Every now and then, someone unexpectedly bursts into flames, and science has never been able to explain why. Except it totally has, and we’re going to explain it too. It’s a story that spans continents and centuries, involving the history of tobacco farming and candle-making, techniques for building houses from dung, and the sad fate […]

This week, we’re looking at our favorite (and least favorite) film adaptations of books, and hopefully coming up with a formula for not screwing it up. And yes, that means some unfavorable comparisons between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, but it also means Douglas Adams and Truman Capote and Harvey Pekar, and […]

This week, we’ve been asked to tell the world the true meaning of Valentine’s Day, and we sort of make an attempt at that. Sure, we get hung up on the horrors of ensemble romantic comedies for a while, and debate the qualifications for sainthood, and try to write a better Farmer’s Almanac, but it’s […]

We love a good old-fashioned topic about weird animals, and they don’t get much weirder than cephalopods. They change colors, they solve puzzles, they fight whales, and they’re basically the closest thing we have to intelligent aliens. So of course we love them! We also waste some time talking about Halloween music and picking fights […]

How exactly does a musician capture one’s heart? Because that’s basically the question we’ve been asked, and we’re going to make some sort of effort to answer it. Does our listener love Regina Spektor’s talent? Her willingness to experiment? Her total lack of media coaching? Her cool friends? We’ve got ideas, and a whole lot […]

Dystopian game shows are hot right now. Or at least we’re all predicting that they’ll be hot in the future. But the trend dates back at least to the 1980s, when Arnold Schwarzenegger fought for his life against a bunch of heavily armed gladiators on the abandoned streets of Los Angeles. It’s a tale of […]

Strap in, because this one is going to get stupid. We’re traveling back to the futuristic year 1994, when the only thing standing between Earth and an invading alien army was a group of Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters. From Beverly Hills. Yes, somehow this was a real show, as well as the topic that finally […]

Once in a great while, we stumble into a situation too awesome to ignore. Topics? Bah! We just got back from watching a real-life carnival barker set off a human-sized game of Mousetrap. Obviously we’re talking about that. And robots, and go-karts, and artisan peanut butter, and guitars made of tennis racquets, and homemade jewelry, […]

The word “meme” has been around since the 1970s, but it took another twenty years for everyone to decide they liked it. Since then, it’s been applied to basically everything, but is that really appropriate? We’re pretty sure we know. We’re also looking at the sordid fall of a memetics journal, the continued relevance of […]

Russian literature isn’t exactly known for its optimism, but we may have wrung some joy out of a story that kills its main character on page one. Before there were inspiring stories of hope in the face of impending death, Tolstoy gave us a tale of social niceties, modest ambition, bureaucracy, and God, and he […]