A new creepy crawly is wriggling into The Pine Tree State, and fast. In this episode, co-hosts Ben Johnson and Nora Saks tunnel down a wormhole into the complicated world of invasive species, and the stories we tell about them. Eventually, they wind up at a garden in Bangor where...
In this episode, Amory shares a 10-year-old Reddit post with Ben showing a photo of a college student with an epic-looking wooden staff and a caption that baffled the photo's subject. Ben shares a Trivial Pursuit question that launched a mystery fit for a Redditor.
In this episode of Endless Thread, co-hosts Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson honor the legacy of internet activist Aaron Swartz with two people familiar with his life and work: documentary filmmaker Brian Knappenberger and Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Swartz died by suicide ten years ago this...
“What are the dimensions of an adult llama?” asked a Redditor called Mrs. Sam Handwich in the "No Stupid Questions" community. "I've been hired to make a tuxedo for a llama and I don't have its measurements," she added. The Endless Thread team gets to the bottom of this now-famous...
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.
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The unsent letter. We all have one, half-composed in our heads or fully-formed as an email draft. 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. In this favorite episode from the archives, we discuss...
Our most recent episode on 'Goosebumps The Musical' featured R.L. Stine, author of the wildly popular 'Goosebumps' book series, which turned 30 this year. In this bonus, we share more of that conversation, including why Stine didn’t want to write the series initially.
“Goosebumps” book fans and musical theater fans, unite! In this episode, Amory and producer Quincy introduce you to “Goosebumps The Musical” and find out what it might take to get it to Broadway (hint: you can help!)
Can a machine think like a human? Can it be conscious? For decades the answer was clear: nope. But artificial intelligence today is challenging that notion. Endless Thread visits Google to see just how close the field is to creating bots with minds of their own.
If you've ever used a dating app, chances are you've encountered a bot, most likely a fake account or a scammer. But this week on Endless Thread, we investigate a new type of bot that is helping users optimize their love lives — a digital dating coach installed in your...
Next up in our bots series, we bring you the tale of Tay, a Microsoft AI chatbot that has lived on in infamy. Tay was originially modeled to be the bot-girl-next-door. But after only sixteen hours on Twitter, Tay was shut down. In this episode, we uncover how the bot...
From the supermarket to the housing market, products are getting smaller but prices are not. Why is this happening? And can it be stopped before the toilet paper roll disappears right before our very… reaching hands? In this encore episode, we're talking all things shrinkflation.
Next up in our bots series, we explore a growing field of AI: immortalizing the dead through predictive AI text.
How can bots increase transparency and shine a light on corruption, such as insider trading, among our elected officials? Will bots be put on the ballot in the near future? We go into all of this and more in this installment of Good Bot, Bad Bot.
For the next few weeks, the Endless Thread team will be sharing stories all about the rise of bots. How are these pieces of software influencing our daily lives in sneaky, surprising ways? First up, our host Ben Brock Johnson delves into the history of ELIZA, the world's first chatbot...