Slate Technology

A “smart gun” is designed to only work in the hands of the gun’s proper owner. With the first smart gun potentially coming to market later this year, can the tech deliver on its promise?

Guests: 

Champe Barton, reporter at the Trace

Kai Kloepfer, founder and CEO of Biofire

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On today’s episode, Candice Lim and Daisy Rosario give their takes on Doja Cat’s latest controversy: hating her fans. They trace her long-documented and problematic history with the internet, then ask how much a fandom can endure before the unstanning process begins.

This podcast is produced by Se’era Spragley Ricks, Daisy Rosario, Candice Lim and Rachelle Hampton.

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After a quiet spring, COVID is surging back for the fourth consecutive summer. So, is this just life now? 

Guest: Katherine Wu, staff writer at the Atlantic

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The mosh pit has a reputation as a violent place where (mostly) white guys vent their aggression. There’s some truth to that, but it’s also a place bound by camaraderie and—believe it or not—etiquette. In this episode, we explore the unwritten rules of this 50-year-old live-music phenomenon with punks, concertgoers, and a heavy-metal physicist.

Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin with Katie Shepherd. This episode was written by Katie Shepherd. This episode was edited by Willa Paskin and Andrea Bruce, with help from Joel Meyer. Derek John is Slate’s executive producer of narrative podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our senior technical director.

Thank you to Vivien Goldman, Paolo Ragusa, and Philip Moriarty, whose insights and research on moshing were crucial to this episode. You can create your own mosh pit using this simulator developed by Jesse Silverberg and his colleagues.

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Tesla sold a vision of how electric vehicles would work: just like gas-powered cars, but cleaner, better. But as a scandal about misrepresented battery life and driving range unfolds, and the price of their cars remains high, it increasingly looks like the transition will be anything but seamless—if it happens at all. 

Guest: Edward Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors.

You can check out Reuters reporting on Tesla’s range scandal here. 

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When Slate’s Evan Chung was a kid, he was obsessed with a mysterious advertisement that ran for decades in the scouting magazine Boys’ Life. Under the enticing headline “You Can Float on Air,” the ad assured Evan—and generations of scouts—that a personal hovercraft could be theirs for just a few bucks. 

In this episode, the adult version of Evan journeys halfway across the country to wield power tools, summon his latent scouting skills, and conscript his father into a quest three decades in the making. 

Will Evan float on air? Scout’s honor: You’ll just have to listen. 

This episode was written by Evan Chung, who produced this episode with Decoder Ring’s Willa Paskin and Katie Shepherd. It was edited by Willa Paskin and Joel Meyer. Derek John is Slate’s executive producer of narrative podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our senior technical director.

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On today’s episode, Candice Lim and Rachelle Hampton dive deep into the ethics of AI-generated music. Since the days of Alan Turing, music created by computational models has been inextricably bound up with technological process. But now that tools like Voicify.AI are going viral on TikTok and the Recording Academy has updated their rules to allow music created with AI tools to be eligible for Grammy consideration, is it already too late to consider the musicians whose work will be made obsolete by AI?

This podcast is produced by Se’era Spragley Ricks, Daisy Rosario, Candice Lim and Rachelle Hampton.

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In a recent public hearing, three government officials told Congress that not only are “unidentified anomalous phenomena” real, they’re a major national security concern. But one witness took his testimony even further, claiming the government possesses materials of “non-human origin.” How much do we really know about UAPs – or, as they’re more commonly known, UFOs? And now that Congress is involved, are we about to learn a whole lot more? 

Guest: Garrett Graff, contributor at WIRED magazine; author of the forthcoming book, “UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There”

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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther.

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It’s 2023 – and less than half of all Americans have returned to the office full time. That means U.S. downtowns from San Francisco to New York are emptier than they’ve been in decades. Offices are actually trending away from policies that mandate returning five days a week. So, how can cities get creative – and develop some new ways to boost the local economy?

Guest: Henry Grabar, Slate staff writer

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Felix Salmon, Emily Peck, and Elizabeth Spiers talk about the tentative agreement between UPS and their unionized workers. They discuss how Goldman Sachs’ Apple credit card went bad, and a new study reveals how household income influences Ivy League admission rates.

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Podcast production by Patrick Fort.

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