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WBUR

Hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson dig into the internet's vast and curious ecosystem of online communities to find untold histories, unsolved mysteries, and other jaw-dropping stories online and IRL.

Endless Thread

There's a lot of drone warfare footage on the internet from Ukraine and Russia. But over the last year, a surprising change has emerged, via photos from the battlefront posted online. It has become clear that a huge part of the drone war, from dropping grenades on soldiers in bunkers, to dropping explosives on infrastructure or airfields, is wired. Those wires are fiber optic cable, stretching from drone operators to the drones, which spool out cable across the ground and over trees along the battlefront. These drones are often single-use rarely returning from the mission they set out on. And the spools of fiber optic cable, stretching over 30-50 kilometers, don't get cleaned up. We explore this evolution of drone use in the conflict - where it came from, and why.

The drone web: how consumer drones have covered Ukraine's battle lines with fiber optic cable

The internet decides what's for dinner.

Ruby Tandoh is the author of the new book, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now. A stint on the Great British Bake Off when she was in college launched her into the world of cookbooks — increasingly irrelevant in a world where we're more likely to turn to Google for a recipe than turn to our bookshelves — and provided her an education in how pop culture stokes our cravings. She takes Ben and Amory on a journey from the surprising history of AllRecipes and the "world's best lasagna," to the TikTok food trends of today. (Spoiler: they don't always taste particularly good.)

Show notes:

All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now

Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. It was edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

What's on the menu: Ruby Tandoh on how the internet and algorithms shape our appetites

In honor of the day-after-Thanksgiving leftover sandwich, we're revisiting our conversation with Barry Enderwick, the man behind the beloved and wildly popular "Sandwiches of History" social media accounts.

Barry joined Ben and Amory to make a triple-decker sandwich from 1958, and to talk about his first cookbook, "Sandwiches of History the Cookbook: All the Best (and Most Surprising) Things People Have Put Between Slices of Bread."

To quote Barry's signature phrase, we think you should give this episode "a GO!" If you're hungry for more, check out Sandwiches of History on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit.

Episodes we love: Sandwiches of History

Endless Thread serves up two of Reddit's most absurd food sagas. First course: Chivegate, in which a Redditor vows to chop a cup of chives daily until the kitchen confidential subreddit declares perfection, only to be accused of fraud. Second course: A Reddit user desperately seeking advice on how to quietly move 13 two-thousand-pound pallets of margarine.

Show Notes:

 • u/occasionallyvertical's post on 
r/UnethicalLifeProTips
 r/kitchenconfidential

This episode was produced and co-hosted by Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson, and edited by Meg Cramer. Production assistance from Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

Chiveman and a mountain of margarine

Ben and Amory share two stories about some out-of-the-box internet trolling. First, Amory tries to untangle a web of rumors surrounding an unusual dish from New Zealand. Then, Ben takes us aboard Terri's Tourz, an alleged Everglade tourist attraction claiming to offer the nation's first ever tours of the South Florida Detention Center known as Alligator Alcatraz.

Show notes:

 3 Facts About New Zealand I Didn’t Know Until I Moved Here (Medium)
 Was this post a joke? (r/newzealand)
 Terri's Tourz

Fryders and Alligator Alcatraz tours: When trolls get inventive

This November, we're playing some of our favorite episodes from the past alongside new stuff, so that newer listeners can experience our back catalogue. And LoFi Girl is one that holds up, big time!

If you've ever searched for "chill beats for studying" or some other form of lean back, endless playlists without vocals and with a consistent vibe, you've probably come across "Lofi Girl."

A livestreamed Youtube channel featuring a looped animation of a girl in a cosy apartment on her desk at night, the channel has brought in millions upon millions of views and subscribers. It's also the big bang for an expanding universe, from additional channels and streams featuring slightly different animated characters and music genres, to copycats, to memes and lore - including stories about a mysterious French music producer, Dimitri.

Episodes we love: Lofi Girl

While some people find Labubus terrifying, millions of others find their big eyes and furry features irresistibly adorable. Why? From Labubu dolls taking over TikTok, to emoji taking over our text messages, cuteness is all over the internet. Ben and Amory talk to Joshua Paul Dale, professor at Tokyo's Chuo University and the preeminent cuteness expert about how cute has conquered all.

A previous version of this episode incorrectly stated that Despicable Me was a Disney movie. The episode has been updated to reflect that Despicable Me is a production of Illumination and Universal Pictures. 

Show notes:
Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World (Profile Books)

The Cute Studies Project

This episode was produced by Grace Tatter, edited by Meg Cramer, and co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

Labubus, lafufus, and Hello Kitty: How cuteness conquered the internet

Everybody get up, it's time to slam now... again! Yes, we're revisiting our episode about the website for the 1996 movie "Space Jam," which is still up and functioning nearly 30 years later.

Amory and Ben talk to the hilarious team behind this digital artifact and hear the unlikely story of its continued existence.

Show notes:

 • The 
Space Jam • website

 'Space Jam' Forever: The Website That Wouldn't Die • (Rolling Stone)

 • The 
TIL post • on Reddit

 Hollywood in Pixels
 SpaceJamCheck • on X

 Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in 14 Days
 Welcome to the Space Jam, Again • (The New York Times)

Episodes we love: Welcome to the Jam

In keeping with Endless Thread tradition, Ben and Amory are celebrating spooky season with another installment of "Endless Dread." This time, we're bringing you along on both an actual haunted hayride — thanks to McCray's Farm in South Hadley, MA — and a digital one, through a handful of spooky stories from the internet.

Ben introduces Amory to a TikTok commentary on recent ICE raids disguised as a parody of consumerism.

Amory tells Ben about an auditory illusion that has risen from the dead (Twitter) to unsettle the living (TikTokers and Redditors), and about a "vampire" from Rhode Island who was exhumed and turned into a tonic to cure tuberculosis. Spoiler alert: it didn't work.

Endless Dread: Haunted Hayride

New to Endless Thread? Wooooo! We're revisiting some favorites from our archives to welcome you.

First up: The cover art for the 1976 paperback edition of Madeleine L'Engle's classic, spooky sci-fi/fantasy novel "A Wrinkle in Time" — featuring a rainbow-winged centaur and a green, glowering, red-eyed face — is iconic. And yet, for nearly 50 years, no one has known who illustrated it. Well, not NO ONE. Not anymore... Endless Thread cracks the case!

Episodes we love: Artist Known — Illustrator for 'A Wrinkle in Time' gets long-overdue credit

The unsent letter. We all have one, half-composed in our heads or fully-formed as an email draft. If you’re really poetic, it might be on a piece of paper, yellowing in a drawer. Whatever form these letters take, they go unsent because they might be better left unsent... or because we wouldn’t know how to send them even if we wanted to. 

But there's a place online where these letters find an audience -- a big one. The "Unsent Letters" community on Reddit has over 350,000 members. In this episode, you'll hear from people who wrote letters addressing pet owners, COVID+ patients, bakery workers, bugs killed in the shower, and so much more.

Unsent Letters: An Online Community Filled With Surprising And Moving Correspondence

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