ChatGPT's human editors
Up to a billion people use ChatGPT every week, for everything from the mundane to the weird to the deeply personal. It is commonly assumed t...
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Endless Thread
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 stor...
Episodes
20 of 473 episodes
Remembering Brooke Eby
"Should I be joking at a time like this?" That's the question then 33-year-old Brooke Eby asked herself when she uploaded her first piece of...
Mixed signals: Nextdoor villains and the holiday you've never heard of
The internet is the great connector. Talk with nearly anyone at any time about anything. But that kind of freedom can lead to misunderstandi...
The Haruhi problem
Get out your graphing calculators, because today's episode of Endless Thread is about a math problem. Specifically: wt(π1, . . . , πm) = m−1...
Keeping the Lights on at a Video Game Cafe in Southern Yemen
Mo lives in Aden, an ancient city in southern Yemen. Built on a volcanic crater, it has castles and beaches set against mountains. It's beau...
Ear rumblers assemble!
Ben can make a roaring, rumbling sound with his ears that no one else can hear. He never thought much about it — whether only he could do th...
Encore: Owl pursuits
This episode was originally published on March 10, 2023. In 2022, freshmen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill got a new neig...
Emily Kwong takes us to science camp
Grab your telescopes because this week on Endless Thread Ben and NPR Short Wave host Emily Kwong take us down two science-related internet w...
'Turn Bluetooth off, or we're turning around.'
The 190 passengers of a United Airlines flight from Newark, New Jersey to Palma de Mallorca, Spain had settled into their seats for their ov...
Fruit of the Loom: Horn of Lies
The brand Fruit of the Loom is almost ubiquitous in the world of underwear and casual wear. You have likely seen its logo, if not on your ow...
The internet is a perpetual stew
This week on Endless Thread it's a producer takeover with Grace Tatter and Kalyani Saxena serving up some delicious online stories. First, K...
Teach us how to Dougie
Long before TikTok dances, there was the Dougie. In 2010, Cali Swag District’s “Teach Me How to Dougie” went worldwide, and for the decade-p...
The Lost Loophole
Kurt Gödel was a genius mathematician and logician, considered by many scholars to be as influential as Aristotle. He was also buddies with...
How to Dim the Sun, from Marketplace's How We Survive
The climate crisis is escalating. We have to decarbonize our economy, but we’re moving too slowly. So, what’s the backup plan? This season o...
Socials for Sale
Most of us know the internet isn't a particularly private place. Yet there's a certain feeling of anonymity that comes with sharing online —...
Encore: Adrián and the Whale
This episode was originally published on March 21, 2025. There are moments that define each of our lives. Some we can predict: graduations,...
Comfort maxxing on the interwebs
Sit back, relax and get cozy. As a matter of fact, why not put on your baggiest of clothes and burrow down in your snuggiest of blankets? Th...
Back to the Backrooms!
Once upon a dimly lit hallway, Ben and Amory stumbled onto a beloved brainchild of the internet: Backrooms. It began as a "creepypasta"— a h...
Endless Thread on OnlyFans
Journalist Leon Neyfakh — known for the podcasts Slow Burn , Fiasco , and Backfired — wanted to know more about the massively popular and sp...
Leave a message after the beep
Jeremy Rellosa used to watch TV shows and movies from the '90s and revel in how the characters walked around untethered to a smartphone, wit...