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Before 1984 the Bell System controlled American communications from end to end. AT&T ran long distance, owned the local operating companies, built nearly all the equipment through Western Electric, and funded the research at Bell Labs. In 1974 the Department of Justice sued, mainly to pry loose Western Electric. Convinced it would lose, AT&T offered a different bargain: keep the factories and the labs, and give up the local phone companies instead.

This episode follows that gamble and its consequences. The 1982 consent decree took effect on January 1, 1984, creating seven independent Baby Bells and cutting AT&T's book value by about 70 percent. In exchange the company won freedom from a 1956 decree that had barred it from selling computers. The computer push failed, local bills rose while long distance rates fell, broadcasters fled to satellites, and after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 the pieces began merging again.

• Mathematician and investor Edward O. Thorp spotted a price gap between old AT&T shares and the when-issued shares of the new companies. His trade, the largest block trade on the exchange to that point, earned $2.5 million.
• The Baby Bells received the Bell trademark and the lucrative Yellow Pages, while AT&T kept the assets it thought held the future: long distance, manufacturing, and research.
• Long distance profits had quietly subsidized local service. After the split, access charges became a long legal fight that reached internet calling, settled by a 2011 FCC order.
• Western Electric struggled without its captive customers. AT&T eventually spun it off anyway as Lucent, later Alcatel-Lucent and now part of Nokia.
• Southwestern Bell absorbed Pacific Telesis and Ameritech, then bought its former parent in 2005 and took the AT&T name. Bell Atlantic followed a parallel path and became Verizon.

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In 1942 Harry Coover Jr. led a team trying to make clear plastic for military gun sights. One compound, cyanoacrylate, stuck to every mold and instrument it touched, so they shelved it as a failure. B.F. Goodrich filed the first patent in 1947, but the real turn came in 1951, when Coover, by then at Eastman Kodak, looked again and saw an adhesive instead of a ruined plastic. Kodak brought it to market in 1958 as Eastman 910.

This episode explains both the business fight and the chemistry behind super glue. Loctite went from repackaging Kodak's product to overtaking it with its own Super Bonder line in the 1970s. The glue itself cures because hydroxide ions in trace moisture trigger chain growth polymerization, which is why a mild acid keeps it liquid in the bottle. That same hunger for water led to battlefield wound sprays, fingerprint fuming, coral grafting, and some real hazards.

• Medics in the Vietnam War sprayed a cyanoacrylate formula on lacerations to stop bleeding. Standard ethyl cyanoacrylate releases formaldehyde too quickly inside the body, so medical versions like Dermabond use 2-octyl cyanoacrylate, which degrades far more slowly.
• Forensic teams heat the glue into fumes inside a chamber. The vapor polymerizes on the moisture in latent fingerprints and builds a hard white replica of the ridges.
• Cyanoacrylate has high tensile strength but low shear strength. Woodworkers exploit this by gluing work to a sacrificial block on a lathe, then knocking it free with a mallet.
• Spilled on cotton, wool, or leather, the glue cures so fast that it releases intense heat, enough to burn skin and scorch fabric. Safety sheets warn against wearing cotton gloves.
• An unopened bottle lasts about a year, longer in a refrigerator, but it must warm to room temperature before opening or condensation will ruin it. Once opened, use it within 30 days.

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In 1997 Deidre LaCarte was an art student at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, teaching martial arts on the side, when she bet her sister and her best friend over who could draw the most traffic to a personal web page. Her entry, a GeoCities tribute to her pet hamster Hampton, offered rows of four low resolution dancing rodent GIFs and a sped up nine second loop of Roger Miller's Whistle Stop from Disney's 1973 Robin Hood.

This episode follows what happened when that page finally caught fire. For 19 months it logged about 800 visits. Then email chains and weblogs found it, and in March 1999 it drew 60,000 views in four days. LaCarte watched squatters grab the dot com address and a British group take the tune up the UK charts, then fought back by turning her joke into a legally clean pop single, a cast of characters, and a merchandise line before selling the rights in late 2001.

• LaCarte spelled hamster with an extra P in the site's title, which accidentally gave her page a unique searchable keyword long before search optimization was an industry.
• Because the page lived on free GeoCities space, she never owned the main domain. Opportunists registered it and hosted copies of her site to siphon off the traffic.
• The Cuban Boys built a dance track around the loop that peaked at number four on the UK Christmas singles chart, and LaCarte publicly accused them of stealing her concept.
• Working with Canadian producers the Boomtang Boys in summer 2000, she recreated the melody as a soundalike to avoid the Disney master recording. The Hampster Dance Song hit number one in Canada and went gold in Australia.
• The single became the most played track in the history of Radio Disney, and later owners issued more albums, including a 2008 Christmas record, and a direct to video film called How the Hamsters Saved Winter.

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Apple's Macintosh commercial aired nationally exactly once, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984, and it is still called the greatest television ad ever made. Directed by Ridley Scott a year and a half after Blade Runner, the 60 second film shows a runner in red shorts hurling a sledgehammer through a giant screen where a Big Brother figure lectures rows of gray, shaven drones. It never shows the computer or names a single feature.

This episode tells how close the ad came to never airing. Apple's board despised it in December 1983, and CEO John Sculley ordered agency Chiat/Day to sell off the Super Bowl time. The agency sold 30 seconds, then claimed it could find no buyer for the remaining 60 without really trying. The story continues through the Orwell estate's cease and desist letter, decades of parody, and the charge that Apple became the very power it promised to smash.

• To qualify for the 1984 Clio Awards, Chiat/Day quietly aired the spot on station KMVT in Twin Falls, Idaho, just before midnight on New Year's Eve 1983.
• Ridley Scott filmed in England and paid London skinheads $25 a day to shave their heads and march as drones. Athlete Anya Major played the runner and David Graham the dictator.
• When Sculley tried to pull the ad, Steve Wozniak offered to pay $400,000 of the $800,000 airtime cost himself, assuming Steve Jobs would cover the other half.
• Apple saw roughly $3.5 million in Macintosh sales almost overnight, and news programs replayed the commercial for free, turning one airing into enormous publicity.
• In 2020 Epic Games released a shot for shot parody alongside its antitrust lawsuit over the App Store, and critic Rebecca Solnit argued in Harper's in 2014 that the ad ushered in a new kind of oppression.

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In 2000, subscribers to Forbes and Wired opened their mailboxes to find a plastic barcode scanner shaped like a cat that they had never ordered. The CueCat, made by Digital Convergence Corporation, promised to spare people the labor of typing web addresses: swipe a printed code in a magazine and your desktop browser would load the page. Investors including Belo Corporation, RadioShack, Young and Rubicam, and Coca-Cola poured in $185 million to make it happen.

This episode follows the device from boardroom fantasy to 30 cent surplus. Print executives wanted proof that readers acted on ads, and they ignored what the product asked of people: a keyboard wedge spliced into the PS/2 port, an hour of registration, an invasive survey, and a unique serial number tying every scan to a real identity. Hackers fought back, the company threatened them, a data leak followed, and the whole venture collapsed within a year.

• Each CueCat cost about $6.50 to make, so the backers gave them away. Forbes mailed 830,000, Wired mailed more than 500,000, and RadioShack handed them out at the register.
• For television, users were expected to run a 3.5mm audio cable from the TV to the computer's sound card so inaudible tones in commercials could open web pages.
• Hobbyists launched a movement called declawing the cat, writing open source drivers and cutting a trace on the circuit board to disable the serial number. The company answered with legal threats, claiming users did not own the devices.
• In September 2000 a plain text file exposed the personal details of roughly 140,000 registered users on a public server. The apology came with a $10 RadioShack gift certificate.
• By May 2001 most of the 225 employees were gone, Belo wrote off its $37.5 million stake that September, and in June 2005 a liquidator offered 2 million units at about 30 cents each.

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On June 4, 1996, the European Space Agency's new Ariane 5 lifted off from Kourou carrying the four Cluster satellites, each about 1,200 kilograms, bound to study Earth's magnetosphere. For thirty seconds the flight was flawless. At 37 seconds the rocket swiveled its nozzles hard to one side, tore itself apart under aerodynamic stress, and self-destructed. Nothing physical had broken. The cause was a few lines of software inherited from the Ariane 4.

This episode traces the chain reaction step by step. The inertial reference system tried to convert a 64-bit floating-point value called horizontal bias into a 16-bit signed integer that tops out at 32,767. The faster Ariane 5 blew past that ceiling, the processor halted as its rules required, and the backup unit, running identical code, had already shut down milliseconds earlier. The inquiry led by Jacques-Louis Lions then exposed the assumptions and skipped tests that made the failure inevitable.

• The fatal calculation belonged to an alignment function the Ariane 4 needed for about 40 seconds after liftoff. On the Ariane 5 it served no purpose at all once the rocket left the pad.
• To keep processor workload under an 80 percent cap, engineers protected only four of seven variables against overflow, trusting old Ariane 4 flight data for the other three.
• With both navigation units shut down, the main computer read diagnostic data as flight commands and forced the vehicle past a 20 degree angle of attack, ripping the boosters from the main stage.
• The team simulated the reference system's outputs in software instead of testing the real hardware. After the explosion, investigators fed the actual units the flight data and reproduced the failure exactly.
• Four replacement satellites, Cluster 2, launched in the summer of 2000 on Russian Soyuz rockets, and the disaster spurred industrial use of static code analysis built on abstract interpretation.

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In 1938 a chemist named Roy J. Plunkett opened the valve on a cylinder of tetrafluoroethylene gas in a New Jersey laboratory and nothing came out. The cylinder still weighed as much as a full one, so he and his assistant sawed it in half. Inside was a waxy, slippery white powder. The gas had polymerized into polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, a chain of carbon atoms sheathed in fluorine. Almost nothing reacts with it or sticks to it. It was patented in 1941 and trademarked as Teflon in 1945.

This episode follows that white wax from a failed refrigerant experiment to the Manhattan Project, the kitchen, the operating room, and the courtroom. PTFE sealed the pipes that carried corrosive uranium hexafluoride, and today about half of it insulates wire for aerospace and computing. The finished material is stable in normal use. The trouble lies in the chemicals used to make it, which do not break down and now circulate in the blood of nearly every American.

• French engineer Marc Gregoire coated his fishing tackle with PTFE in 1954, then etched aluminum pans with acid so the coating could lock into the metal, and launched the brand Tefal.
• In 1969 Bob Gore found that stretching heated PTFE creates a membrane with pores far smaller than a water droplet but larger than a vapor molecule, the basis of Gore-Tex.
• Overheated PTFE releases fumes that cause polymer fume fever in people and can kill pet birds, as a 1973 study with parakeets showed.
• After drinking water near a DuPont plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, was contaminated with PFOA, a science panel studying nearly 70,000 residents linked exposure to six conditions, including kidney and testicular cancer.
• The replacement chemical GenX was found in 2017 in the Cape Fear River, the water supply for about 500,000 people, and is now called a regrettable substitute.

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The recording industry once demanded 72 trillion dollars in damages from a file sharing program, more than three times the gross domestic product of the planet at the time. The target was LimeWire, created in New York in 2000 by Mark Gorton. Written in Java, it ran on Windows, Mac, and Linux alike and connected users directly to one another over the Gnutella network. It also carried a heavy price. Around 30 percent of files on the network contained malware, and the free version once bundled a program called LimeShop that tracked shopping to collect affiliate commissions.

This episode is a biography of the software: its birth, its chaotic prime, its court-ordered death, and its strange afterlife. The 2005 Supreme Court ruling in MGM v. Grokster removed the defense that file sharing companies had relied on. Five years later a federal judge shut LimeWire down. What followed was an open source revolt, and then, two decades on, a revival that has little to do with music piracy.

• Most users ran the free version of LimeWire to pirate LimeWire Pro, the paid tier that cost about 35 dollars a year.
• A confusing sharing setup led people to expose whole hard drives, and in 2007 the Justice Department prosecuted an identity thief who simply searched the network for tax returns and bank statements.
• In October 2010 Judge Kimba Wood ordered all searching and downloading disabled, and the case settled in May 2011 for 105 million dollars.
• Weeks after the injunction, an anonymous developer called MetaPirate released LimeWire Pirate Edition, stripped of adware and with every Pro feature unlocked.
• Julian and Paul Zehetmayr bought the brand in 2022 for a music NFT marketplace, and in September 2025 the new LimeWire acquired the Fyre Festival name from Billy McFarland in an eBay auction.

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In the spring of 2011 a handful of anonymous hackers knocked the CIA's public website offline, pulled user data out of Sony Pictures, and planted a story on the PBS site claiming Tupac and Biggie Smalls were alive in New Zealand. They called themselves LulzSec, short for Lulz Security, and said they did it for laughs. The group formed in May 2011 from an older crew known as Internet Feds. Its leader, Sabu, was Hector Monsegur, a 29 year old unemployed IT consultant in New York. Its voice on Twitter was a British teenager called Topiary.

This episode profiles the crew, its methods, and its collapse. Most of the damage came from old, basic techniques such as SQL injection and reused passwords, which was exactly the embarrassment LulzSec wanted to inflict on careless companies. As the stunts grew, so did the ambitions and the enemies. Fifty days after it began, the group announced a cheerful retirement. The real story was a betrayal already under way.

• Kayla controlled a botnet reported at roughly 800,000 infected servers, and Tflow, a 16 year old web developer, handled the group's own operational security.
• LulzSec ran a phone line where fans could request targets, then flooded game services such as Minecraft and League of Legends with junk traffic.
• In late June the group joined Anonymous for Operation Anti-Security, hitting the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency and leaking Arizona Department of Public Safety documents.
• Rival hackers including Team Poison and The Jester worked to unmask the members, angry at the heat they were drawing onto the whole underground.
• Monsegur had been arrested in early June after logging into a chat once without his VPN, and he kept leading the group from an FBI monitored computer while gathering evidence on his friends.

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In 1983, in the Castro Valley Village shopping center in California, Joseph Marver ran a failing women's clothing shop called Spirit Women's Discount Apparel. Watching crowds pour into a costume store across the street, he cleared out the dresses, stocked costumes, makeup, and props, and took in 100,000 dollars in a 30 day trial. The following year he opened a temporary seasonal storefront in a mall. By 1999 he had about 60 locations and sold to Spencer Gifts. Under Steven Silverstein, chief executive since 2003, the chain has grown past 1,600 stores.

This episode explains the real estate trick behind that growth, a practice described as calendar arbitrage. Spirit signs cheap short leases on vacant big box stores early in the year and lets landlords cancel if a permanent tenant appears by June. It then builds a full store in weeks with 52,000 temporary workers and tears it down by mid-November. The same machine quietly funds something unexpected: child life programs in pediatric hospitals.

• Spirit takes buildings strictly as is, asking for little more than a working roof, plumbing, electricity, and HVAC, and may pay a flat fee of about 30,000 dollars for a season.
• After rival Party City liquidated in 2025, Spirit opened pop-ups inside 85 of its former locations in 2026.
• Exclusive animatronics and themed displays keep families lingering in the store and give shoppers something they cannot order from Amazon.
• In 2016 Health Canada recalled eight products over fire and choking hazards, and a later audit found 23 of 45 Canadian stores still selling them.
• The Spirit of Children foundation, started in 2006, has raised over 164 million dollars for more than 160 hospitals, with every dollar collected in a store going to the local partner hospital.