’s that shot from the movies: a really busy midtown street, protagonist smack in the middle of it all, everyone going somewhere. It’s one of the most recognizable shots in film. It can be found ...
07.13.2021 Who Killed The Segway? In the year 2000, Dan Kois was a junior book agent working on selling a secretive book proposal called IT, a codename for what would eventually be revealed as the Segway personal scooter. This is the story of the invention ...
07.06.2021 The Sign Painter Ilona Granet was a New York art-scene fixture who won the praise of the art world when she put up anti-harassment street signs in lower Manhattan in the mid- 1980s. Her career seemed like a sure thing, but three decades ...
06.29.2021 That Seattle Muzak Sound If you love the show and want to support us, consider joining Slate Plus. With Slate Plus you can binge the whole season of Decoder Ring right now, plus ad free podcasts, bonus episodes, and much more. On this episode, ...
06.22.2021 The Invention of Hydration To say that hydration is an invention is only a slight exaggeration. Back in the 1970’s and ‘80s, no one carried bottled water with them, but by the ‘90s it was a genuine status object. How did bottled water transform ...
06.15.2021 The Soap Opera Machine Welcome to a brand new season of Decoder Ring! On this episode, we investigate the wild world of soap operas through the lens of one legendary, decades-long, ripped-from-the-headlines storyline. The rape of Marty Seabrook dared to combine the melodrama of ...
03.15.2021 Decoder Ring Presents The Sporkful’s Mission: ImPASTAble 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. Each week on The Sporkful Dan Pashman ...
12.21.2020 The Blue Steak Experiment What took blue food so long to catch on? Today it’s all over the freezer aisle, in candies for kids, in tortilla chips, and novelty foods, but it wasn’t very long ago that food experts agreed: blue food was an ...
11.23.2020 The Cabbage Patch Kids Riots In 1983, the Cabbage Patch Kids were released, causing widespread pandemonium in toy stores and in the media. How did a children'a toy inspire such bad adult behavior? On this episode of Decoder Ring we explore the strange world of ...
10.26.2020 Jane Fonda's Workout, Part 2: Hanoi Jane's VHS Revolution How did Hanoi Jane become Exercise Jane? This is the second part of our two-parter on Jane Fonda's Workout. If you haven't yet, listen to the previous episode "Jane and Leni" first, it will give you the full context for ...
10.12.2020 Jane Fonda's Workout, Part 1: Jane and Leni When Jane Fonda granted us an interview to talk about her famous workout tape, things didn't go as planned. On part one of a special two-part Decoder Ring, we explore the decades-long friendship of Jane Fonda and Leni Cazden, the ...
08.14.2020 Mystery of the Mullet The mullet, the love-to-hate-it hairstyle is as associated with the 1980's as Ronald Reagan, junk bonds, and break dancing. But in at least one major way, we are suffering from a collective case of false memory syndrome. In this episode ...
07.13.2020 The Karen 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 this episode of Decoder Ring ...
06.10.2020 The Metrosexual 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. On this episode of Decoder Ring we explore the origins of the metrosexual, and how ...
05.11.2020 Gotta Get Down on Friday 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. Dubbed "The Worst Music Video Ever Made" Friday was an almost universal object of derision. This is the ...
04.08.2020 Unicorn Poop 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. ...
03.19.2020 Rubber Duckie Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn. Sign up now to listen and support our work. How did the humble rubber duck become an icon of bath time? On this ...

Older episodes

Decoder Ring

What's Decoder Ring about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Decoder Ring episodes:

Slate Plus Exclusive: The Making of This Season

The Mailbag Episode

Encore: ‘You’ve Got Mail’ Got It Wrong

Cellino & Barnes, Injury Attorneys, 800-888-8888

How Preppy Became Streetwear

The New Age Hit Machine

The Butt and the Bustle

The Truth About #TheDress

Fall 2022 Teaser

McGruff Takes a Bite Out of Crime Pt. 2

McGruff Takes a Bite Out of Crime Pt. 1

Slate Plus Exclusive: The Making of This Season

The “Sex” Scandal That Made Mae West

The First Alien Abductees

The Most Famous Poet No One Remembers

The Mall is Dead (Long Live the Mall)

Summer 2022 Teaser

The Storytelling Craze

“We Got Ourselves a Convoy”

The Sideways Effect

The Madness Behind ‘The Method’

“F--k Everything, We're Doing Five Blades”

Spring 2022 Teaser

Decoder Ring Presents Endless Thread: The Rickroll

Custer's Revenge

The Fame That Got Away

Truly Tasteless Jokes

The Philosophy of Vampires

You Just Lost The Game

The Alberta Rat War

The Great Helga Hype

Selling Out

Tattoo Flash

The Tootsie Shot

Who Killed The Segway?

The Sign Painter

That Seattle Muzak Sound

The Invention of Hydration

The Soap Opera Machine

Decoder Ring Presents The Sporkful’s Mission: ImPASTAble

The Blue Steak Experiment

The Cabbage Patch Kids Riots

Jane Fonda's Workout, Part 2: Hanoi Jane's VHS Revolution

Jane Fonda's Workout, Part 1: Jane and Leni

Mystery of the Mullet

The Karen

The Metrosexual

Gotta Get Down on Friday

Unicorn Poop

Rubber Duckie

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