Endless Thread

Every year, the Endless Thread team convenes around a campfire to freak each other out with the scariest stories they can find on the web.

This Halloweekend, Ben Brock Johnson, Amory Sivertson, and producer Frannie Monahan present tales of strange canine-like creatures, mysterious Appalachian sandwiches, and legal-minded ghosts.

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Lagoa Misteriosa, or Mysterious Lagoon, is located near the small Brazilian city of Jardim. Surrounded by lush jungle, the surface of the lagoon looks like azurite — still as glass and crystalline. Its waters are so clear, looking down you might expect to see the bottom, except... the bottom of Lagoa Misteriosa has never been found.

Today on Endless Dread, our annual witch's hat tip to spooky season, Amory takes Ben deep down into the story, and mystery, of Lagoa Misteriosa. The story for Amory began on Reddit in r/thalassophia, a community devoted to the fear of deep water.

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Up to a billion people use ChatGPT every week, for everything from the mundane to the weird to the deeply personal. It is commonly assumed that these messages are private – between the user and the LLM. It is commonly assumed that these messages are private – between the user and the LLM. But in some cases, human reviewers are reading these conversations and offering editorial feedback to help ChatGPT sound more human.

Reporter Joseph Cox of 404 Media broke the story of Project Lily, Open AI's initiative to use human reviewers to train and improve ChatGPT. He breaks it down for us on this week's Endless Thread.

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"Should I be joking at a time like this?"

That's the question then 33-year-old Brooke Eby asked herself when she uploaded her first piece of TikTok comedy in 2022, about being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Brooke built an audience of hundreds of thousands of people who were rooting for, and laughing with, her. Sometimes it got weird.

Brooke died due to complications with ALS earlier this month. She was 37.

In 2025, she talked to Endless Thread hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson about how facing death changed her relationship with social media and online community.

The internet is the great connector. Talk with nearly anyone at any time about anything. But that kind of freedom can lead to misunderstandings. Maybe your neighbors discover your cruder, less friendly persona online. Maybe a debate over holiday lore becomes a battle front.

Endless Thread producers Grace Tatter and Frannie Monahan bring two stories to remind us that the internet is a morass of information that no one can ever control.

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Mo lives in Aden, an ancient city in southern Yemen. Built on a volcanic crater, it has castles and beaches set against mountains. It's beautiful. Like the rest of the country, it is also in the midst of an ongoing civil war. This summer, protests broke out over living conditions and basic services in the city -- like electricity, which can be shut off for 18 hours at a time.

But despite these conditions, for the last five years, Mo has been fighting for a persistent dream of his –– a video game internet cafe for his neighborhood. This week on Endless Thread Ben and Amory tell the story of how Mo, against all odds, has kept the lights on (quite literally) at his gaming cafe thanks to his persistence, and the help of internet strangers across the world.

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Ben can make a roaring, rumbling sound with his ears that no one else can hear. He never thought much about it — whether only he could do this, or whether everyone could do this — until he discovered a subreddit called Ear Rumblers Assemble: a whole community devoted to the mysterious and understudied ability to voluntarily tense one of the miniscule muscles in our ears. 

We go into Ben's ear with Dr. Anand Devaiah, and raise questions about how everyone experiences the world differently and the enduring mysteries of the human body.

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This episode was originally published on March 10, 2023. 

In 2022, freshmen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill got a new neighbor: an owl. What wasn't clear was whether the owl was trying to befriend them, or catch them.

Sometimes the owl seemed to be chasing students. Other times, it seemed to come in peace. A popular campus Instagram account reported that a woman had actually raised the owl herself. After she was spotted feeding it, the owl sightings stopped, much to the disappointment of students who'd come to consider it as a sort of mascot. Where had the owl come from, and where did it go?

Endless Thread host Ben Brock Johnson and producer Grace Tatter talk about how the owl gained online campus fame, and get a surprise update from the person who knows the owl best.

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Grab your telescopes because this week on Endless Thread Ben and NPR Short Wave host Emily Kwong take us down two science-related internet wormholes. First, Emily introduces us to the intergalactic world of astronaut fan fiction, starring the crew of the 2026 Artemis II moon mission. Then, Ben takes us through the r/Science discourse on a new LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) study mapping an ancient Amazonian civilization.

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