Decoder Ring

We are really lucky to get lots of listener suggestions for the show, more good questions than we can possibly answer in a mailbag episode once or twice a year. So we’re starting a new segment we call… Decoder Rings Back! Every month, host Willa Paskin will personally call up a listener to answer their question. In this inaugural installment of Decoder Rings Back, Willa calls up listener Dustin Malek about his cultural mystery: Why did the Mona Lisa, of all paintings, become the most famous in the world, bar none? Willa shares the story of daring heist that turned Leonardo da Vinci’s enigmatic smiling subject into a celebrity.Future episodes of Decoder Rings Back will only be available to Slate Plus subscribers. So if you want to be sure not to miss them, sign up for Slate Plus! You’ll get exclusive episodes and ad-free listening not just on our show, but all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen. This episode was produced by Max Freedman. Decoder Ring is also produced by Katie Shepherd and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281.Sources for This EpisodeCumming, Laura. “The man who stole the Mona Lisa,” The Guardian, August 5, 2011.Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas Hoobler. “Stealing Mona Lisa,” Vanity Fair, April 16, 2009.Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas Hoobler. The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection, Bison Books, 2010.Isaacson, Walter. Leonardo da Vinci, Simon & Schuster, 2018.Roberts, Sam. “Happy Birthday to the Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa and Took It to Italy,” The New York Times, October 7, 2022.Sassoon, Donald. “Mona Lisa: The Best-Known Girl in the Whole Wide World,” History Workshop Journal, Spring 2001.Sassoon, Donald. Mona Lisa: The History of the World’s Most Famous Painting, HarperCollins, 2016.“The Theft That Made The 'Mona Lisa' A Masterpiece,” NPR, July 30, 2011.Zug, James. “Stolen: How the Mona Lisa Became the World’s Most Famous Painting,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 15, 2011.

We can’t make this show without you, our listeners. Today, you can help support Decoder Ring – and get a really good deal. To join Slate Plus for just $59/year, visit slate.com/decoderplus on December 31st and type in the promo code DECODER50 at checkout. Slate Plus members get to listen to episodes of Decoder Ring (and all your favorite Slate podcasts!) with no ads, and get access to exclusive bonus episodes. You can join Slate Plus at any time from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, but the discount code DECODER50 will only work through the end of 2025. Subscribe today at slate.com/decoderplus.

Decoder Ring listeners write in with some excellent mysteries, and for our last episode of the year we’re solving three of them. Why do children play in boxes full of sand? Why do rock bands pretend like the show is over when everybody knows they’re coming back for an encore? And what was up with those school assemblies where you’d get to skip class to learn about…yo-yos? The voices you’ll hear in this episode include yo-yo masters ”Dazzling Dave” Schulte and Dale Oliver, children’s book author Rob Peñas, Pulitzer Prize-winning design critic Alexandra Lange, and music journalists Brian Wise, Michael Walker, and Travis Andrews.  You can find all the music from the segment about encores in this YouTube playlist. This episode was produced by Max Freedman, Katie Shepherd, and Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. We had additional production from Joel Meyer. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281. Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen.

Videomate: Men was a VHS tape released in 1987 featuring 60 single men pitching themselves as dates to women on the other side of the TV screen: “The love of your life could be on your TV tonight!” the box reads. In retrospect, Videomate: Men is a bizarre and hilarious time capsule, but at the time it was one of many manifestations of what was known as video dating. To find out how anyone thought this was a good idea, Decoder Ring examines the weird and forgotten world of video dating in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s to find out why video dating once seemed like the future—and if that future is still yet to come. On this episode, originally released in 2019, we talk to the creators of the Found Footage Fest, VHS collectors who unleashed Videomate on the internet; ask the creators of video dating services like Videomate’s Steve Dworman and Great Expectations’ Jeffrey Ullman what they were thinking; and talk to participants who used these services but not necessarily in the way that was intended. We’ll also discuss the future of video dating with Coffee Meets Bagel co-founder Dawoon Kang and former host of The Longest Shortest Time Andrea Silenzi. This episode was written by Willa Paskin and was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch. We had research assistance from Cleo Levin. Decoder Ring is produced by Katie Shepherd, Max Freedman, and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or leave a message on the Decoder Ring hotline at 347-460-7281. We love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show.  Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen.

Americans are currently besotted with protein. It’s touted as being good for muscle growth, weight loss, skincare, mental acuity, longevity, and much else besides. It’s sold to men, women, children, the elderly— you can even buy protein for your pets. The protein supplement market alone is worth $21 billion and growing—and extra protein is being added to coffee, cereal, pasta, beer, ice cream, and popcorn. But as frenzied as we currently are about protein, this is not the first protein boom—or even the second. Protein has been promoted as a charismatic, cure-all nutrient for nearly two centuries. In this episode, with the help of Samantha King and Gavin Weedon, the authors of Protein: The Making of a Nutritional Superstar, we look closely at all our protein crazes and their associated protein products—from beef tea to whey powder—and see what they can tell us about our current protein mania.  This episode was produced by Max Freedman. Decoder Ring is also produced by Willa Paskin, Katie Shepherd, and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. We had editing support from Josh Levin and fact-checking by Sophie Summergrad. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com  or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281. Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen. Sources for This Episode King, Samantha and Gavin Weedon. Protein: The Making of a Nutritional Superstar, Duke University Press, 2026. Baker, Ryan. “Protein has become America's latest obsession. Companies like General Mills and PepsiCo are capitalizing on it,” CNBC, July 22, 2025. Brock, William H. Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Callahan, Alice. “The More Protein, the Better?” New York Times, April 9, 2025. Draper, Kevin. “America’s Protein Obsession Is Transforming the Dairy Industry,” New York Times, July 16, 2025. Gayomali, Chris. “Big Food Gets Jacked: How protein mania took over the American grocery store,” New York Magazine, Feb. 12, 2025. “The Great Protein Fiasco,” Maintenance Phase, Aug. 31, 2021. Liebig, Justus von. Researches on the Chemistry of Food, Taylor and Walton, 1847. McLaren, Donald S. “The Great Protein Fiasco,” The Lancet, 1974. Oncken, John. “Stingy, 'half-way' dairy farmer's curiosity changed the world,” Wisconsin State Farmer, April 27, 2022. “Subject of Whey Disposal Discussed in UW Bulletin.” Wausau Daily Herald, Aug. 28, 1965. Torrella, Kenny. “You’re probably eating way too much protein,” Vox, Jan. 30, 2024. Wilson, Bee. “Protein mania: the rich world’s new diet obsession,” The Guardian, Jan. 4, 2019. Wu, Katherine J. “Should We All Be Eating Like The Rock?” The Atlantic, Aug. 28, 2023.

Hark, the holiday season is upon us—and with it the most solemn of festive traditions: a gift guide! In this video and podcast special, Slate hosts Dana Stevens, Chris Molanphy, and Willa Paskin beam-in from their collective hearths to deliver unto the internet their favorite gifts for culture lovers this holiday. In addition to sharing gifts, they also discuss the cultural artifact that is the “holiday gift guide,” and its history going back to the early 20th century, up to the modern day. See the entirety of the 1910 gift guide Our Special Holiday Gift-Book from Greenhut-Siegel Cooper, and Esquire’s ultra-mod gift guide from 1961. Check out our gift recommendations below: Dana Stevens’ Cozy Movie Night-In:  The Salbree Collapsible Silicone Microwave Popcorn Popper & Amish Country Popcorn L'agraty Chunky Knit Blanket Throw The Adventures of Antoine Doinel, The Criterion Collection Box Set Chris Molanphy’s Hit Parade Collection:  The Beatles’ Revolver CD Box Set Mad Men Blu-Ray Box Set  Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster Year, by Michaelangelo Matos Willa Paskin’s Fruit-Themed Trompe-l'œil Housewares: Cantaloupe-shaped bowls in the style of Bordallo Pinheiro 4-Pack Orange-Shaped Candle Stocking Stuffer Cherry-Shaped Toilet Brush The Slate Culture Gift Guide is produced for Slate Studios by Benjamin Frisch and Micah Phillips, with Meryl Bezrutczyk and Andrew Harding.

Autumn may have more cozy signifiers than any other season—though we all have our own favorites. Maybe for you it’s sweater weather, football games, spooky season, apple picking, leaf peeping, or mainlining candy corn. Whatever it is, in today’s episode we’re looking closely at three of these autumnal staples. First, we get to the bottom of a recurring complaint about the taste of the pumpkin spice latte. Then we gaze deep inside the enigma hiding inside colorful fall leaves. Finally we ask some hard-hitting questions about the seasonal availability of an elusive cookie. Snuggle up and enjoy! In this episode, you’ll hear from author and podcaster Don Martin who has a new audiobook out about loneliness called Where Did Everybody Go?. We also speak with Simcha Lev-Yadun, professor of botany and archeology; Susanne Renner, botanist and honorary professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis; and Prospect Park Alliance arborist Malcolm Gore. And you’ll also hear from Lauren Tarr, who runs the blog Midlife Moxie and Muscle, and her mother Grace Dewey, along with Caroline Suppiger, brand manager at Mondelēz. We’d also like to thank Brian Gallagher, Tom Arnold, Sylvie Russo and Laura Robinson. This episode was produced by Katie Shepherd. Decoder Ring is also produced by Willa Paskin, Max Freedman, and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com  or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281. Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen.

There’s a ubiquitous prop in just about every police procedural and conspiracy thriller: a cork board pinned with documents, newspaper clippings, and Polaroid photos, all connected by a web of red string. They go by many names, including pin boards, string boards, evidence boards, investigation walls, conspiracy walls, and walls of crazy. These boards can be vehicles of insight or manifestations of madness—and in many cases, both. But where did they come from? And can they really solve a crime? In this episode, we try to unwind the red string board all the way to its center. To aide in our investigation, we enlist the help of Aki Peritz, a former CIA analyst and the author of Disruption: Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History. You’ll also hear from Shawn Gilmore, editor of The Vault of Culture and creator of the Narrative String Theory project; and Dr. Anne Ganzert, author of Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television. And we learn about the intricacies of building a string board from production designers Michael Scott Cobb (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and John D. Kretschmer (Homeland). This episode was written and produced by Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. It was edited by Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is also produced by Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281. Sources for This Episode Benson, Richard. “Decoding the Detective's 'Crazy Wall',” Esquire, Jan. 22, 2015. Coley, Rob. “The case of the speculative detective: Aesthetic truths and the television ‘crime board’,” NECSUS, May 28, 2017. Ganzert, Anne. Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Gilmore, Shawn. “Narrative String Theory,” The Vault of Culture. McGarry, Andrew. “Did Orwell's nightmare Nineteen Eighty-Four inspire the Snowtown murders?” Australian Broadcasting Corporation News, May 21, 2019. Peritz, Aki. Disruption: Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History, Potomac Books, 2021. Peritz, Aki. “The FBI Is Going Crazy-Stringboard Crazy,” Slate, Feb. 1, 2022. Stiehm, Jamie. “My So-Called Bipolar Life,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2012. Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen.

Earlier this year, a tweet went out from the official account of the Democratic Party, tagging the Trump advisor Stephen Miller. It was an image of what appeared to be a simple hotel room chair. But for those in the know, it was much more than that: It was a “cuck chair,” an online meme straight out of a popular genre of hardcore pornography in which a man watches his partner have sex with another man. How did we get to a place where the Democrats could flame a political opponent with an image out of cucking porn and have millions of people immediately understand it? In this episode we trace the complicated and intricate history of the cuck. It’s a history that includes everything from Jacobean dramas to World War II pilots to, yes, pornography, as well as a host of deeply American prejudices that have become a lot less submerged over the last 10 years. And we also situate the cuck within a larger context, one in which porn is the elephant in the room of American culture. It’s a potent force, shaping and reflecting our very wants and desires and it is constantly seeping into mainstream culture—and yet we don’t analyze, critique, or even talk about it very much because, well, it’s porn. In this NSFW episode, you’ll hear from: Slate staff writer Luke Winkie who wrote about the tweet that kicked this episode off; Samantha Cole, one of co-founders of 404 Media and the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex;  Jennifer Panek, professor of English at the University of Ottawa; sex therapist and clinical psychologist Dr. David S. Ley; Dr. Justin Lehmiller, social psychologist, senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, and podcast host; Mireille Miller-Young, associate professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara and the author of A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, and New York Magazine tech columnist John Herrman.  This episode was written by Willa Paskin. It was edited by Josh Levin and produced by Katie Shepherd, Willa Paskin, Max Freedman, and Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director, and we had help from Sophie Summergrad. We’d also like to thank Gabriel Roth, Talia Lavin, Tatum Hunter, Rebecca Fasman, Jessica Stoya, Aiden Starr, Perrin Swanmoore, Sophie Gilbert, and Kevin Heffernan, who was a fount of knowledge.  If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281. Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen.